Summer Plans for Your Teens

The summer is almost upon us, y'all. Do you know what you're doing with your kids? Let's talk about it. Hi, my name is Chrystal Hurst, and if you are here for the first time, welcome. Be sure you hit that subscribe button on YouTube or follow me on Facebook so that you don't miss any of the content that I'm sharing here week in and week out, or miss out on any of the lives that happen when I decide to flip on the live switch and have a little fun and foolery. It happens every now and again. Listen, I'm here because I really do want you to live your life well, and I have been well mentored in my life by grandmothers and aunts and my own mother. And there are other women outside of my life who mentor me. In fact, I talked a little bit about how to find a mentor a few weeks ago, and I'll make sure that you have a link to that in the, in the notes below as well. But today I want to talk about something that is happening to me right now in my life, in a way that I may mentor some of you who are wondering what am I going to do with these kids? I specifically, in my home right now, have children that are 13 to 19. My husband and I have 5 children together. We gave each other the gift of a girl on the wedding day, so we started with 2, and then we added 3 boys after that. The 3 boys are home. One is home from college. But I have a house full of teenage boys, of testosterone, of manliness and sweat, and sometimes a little bit of funk. And so what I did for my children when they were younger— I have a whole nother talk I could do about that on another day. Right now I want to talk about what to do with these teenagers that are in your home. And there are 5 ways that I found, uh, from past summers of having teenage girls and even teenage boys that I'm going to be implementing. My boys are not about— they don't, they don't even know what's about to hit them. They don't even know what's about to hit them. They kind of know because they know me. But I wanted to share some things that I hope will be helpful to you. The first thing is you need to sit down as the mom, as the auntie, as the grandmother, whoever you are that has these kids, and you need to ask yourself What's a win for me at the end of the summer? What will I look back and say that this was our experience in our home? And what does that win look like? You can't cast vision for a great opportunity for togetherness in your home without knowing what that vision is. So sit down and write it down. At the end of the summer, what will make you feel good? And it may be only one thing that maybe as a family we took a vacation, or maybe we had a staycation in town, or maybe we had a family game night every Friday night, whatever it is. Make your list, and then sit down with your family, your husband, your children, and ask them the same question. What's a win for them? Now, I can tell you, your children, especially if they are wanting to sleep in, which teenagers do, wanting to play video games, which teenagers do, wanting to go to the mall if they're girls, as teenagers do, wanting to talk on the phone or be on Instagram nonstop with no accountability— that's a lot of times what teenagers want. Maybe they want to work, they want to make money, it doesn't matter. Have an open floor, make it a conversation. Come to that conversation knowing what's a win for you and asking your spouse, your children, what is a win for them? Because make your summer a group project, a group project where everybody wins something. Everyone may not win everything, but everyone wins something. I can tell you right now what's a win for me. We have a playground, uh, on our, uh, in the back of our house, in our backyard. It's a playground that we got with our house. It's a large playground like the kind you see in Costco. And, um, y'all, it's dirty. And so I have little kids that come here during the summer— my nieces, my nephews, my grandchildren— and I want my boys to clean it off. That is a win for me. House projects are a win for me. And so I've made a list of house projects that my boys will be doing with their summer. So they don't even know what's about to hit them. But that's a win. But I had to sit down and make my list. There are some things on my list that are a win for my summer that my boys will not do. I need to get a good handyman in here. There are some things that they don't need to be messing with, electrical wiring and stuff like that. But yes, can they clean off that playground? 100%. So make the list, decide what's a win, sit down with your family and ask your family the same question. Now, what is a win for me? Work. They're going to be sanding off some doors, repainting some things, fixing some doorknobs, changing some light bulbs, shampooing some carpets. We have some branches that need to be sawed. I've never used a chainsaw in my life, but guess what we're all going to do? We're going to go down to Home Depot and ask questions. I sent my boys to Home Depot the other day and they said, well, we don't know what— we don't know what we're getting. I said, guess what? Neither do I, and you are doggone 19, so you know what you can do? You can ask questions, investigate, get the information you need. You can Google, we can watch YouTube videos, and anything that we can watch a YouTube video for, we can do ourselves. I will determine the level of difficulty and how much I feel like we want