Smells like teen spirit
SCHOOL IS finished for the summer. There are no jobs. The weather’s awful. The obvious temptation is for teenagers to spend the next ten weeks sitting on the couch, gaming online and eating cereal out of the box.
If this is the prospect for the bored teenager in your house, consider these 17 alternatives.
There may be no jobs, but there’s work. Charities are crying out for help, while community volunteers will be sprucing up the estate/village/town. If picking up litter or planting flowers is not to taste, check out the local festivals. There’s hardly a town or village that doesn’t celebrate its oysters, its bachelors or its literature, and help is needed. There may be no cash on offer, but there is a great social life, plus good karma.
Ten weeks to September. The perfect time-frame to get the body in shape. Aim for a 10K road race, held most Sundays. Check locally for a new sport they could begin, or they could return to one they enjoyed as a kid. Recruit a friend or two to do the same.
Once the home of scary women wearing cardigans and horn-rimmed glasses, libraries have been transformed. Most curate a packed programme of events for the summer. Some provide language labs, most offer computer time; free of charge. If that doesn’t appeal, there’s always the books.
Harness that spare time for the good of the household and get the grass cut, the bathroom painted, the windows washed or the flower beds weeded. Incentivise the venture with cheap activities — see below.
You can score cheap deals at livingsocial.ie, dealrush.ie, groupon.ie and smartsearch.ie. This morning, for example, there’s half-price drawing, photography and music courses on livingsocial.ie. Groupon.ie is offering cheap paint-balling and boat trips. You can get kayaking cheap on dealrush.ie. Set up a new email address, register for everything, then choose the deals that might appeal to your teenage couch potato.
Encourage a peaceful takeover of a corner of the garden and get them growing something. All kinds of herbs and vegetables grow quickly, and without much fuss, over the summer. Encourage them to develop a herb or salad garden, or go organic and see what they can produce.
Check out Coillteoutdoors.ie. Coillte maintains over 150 recreation sites on the one million acres of land in its care, including walking trails, mountain-biking trails, family-walking trails, national loops and mountain routes. Access to most of these sites is free, and many also provide customised orienteering routes and facilities.
Start a band. All you need to write a song is three chords and an attitude, and there’s so much empty property that finding a place to gather and be noisy is easier than it used to be.
If there’s a fledging guitarist, drummer or keyboardist in your house, get them to put up an ad in the local shop looking for like-minded people. The only difficulty will be persuading someone to play the bass.
Martha Payne, a schoolgirl from Argyll in Scotland, began her blog Never Seconds in April. She posted pictures of her school meals and rated each out of ten. Within three months, the blog had attracted two million readers and had garnered her press coverage from around the world. Get your tech-savvy teen to flex his social media muscles and see how many followers he can rack up.
Forget Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Discourage the use of a word processor. Instead, get them to go ‘old school’ and write something with pen and paper; a short story, novel, epic poem. There are loads of writing competitions that’ll give them something to aim for.
The annual F.ounders, web-based entrepreneurs conference in New York this month featured 150 of the web’s movers and shakers.
The average age of this group of multi-millionaires (and some billionaires) was 30. Most started their first business in their teens. If your teen is an emerging techno-nerd, give up the campaign to get them out into the fresh air: just buy them some more hard-disc space and keep them well-supplied with tea and biscuits.
If you can’t afford the summer film courses run for teens by (among others) the Irish Film Academy or the Digital Film School, check out the range of free online resources. Cheap technology has put all kinds of creative possibilities into the hands of the amateur. Tell them to go make a movie.
If he has a vague interest in stuffing mushrooms, there are teen cooking classes available at a variety of venues around the country. Brennan’s cookshop, on Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork, runs a series of cooking courses aimed at bored teens, covering topics such as basic baking, main courses, pasta and sauces, soup and desserts.
Courses are hands-on and the results can be taken home for the family to enjoy.
Once you’ve perfected your Madeira cake, why not bake up a storm and have a cake sale. If it goes well, you could print up a menu, distribute it locally and bake to order.
De-clutter. Get them to go through the house and gather up all the unwanted junk — old toys, old clothes, the remnants of abandoned hobbies — and have a garage sale, or get it all up on eBay or adverts.ie. Then let them keep the money, or a percentage of it if it looks like they’re going to do too well.
Babysitting, the old faithful. You’d be amazed how many cash-strapped parents will still find a few quid to get someone to take their children off their hands for a few hours.
If your teen is not the maternal type, dog walkers, grass cutters, car or window washers are always needed. Print up flyers, stuff letterboxes and see what happens.
Gaming has been blamed for everything from violence to obesity, but recent research has debunked much of the scare-mongering and confirmed what gamers always knew. Video games relieve stress, they improve hand-to-eye co-ordination, they keep reflexes sharp.
There’s frequently a great social dimension to online gaming, plus, of course, if they’re in their bedroom or on the couch, they’re not out doing something worse.
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