Uncommon Freedom

3 Tips for an Epic Summer With Your Kids

• Kevin Tinter

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Want your kids to have an enriching summer while you stay productive in your business? According to Kevin & Bekah, who are parenting 4 kids (including 3 teens), while running a business (or two!) from home . . . it IS possible. But it takes intentional planning.

In this episode, Kevin & Bekah share their top 3 tried-and-true strategies for crafting an incredible summer, including:

  • Why scheduling your "big rocks" like vacations and camps needs to happen ASAP
  • How to adjust your work schedule to get stuff done AND maximize quality family time  
  • The types of summer camps and activities they look for (and which ones to avoid)

If you want to make epic memories with your kids this summer without sacrificing your business, this episode is a must-listen. Listen now to discover practical tips you can implement today!


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Speaker 1:

All right, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Uncommon Freedom Show. This is Kevin, joined by my super cheerful wife, becca Beck. Good evening, how are you?

Speaker 2:

Great babe, how are you?

Speaker 1:

I am better than you, that's for sure. Anyways, we are really excited. Actually, we're going to talk about summer we spent yesterday.

Speaker 1:

It is early may and it's hard to believe that in arizona our kids are probably getting out earlier than they've ever gotten out this particular year because memorial day is a little early in the month early normal and our kids are typically done the thursday or friday before memorial day. So we realized this weekend that, holy smokes, they actually just have three weeks of school left. That's right. And so we um, we had already started planning a little bit but wanted to finalize as much as we could our summer plans and wrap things up, feel pretty good about what our summer is going to look like, and we realized that this is something that would benefit most families, certainly couplepreneurs, but really every family that has kids in school. It can be quite the adjustment when they get out, and we love summers, we love summers, we love school years. There's pros and cons to both seasons, but we found that prior properly no prior proper planning prevents a piss poor summer vacation Would you agree.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and most people don't figure this out in advance. So we hope that some of our tips will help you, especially those of you in other parts of the country who will not have your children out of school till probably mid to late June. What we know is, when we don't plan far enough in advance, we end up with a lot fewer options and it just gets more complicated Again. We want our children around, we want family time, but most of us who have children at our house also realize that a lot of unorganized, unscheduled time with kids, especially the older they get, can lead to a lot of mischief, wasted time, arguing, unproductive time. And if you're like us and you have a passion to keep your kids off of screens for the majority of their day, it requires some planning, unless you live in a neighborhood where they go out all day and play, which is amazing. In Arizona, the summers are hot and we don't necessarily have the type of neighborhood where our kids have a ton of like immediate friendships right there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, in Arizona actually, a lot of the summer families take off for vacation because it is very hot here. So they either have a mountain home or, you know, a cabin, something like that, or they just disappear to a VRBO, or they travel to other parts of the country. Just disappear to a VRBO, or they travel to other parts of the country.

Speaker 1:

And the reality is that summer vacation was really designed when we lived more in an agrarian society and families needed their kids to be available to work the farms in the summertime, and it doesn't really serve us. The same way, we're grateful for a shorter summer vacation in Arizona, only eight weeks, instead of the godforsaken 10-week-plus vacation our kids had up in Oregon. It was just too stinking long, and what we find is that our family, like many families, just about two weeks in, without proper planning and activities, our kids are bored and they're getting in trouble. We know the idle hands get into trouble very easily, and so what we really want to do is share some strategies we've learned to help you plan out an awesome summer that still leaves you some margin for just some downtime, where not every minute has to be scheduled, but you can really maximize summers and have them go by in a quick and enjoyable way, and you can still make lots of memories and still be productive, because we find that for a lot of people, any productivity disappears when they don't properly plan.

Speaker 2:

That's right. So our take on calendaring your life lifestyle design is that you need to be both flexible and intentional. So intentional, meaning we're very clear what we stand for, what our values are, what we're looking to achieve on the other end. And then flexible, meaning we need to be able to move things in and out with a, you know, fluid family life like we have, where there's going to be a lot of different things going on and we need to be able to make pivots and be as agile as possible. But what we find is, you know, some people are super, duper strict. That's probably rare.