to risk our lives or risk our limbs, but at the end of the day, y'all are gonna work around here. You know what I have been paying? We have a pool. I have been paying a pool company since we got here because when we moved into our home, my husband had COVID. The week we moved. I had to move with my husband in COVID, on an isolation. So when we moved, I was like, who— the people who had the house, I was like, who cleans your pool? And I just took their people. Guess what? I got 3 pool boys. Guess what they're about to do? Clean the pool. So what's a win for me is work. I know what's a win for them. What's a win for them is video games. So Here's what I want to say. Another tool is for a successful summer. If you have children that have eyeballs, they probably are addicted to technology. So one of the things that we will be reinstating, because it just fell by the wayside with some personal challenges we've recently had in our life, um, our tech hours. So we are all clear, we are all clear how much technology is okay. Now, I don't mind the TV being on in our family room if we're watching family television. Like, my boys will watch a Magnolia Fixer Upper episode with me, uh, a a little false information. They love Chip and Joanna as much as I do. They will watch Food Network. I don't mind that, but all this bang 'em up, shoot 'em up stuff— no, my heart can only take so much of that. So, uh, the TV, your video games, there is a time for that. There is a family check-in spot for your devices, for your phones, and for your iPads. No, you're not all over the house doing video games all summer long. You need— and this is the third thing I want to encourage you to instill house rules. Most of those rules will probably need to be around tech, uh, or maybe they'll be around the kitchen. I'll come back to that in just a moment. But it's okay for your kids to be bored. Uh, let them be bored. Let them be bored enough to play one of those board games that's actually been sitting in your room for the last 3 years. Let them be bored enough to make up games outside. Let them be bored enough to walk around outside and pick up sticks and make up songs and make up games outside. Let them be bored enough to play hide and go seek with each other. Yes, my teenage children will play hide and go seek. Let them be bored enough to come up with recipes or to make the meal plan. Let them be bored enough to make up stuff to do. It's okay for your kids to be bored. Boredom is a gift. It's where things in the imagination are born. It's where people come up with ideas. So yes to what's a win for your family. Yes to hours of operation in tech or in your kitchen. Yes to being bored. Let me swing back to uh, this with the kitchen, with this concept of the number 4 thing, family meetings. So we had a family meeting last night where I told my children that they will be power washing, uh, a playground area that we have in the back of the house. They probably will also use that power washer to clean the front of the house, and they may even use the power washer to clean off our back porch. And we're just— we're gonna listen, we're renting this thing for the day, so we're gonna— we're gonna find all kinds of things to power wash. But I also, in our family meeting, told them that I want to instill not just tech hours, but kitchen hours. Here's what I'm gonna be serving breakfast every day. If you miss breakfast, that's totally fine, eat cereal. But we are not gonna have this wandering through the kitchen, munching and crunching all day long where the kitchen is always a disaster and where there's food always on the floor and where we are constantly cleaning up. Nope. I am not a short order cook. Now we will have lazy days and of course I'll make exceptions because I love making big breakfast for my family and love trying new things. But what I'm not going to do is be picking up after them all day or running behind them to pick up after themselves. I'm going to make the breakfast, y'all, so good that they want to get up for breakfast around 9, 9:30. They're not going to want to miss it. But all of this was shared in a family meeting. So whatever you want to discuss, your wins, or whatever you want to discuss about your, um, your tech hours or your kitchen hours, whatever you want to discuss about being bored and I don't have anything to do. And don't say that because there's a bored jar with a lot of things, a lot of ideas crumpled up on sheets of paper. And if you tell me you're bored, you have to pull from the bored jar, and you may get something fun. You may also get some more work. Don't say you're bored, just use your time well. When I want to tell my family about all of these wonderful things that I've come up with for the summer months, guess where I do that? I do that at the family meeting. We sit down with a good meal. I get all these men in my house, get their tummies all full. They love me to death, and then I hit them where it hurts. Let me tell you about what I see for this week. Ta-da! This is also an opportunity because I will have 2 working sons in my life for us to go over everyone's schedule. We have to share a car for us to go over what they would like to do, for them to request a day for their friends to come over, for us to let them know what we expect, for us to tell them maybe where there have been problem areas and where I need their help. We have a family meeting, uh, just