In the next few weeks, we will know what my adopted stepson will be doing this summer. If his grades have come up enough, he will have a nice long summer vacation, filled with family time, lazy days, as well as a part time job if he can find one that is willing to take a young teenager. If his grades have not come up though, he will be sitting in school throughout the summer, with a week off at the very beginning and one off at the very end, thrilled about that prospect he is not.

Are we happy with the idea of summer school? Not at all, especially since we will have to shell out over one hundred dollars for him to take a class he has already taken for free, and just failed to do his work in. Yet having him take classes during the summer, and work off the cost, is much easier in the end, than battling over homework on a daily basis, or getting aggravated over how he can sit in class do an assignment and then simply fail to turn it in. This has been the first year that we haven’t driven ourselves nuts (and when I say we meaning my husband and I, I really mean me) staying on top of his school work emailing teachers on a daily basis, and making sure that everything gets turned in when it is supposed to.

This will be the year of natural consequences for him. We help him with what he keeps us informed on, but are no longer checking up all the time with teachers to make sure that we are getting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He has already whined quite a bit about the prospect of attending school over the summer for English class, and was even less happy when the reply was somewhere along the lines of ‘if you didn’t want to take it in the summer, you should have done your work in the fall.’ That went over like a lead balloon; I caught quite a dirty glace being shot my way out of the corner of my eye once those words left my mouth. Sorry son, you do the crime, you do the time. Lucky for him the family cruise has been moved from the summer to the early fall, otherwise he may have missed out on quite am awesome vacation do to pure laziness on his part.

We are hoping that with his hard work in the second half of this last quarter, coupled with a good final exam grade that he will be able to squeak by without needing to repeat the class, yet there is also a small part of me that wouldn’t mind him sitting in summer school learning that no matter how boring class seems in the fall the first time you take it, it is way better than taking the same class again during the days and weeks that one could be sleeping in, hanging with friends, or getting a job to earn money for all those must have gadgets every teenager craves. No I do not wish to see him miserable all summer, but I would like him to learn that no matter how smart he is, or thinks that he is if a teacher says do the work, well then you get into gear pull your head out of your derriere and by golly do the work!

While I always figured that I would be much angrier if he were ever in danger of summer school, I am actually okay with either way this summer will turn out. I know that no matter what he will learn a lesson. He will either be learning about life and growing up through his first job during the summer months, or he will be learning about life and growing up through being held accountable for his own actions and what happens to those who do not follow thru while sitting his butt in summer school all summer long. Either way he will be learning, and that is something that I am just fine with!

Somewhere along the line I realized that all my hard work of trying to keep him out of summer school was doing absolutely nothing but creating more work for me. If I was always willing to bail him out he learned nothing except that there would always be someone else there to pick up the slack for him. By stepping back and only offering support only when it is asked for, he will finally be able to learn accountability on his own, instead of us saving him from the natural consequences of life and then trying to explain to him what would have happened had we not stepped in. It’s time he learned from experience rather than lectures.

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