Speaker 2:

On the other side of the spectrum are people that make very few plans and then wonder why it feels frenetic and crazy. And if you're like us, we have both a family and a business. We want both of them to thrive at the same time, and so that takes a lot of intentionality. And for those of you also building a business at home we talk about this in our coaching business as well you need to be getting ahead of the curve, looking ahead, and what we tend to do with our kids is we make a pivot about every six weeks to six months. It just kind of depends on the season that we're in, as far as what our childcare looks like, the time we spend together and how we structure our work environment.

Speaker 2:

So we have three things to consider, three awesome tips for spending summers with your kids being intentional and also being able to build a business and work and thrive. So the first is to schedule your rocks and get them on your calendar. No surprise, we have talked about this when we've talked about calendaring and lifestyle design, but it's really important to start with what you want to create, not just filling in all the small things. That will take a lot of extra time. So for us, that's family trips, so anything we want to be very clear to plan out that goes on the calendar any family trips or travel, meals with friends, days at the lake, et cetera. And we're talking about the big rocks. You're going to have lots of little pebbles that come in throughout the summer. That's part of the flexibility. But just being intentional about anything you absolutely don't want to miss and having that on the calendar first.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so we like have our friends, Doug and Tia have a cabin up at Flagstaff that we've wanted to visit Our boys love spending time with Doug and Tia and mentioned hey, can we go visit them? And so we looked at our calendar and found some open windows. There was really only a couple of blocks of time that we had and shot that over to Doug and Tia and they just got back to us today. So we were able to schedule that. But if we didn't get ahead of the curve on something like that, it would not happen. The other thing is, you know, we would love to take some of our friends to the lake for a day at the lake, and what we know is that if we don't plan it out, it's just not going to happen.

Speaker 1:

Things get busy. So we're going to prioritize that, schedule it and make it happen. So we really encourage you. It's not all about just the trips, but just anything that's important. Get it on your calendar. And then what that allowed us to do is to also move into number two, which is to figure out your summer work schedules. If you work from home especially, you have to understand that your schedule will change. It is absolutely impossible for you to expect that you can keep your same school time schedule during the summer. So, Beck, how do we adjust this?

Speaker 2:

Well, again, we have it very set on our calendar and for us we found a way to work together that we've really been using for years, which is pretty rare that you find something that works so well. Again, we have a schedule that we pick ourselves and so, because of that benefit, we have scheduled work days. Mine are Mondays, wednesdays, kevin's are Tuesday, thursdays. On those particular days we are fairly responsible. On the days that each other are working we are very responsible for anything that happens around the house, whether it's picking kids up, dropping kids off, dinner, prep, all those things, and we ask each other for help. But we're pretty committed to giving each other those days to really schedule everything that we need to. That way we have a lot of flexibility. I don't have to check my calendar very carefully if I'm scheduling on a Monday or Wednesday and also I build my Mondays to be a very busy, busy workday. You do the same thing with Tuesdays and when we stack our week that way, we have a lot more flexibility that comes. We try to protect Fridays for like a date day and kind of a business meeting together, but again, with kids home it's going to look different. So we put it on the calendar. We've got to make some necessary adjustments, knowing that we're going to need some supervised time and we're also going to need to fill the calendar with positive and enriching things for our kids to do when we didn't use the methods we're going to talk about today, when we had our kids mostly at home and not going out to camps, and more involved when they were younger.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that we've always used is checklists and we've basically given them a summer checklist which included things like listening to a podcast, reading a book, having to do a certain amount of outdoor activity, doing their chores.