recently because we had a difficult personal situation. I had to sit my boys down and I had to say, listen, This is what's happening in the life of me and your father right now, and I need your help. There are things that you already know to do. What I really need is for you to do them without my prompting. I need you to see the dishes in the sink. I need you to see that the clothes need to be folded. I need you to see that things need to be done around the house. I need you to just do them. I need you to do them. Your gift to me is not that you do them. Your gift to me and gift to your circumstance, your gift to our family, is that you see what needs to be done and do it without prompting. Your gift to me is that you do it without arguing and complaining, that you do it getting along, that you are willing to be helpful. And you want to know what? When we entered the home and we were coming back from a difficult situation, do you know what my boys did? It was like magic. They did the dishes, they folded the clothes, they said, 'Mom, do you need anything?' They were so great. And you know what I did to get them to do that? I told them. Can I tell you that there are so many things that we expect from our children— and this could be friends, family, husbands, whatever— but when you were dealing with thinking, communicating people, particularly young adults, We get mad at people for the things that we don't tell them. They should just know. Well, maybe they should, but if you don't tell people— open up your mouth and tell people what you need and what you expect— you can't expect it. And then you can't expect what you don't inspect. I looked at my sons and I said, would you prefer— this is a family meeting now, last night— would you prefer to rotate from your tasks on a weekly basis or a daily basis? 'Cause there's something with the summer. We're not gonna rotate monthly. Weekly or daily? They said daily. I said, so what you're telling me is you don't wanna have to do the dishes for a whole week. See, I would prefer weekly 'cause then I don't have to figure out who to chase. But here's the deal. They would prefer daily 'cause they don't wanna have to be responsible for the dishes every day. I said, I tell you what, tomorrow I need you all to make a schedule. We have a whiteboard in our house. And I said, go to the schedule. You all know the major things that need to be done. The emptying of the trash, the doing of the dishes, the doing of the laundry. And I said, you make a list of the things I always tell you to do. You make a list. Y'all decide who's doing what on what day. Guess what? I'm a mother who's working myself out of a job. I could make the list. You know how many lists I have in my life? I've had a list for every other year with children. Who's doing what? When am I nursing the baby? When am I reading the 3-year-old? When am I having conference time with my 12-year-old? Because, you know, we homeschool. And why have I done that every year for the last 20 years? I've been making lists and schedules ad nauseam my whole adult life with children. Guess what? I don't have to do anymore. Y'all make the doggone list. Y'all want to rotate every day? I don't want to think about that. Y'all figure it out. Responsibility. Family meetings about saying, where does responsibility lie? Where— how can we support you, young men, and your responsibility towards your job? How can you support our family and your responsibility for taking care of our home? My sons, one of them actually asked me, why do we have to do that? I said, because you live here. You remember how excited you were to live here? Remember how we all said, "This is a great house"? Well, guess what? Houses take work. And you are an able-bodied young man who can do just that. Ask yourself, ask your family, what's your win? Set your hours of operation for things that need to go. Now, if you don't care about hours, if you want— if you're the kind of mom that wants to fix a custom order breakfast for every child as they wake up in the day, and that's how you want to spend your summer, more power to you. That is not me. I would definitely set the tech hours because too much tech is not good for your kids. And believe me, I don't care how much they hate reading. If they're bored enough, they'll pick up that doggone book and give them the gift of nothing to do. Be bored, have empty weekends, be sure you're having your family meeting. And last but not least, look for the opportunities for you to create family memories with family experiences. These do not have to be expensive vacations. These can be, uh, like my, one of my sons last night, he was bored. I said, well, you need to learn how to play solitaire. He went straight to the computer. I said, I meant with cards. I meant with cards, real cards, like in your hands. But he did go to the computer and he said, Mama, I want to play chess, but my brothers won't play with me. Can I play on the computer? Uh, tip for the moms, I said, you sure can, but turn that laptop forward-facing where if I walk by in the room I can see what's on the laptop. Um, so he was playing chess and then I looked at my husband and I said, we should learn how to play chess. All of my children know how to play chess because they had a chess class in one of their homeschool classes. And so I said, we should learn how to play chess. The boys know how to play chess. We should