Speaker 2:

So they had to work through the list to be able to get to their screen time, and I know a lot of other families do that as well, but it's a way way to keep your kid from being can I have TV time? Can I have TV time? Can I have TV time? Or just helping themselves and you feeling frustrated, cause we knew if we had our children do a checklist of enriching activities, then we were much more flexible about having some screen time and also setting the limit Like, yes, you can have this many hours per day. If you use it early in the day, you're done and just making sure they understand that we have expectations for how they're spending their time. And what happened with the checklist is the checklist became the boss, so we didn't have to micromanage a lot of their time With teenagers. Now we don't use checklists in the same way. It's a little condescending at that age, but when they were like elementary school to even up to middle school, I would say it's a great tool once they can read and write.

Speaker 1:

Yep, yeah, and a great little tool. Parenting formula to remember, or diddy, whatever you want to call it is B doesn't happen until A is complete, and so we, we do use this with our older kids. Like, right now we have two kids that are done with their school year and um, and they are looking for jobs. But we've let them know you don't get daytime screen time until you have a job, um and so, uh, b is daytime school time, a is getting a job, and so right now they're not getting any screen time until the evening because neither one of them has yet secured and started working at a job.

Speaker 1:

The other thing is you mentioned this is basically giving your kids an allowance for screen time so that they understand that it's not. You can start once the stuff is done and spend, you know, six, eight hours. You know we typically like a maximum of two hours is what we would go for, and it doesn't mean that if we're going to watch something as a family, that we won't flex on that, but giving them a budget so that they can use it. And you know you're teaching them to budget time, just like we need to teach them to budget finances. So the bottom line is realize that you're going to have to shift your work schedule in the summer, especially if you work from home.

Speaker 1:

Our goal is not that our kids need 40 hours of childcare during the summer. So we're looking at we still utilize childcare, maybe to drive kids to further activities, but we still want to have a lot of times. For us it's morning time and then if we do need some child care help, they come in in the afternoon. But we're not, you know, and some people especially if you're a single parent you might not have a choice on this, but it's being intentional to ensure that we're leveraging the child care help that we get if we need it and we're being intentional about the time that we spend with the kids.

Speaker 1:

And also, it might be blocking out times, just like we're going to block out times to spend with certain people. It's blocking out times to do activities with the kids. All right, the third tip and this one is awesome is finding activities for your kids to do. Find this and, depending on where you live, this may be a bigger or less major emergency, but we have learned over the last I don't know well, really probably 10 years or so some great activities. Do you want to start sharing some of the ones that you can think?

Speaker 2:

of yeah, and I would say you know a lot of it depends on your finances. A lot of it depends on, would say you know a lot of it depends on your finances. A lot of it depends on where you live. A lot of it depends on availability, that kind of thing. Transportation, again for us, because we have child care that we've used consistently for years. That's highly trustworthy, that has the flexibility and our finances can support these options. We have an almost unlimited amount of choices about what we can do, so we just pick and choose what works.

Speaker 2:

You might need to go with something that matches your family life better, but we want to give you ideas. So the other thing is we would suggest that you do this ASAP. If you live anywhere near us, do it this week, because school's almost out. If it's coming for you, then just get a good six-week, four-week head start or these things will fill up. And the other thing is set expectations with your kids. It's some of them want to do these things, some of them don't. In our family we have an expectation they're going to do some of them. Sometimes we've scheduled them and been like you know what that was probably more than we needed to put them in. Other years we've said, wow, we probably should have added a few camps, because these particular children are just bored every day. They're not looking for things to do for themselves and they need some more help. So, setting expectations early with your kids, like our kids, know that we expect them to do one church camp per summer and then they can pick the one that our church does or go to a different one. So all three of our teenagers are signed up for youth camp this summer.

Speaker 2:

And then here's a few other ideas, especially with Evie for us, because she's six and a half, going on seven, and we know that she needs a lot of supervision.