play with them. Opportunity for family memory. Um, y'all have heard me talk before, if you've been on this channel for any kind of time, about surprise rides. Sometimes we just get in the car and drive, just see where the road leads. Where do we end up? At some random gas station or a Buc-ee's in Texas, you know, to get a drink and a bag of potato chips. But we just hit the road and listen to a book on tape. Y'all, dumb stuff counts. Dumb stuff counts. So I want you to know, when we were— when in our first home, we lived across across the street from a school that offered a free lunch. And this was, you know, my kids were small, but I had big kids and little kids who were just bored. You know what took up like 2 hours of our day? I put the smaller kids in the double stroller. We walked across the street. We got the free lunch that anybody could get in the neighborhood. The kids were elated to have strawberry milk for lunch, 'cause I never buy strawberry milk. And then for the next hour we played on the playground and then we walked back home and then everybody took a nap. Do you wanna know what we were doing? Being bored, but also having a family experience. Family experiences do not have to be expensive. They don't even have to be well-crafted, well thought out, or very intricate or complicated. It just means look at what you enjoy, look at what you can experience, look at what your kids want to do, and experience it together. The other night I took my kids to Deep Ellum, which is the part of Dallas that's kind of known for being very eclectic, very weird. It's where all the tattoo parlors are late at night. Deep Ellum is a thing. We were out late. There is a restaurant that's open 24 hours in Deep Ellum, so I thought, let's just go by this restaurant, y'all. I totally forgot It was a Saturday night, y'all. The parking was crazy, the people were crazy, traffic out the wazoo. We finally found a parking space, and it dawned on me, this is a family experience. Like, this is random. We just came to eat pancakes at this random restaurant in this area of town, but my kids now get to see Dallas at night. What have you not done in your city with your family, with your kids? Maybe you did it when you were wilding out in your 20s and 30s. All right, take your kids Wile out together. Let them know that you know a thing or two about wiling out. It'll freak them out too. Family experiences are fun, okay? And you can do whatever you think will make it fun for you. And watch me now, if you're having fun, your kids will too. They may not tell you now, but they'll tell you later. Remember that thing Mommy always made us do? Remember that thing Daddy made us do? I believe that when my kids get this power washer out here today and they start power washing everything in God's green sight, in, in the, in, in God's sight and in this green area of grass. I know that they're going to be miserable today, and you want to know what? I'm going to have so much joy in them being miserable. But you know what I know? We're creating a family memory, a family experience. I know I'm giving them the opportunity to work, and that's a win for me. What they don't know is that even though they're doing it and they will be totally bored doing it, and even though they'd rather be experiencing tech hours and playing video games, what I know is that this will be a win for them later, because work is a win. Don't be afraid to let your kids be bored. Don't be afraid to put boundaries on your children. I don't care how old they are, it's your house, not theirs. Don't be afraid to let them work, and don't be afraid to sit down and really hear them out. What's a win for them? And to incorporate as much as you can into your schedule. Listen, y'all, I years ago put together a list of ideas, summer activities for your kids. I know that if you're like me, you need that in your life, just ideas. Of things to do. So when you get bored, they get bored, you don't know what to do, you have a track to run on. And I would like to give that to you. So take a look down below for the link to go grab that list so that you can have better ideas of what to do with your kids this summer. Okay, y'all, I hope this has been helpful to you. Listen, you are the mom. If you're watching this and you're a guy, you are the dad. Don't let them kids punk you into thinking that you don't run this place. This your place. You run this house. Run it. And while you're doing that, have fun. I would love for you to tell me in the comments What do you have planned for your kids this summer? Share the ages of your kids and what you are doing in your home to make this summer work for you. Because listen, when you share your ideas, I know that somebody else is going to get into these comments and they're going to learn from you. And that's what we do here, right? We girls— Chrystal Hurst, Coffee with Chrystal Hurst, the Sister Circle— we are better together. So share your information and your wisdom so that we can learn from each other. All right, y'all, I'll see you next time. Next week. Yes, family meetings, 100%. Listen, there's so much free stuff, like, in your city. Do the homework. Like, be a visitor in your own city and just Google Dallas free kids, Chicago free kids, PG County free kids. There is free stuff, and your kids won't care. They just want to get out the house. All right, y'all, I will talk to you later. Have Great day.