Speaker 2:

She's easily bored because she's the only one her age and it's going to be helpful for her to have positive influences. We looked at things like VBS. We've also considered in the past not with Evie sleepaway camps, fellowship of Christian athletes, gymnastics, the YMCA church camps, ninja warrior camp something of special interest, maybe you can expound upon that and swimming. So those are some of the activities that we have looked at for our kids. The other thing you can do with your checklist is one year our kids had to do a Spanish lesson with our nanny, teresa, who is fluent, and they also had to take a swimming lesson with Teresa. So maybe you have childcare that you can utilize to teach them something or to supervise something. So our checklists were pretty robust through the past, through the last few years, for the things we wanted our kids to do, and they were little, bite-sized pieces most days of the week, but that meant that they were busy, you know, at our house doing things that were also productive.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so sleepaway camps was a total like mind blown experience for us. We have quite a few friends that are Jewish in the Northeast and we started talking to some of them like how do you handle summers? And they're like, oh, sleepaway camps. And we're like what the heck is a sleepaway?

Speaker 1:

camp and literally there's a lot of camps for kids that are where the kids go, sometimes week after week after week, and sometimes it's just one week at a time, but they can stack several weeks together. Now we have never sent our kids to multiple weeks in a row. However, just the knowledge that there are sleeping camps for kids that aren't just your church camp was kind of mind-blowing for us. It was a total paradigm shift. They can be quite expensive, but many times, like our friends many times said, our kids love it. You know they have parent days and things like that. So that's something to look into if you're looking for something or if your kids just need something to keep them more occupied for an extended period of time. But it opened the door for us to other types of camps, like sports camps. One year our kids did go to a YMCA camp.

Speaker 1:

The one thing that we have found is that you really need to evaluate and sometimes you won't find out until after the fact but who's going to be influencing your kids? So we found out that there's somewhat of a correlation to the cost of a camp and the reality is, if you have a single parent, they're going to have to most likely send their child to a cheaper camp. And so just understand that if you're to pay attention to the cost of the camp and understand that there can be a correlation to who the influences are, based on the cost of the camp. Not saying it's guaranteed, but, like for us, we noticed when our kids came home from the YMCA camp like there was some things we had to clean up and just some things that they were exposed to nothing illegal or anything like that, but it was just like oops, we're big on who influences our kids and that wasn't the best choice for us.

Speaker 2:

And no guarantee, even when you go to things like a church camp, that you're going to have. I mean because you know we're all raising imperfect kids and we're imperfect parents. But it is important, based on your values, that you're assessing. You know what kind of influences, both adult and children of the same age, do you want your kids to have? The other thing we look at is what kind of activities are they doing? We don't want a camp where there's, you know, maybe a lot of unsupervised time or there's not a lot of physical activity. We want our kids outdoors, we want them tired.

Speaker 1:

We look for camps that don't allow electronics. Yeah, exactly, don't allow electronics, yeah because you might have the right filters on your kid's iPhone or iPad or whatever, but we can assure you that the kids that your children are going to camp with likely do not have those same type of guidelines. So having a no electronics policy is definitely something that we look for.

Speaker 2:

And we're not trying to get rid of our kids all summer. So let's be really clear about that. We love summer, we love spending time with them, we love the relaxed atmosphere and the sleeping in. What we're trying to do is create structure so that we don't have just a wild hot mess, which can naturally happen in any household when there's just a lack of structure. And again, if you live somewhere in the United States where your kids go outside all day and play with the neighbors and come home at dark, like many of us grew up, you probably don't need these kinds of things. We wish that was where we were raising our kids and how we were raising them. Again, in Arizona it's about 115 degrees in the summer, so there's not a lot of going out and playing with friends in the neighborhood right now, but it's still. We're trying to create healthy pockets of time with people and activities for our kids to be enriched and busy in a positive way. So that's the purpose behind what we're doing.

Speaker 1:

We found that when our kids are gone, then when they're back we can be very intentional about the time that we have together. The other thing that we've also learned is that if you can kind of stagger and just have one or two children gone at, a time that it creates special opportunities to be with the kids that are home, the entire dynamic changes.

Speaker 1:

I mean this is kind of a phenomenon that as I talk to other parents it seems like it's pretty consistent across the board. You remove one child and life just gets easier. It doesn't really matter what child it is, but the dynamic just gets easier at home across the board. If you have five kids and you go down to four, four seems easy. If you have two and you go down to one, one seems easy. So just realizing that sometimes it can be nice to have everyone gone so you can have a super productive or maybe relaxing week, but at the same time you can maybe get a lot more bang for your buck by just having one child gone at a time.

Speaker 2:

That's true. And there are family camps, of course, which is another awesome way. It won't solve your how do I get work done be purposeful, necessarily, but the family camps that people have participated in I know we just served at one last year, but it's a really powerful time. So whether you're serving somewhere or you're going away together with other families, it can be an awesome connection time and make very, very special memories.

Speaker 1:

So one other thing is we recommend don't give your kids too many choices. Obviously pay attention to the personality, be age appropriate with it. Like with Evie, we really don't give her choices because she's just not, doesn't have the maturity to handle those.

Speaker 2:

Well, she's very fickle.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes, with some of our kids it's like you're going to a fellowship of Christian athletes or an FCA camp, but you get to pick the sport that you're going to participate in and once again, like with church camp, it's you're going, we expect you to going to participate in and once again, like with church camp, we expect you to go to one per over the summer. But you can pick, and if you don't pick something, you're welcome to pick a different church, but if not, then the default is going to be the church that we're attending.

Speaker 2:

And as your kids are working and doing other things.

Speaker 2:

Obviously all of this changes as our kids age and just shift the seasons of life.

Speaker 2:

So the key is to figure out what works best for each kid at each age and at each stage of your business and each stage in your family life. So we've had many different summers. That have been very different layouts, but what we have found is pre-planning prevents us from being frustrated with our kids or frustrated with our lack of structure. You know, four weeks into an eight week summer and it helps it to be a lot more enjoyable. In fact, most of the time we blink and we can't believe it's over. The benefit in Arizona is, yes, we have a short summer and a hot summer, but we actually get breaks at three other times of the year and we maximize those for family time. We take three other or two other trips a year fall break and spring break and then Christmas is obviously just a really fun time together. So with those added times it also means we're okay with our summer being very structured because we're going to have to family time together every couple months and usually those are very unplugged times together.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, all right everyone. Hey, hope you found this helpful. This was learning some of these strategies was a game changer for us, and number one factor is just planning with enough time, where because we learned from the hard way in the past where we're like, oh, we got to look at camps and then we found out that most of the camps that we were interested in were now booked, because they do tend to fill up quickly. So we wanted to get this episode out to you as quickly as possible and just hope that you have an awesome summer, that you really make some amazing memories with your spouse, with your family, with your kids, but also that your kids are enriched through the summer, they don't forget everything they learned over the last school year, and that they can really just grow and develop and become better human beings over the course of the summer.

Speaker 2:

That's right. So a couple last minute tips would be again, to sit down and have a joint family calendar. Hopefully you have a digital version. Yes, the paper calendars, the wall calendars, are very cool, but we would highly encourage you in 2024 to have a shared online, google-like calendar. That makes it a lot easier to communicate with each other. Plus, if you have child care that you delegate to, it's a lot easier to delegate.

Speaker 2:

And the other thing is we had our assistant go in and do all the registration, so we just made the list and sent the list off and then she did all the registering Again, not a high leverage activity for us.

Speaker 2:

And finally, don't forget, if you're not going to send your kids to different activities like this or you're going to mix and match, that checklists are an awesome way to go, and in fact, we'll get our assistant to see if she can do a blog on that, because she has been around through a lot of summer checklists and give you some great ideas again for the types of things that we've had our kids do during the summer months to enrich their lives and kind of just allow them to be self directed with purpose, which gives us a lot more freedom within the household as well. And that's it, folks. That's our late night edition of the three awesome tips for a great summer with your kids. Check us out on all social channels and also follow us here, and we would love for you to support us on YouTube or whatever you're listening to us on for podcasts. Have a great rest of your week.