Summer is a few weeks away. Does your child have a plan?

Within PrepWell Academy, I spend significant time helping students plan their summers. This entails several weeks of advice, recommended websites, prompts for self-reflection, and interest inventories.

Why are summers so important?

• An opportunity to learn and grow
• Time to prepare for standardized tests
• A chance to "test a theory" about careers
• A break from over-scheduled school year
• A time to earn money
• Exposure to college coaches
• and more...

If you would like your child to get the full playbook on these options and their pros and cons, enroll them in PrepWell Academy.

I do have a general recommendation, however, that applies to all high school students.

Have your child pursue a "sweet and sour" summer. That is, 50% sweet (or fun) and 50% sour (or hard). I'm sure they will have plenty of ideas for the sweet part.

For the sour part, they get to pick from these options:

1. construction work
2. landscaping
3. moving and storage company...

In addition to last week's question regarding How do I build a list of colleges? the next biggest challenge I hear from parents (and kids) seems to be:

"What should my child do this summer?"

Of course, the standard, generic advice is:

• find a job
• find an internship
• volunteer

I like to provide more unconventional advice to my PrepWellers.

Cast a Wide Summer Shadow

If your child wants a unique summer experience, encourage them to "shadow" as many people in as many careers as possible.

These days, kids have no clue what people do at their jobs.

They see people rush into buildings, shuffle around the streets with their Starbucks coffee, and sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway.

What happens the other 97% of the time?

My 8th-grade son is obsessed with the question:

"Dad, what do people do all day at work?"

He is fascinated by the whole concept.

Unfortunately, I haven't the foggiest idea what to tell him.

I haven't had a conventional job for many years so I find it difficult to...

Every Thanksgiving, my extended family gets together in Palm Desert. Our group includes eight adults and eleven cousins from 4 - 17 years old.

For the last few years, I have organized a "Thanksgiving Day Junior Olympics" competition for the kids. This year, 8 of the 11 cousins participated.

The specific events (which are kept secret until game day) test a wide range of physical abilities, athletic skills, and random gameplay. It's an all-day affair (11am to 6pm) with a few breaks for water and snacks.

2016 List of Events

1. Swim (sprint distance)
2. Swim (long distance)
3. Jump from 8-foot ledge into pool, underwater somersault immediately into a 20-foot underwater swim (all on a breath-hold)
4. Submerge a water polo ball to bottom of pool using only one hand (must tap the bottom of pool with ball 2x)
5. Plank (minimum 2 minutes, more points for longer endurance)
6. Billiards
7. Bean Bag toss
8. Shuffleboard
9. Running (sprint, 1x around lake)
10. Running (long distance, 2x around lake)
11. Running (40-yard dash...

Sports, music, clubs, community service and other extracurricular activities will soon become very important in the college admissions process. They paint a picture of who your child is and how they choose to spend their time. Deciding which and how many activities to pursue can be a challenge. Deciding when to quit a particular activity can be fraught with indecision as well.

What do you do when your son or daughter wants to quit something? Do you let them? Or do you force them to stick it out? Consider these factors first:

Commitment

1. Financial: This is an easy one. If you've already paid for 6 months of piano lessons, then Little Johnny will complete the 6-month commitment.  You've bought (no pun intended) yourself some time before having to revisit the issue again.
2. Friendship: This is a bit tougher. If your child joined the swim team "with a friend", tell your child that it's not fair to abandon that friend mid-season. This should be a pretty easy sell and will likely buy...

We are inundated daily with warnings about social media use and misuse by our teens. How are we supposed to keep up?

We need to stay current on what's happening, what to look out for, and how to mitigate potential risks.

"Make mistakes, just not the big ones"

I don't mind when teens make mistakes. In fact, I promote it. Mistakes can drive personal growth. However, I also warn teens to avoid the big mistakes - mistakes that are life-altering. Avoid these at all costs:

1. Drug use
2. Drunk Driving
3. Unwanted pregnancy
4. Social Media misuse

I recently added #4 to the list - and for good reason. Social media problems are ruining peoples' lives everywhere. Unfortunately, the use of social media has become so widespread, that the odds of someone doing something disastrous are increasing by the minute.

What you should know

• Once posted, consider the content of the post to be permanently embedded in the digital landscape - forever
• Don't believe any promises that your post will disappear in x...

After a lot of experimentation and teen-testing, I found that a creating a LinkedIn profile is the most elegant, efficient, and effective solution for your child to capture and order important milestones throughout their high school career.

You may already have your own LinkedIn account, or likely have heard of the professional networking behemoth. If you don't have an account, maybe now is a good time to create one alongside your child.

My recommendation comes after reviewing the Common Application in detail and noticing the vast similarities between the two formats (the Common Application is the universal, online college application that is accepted by hundreds of colleges).

When I tried this myself, I pulled up www.linkedin.com, and within 15 minutes, I had created a robust profile for an imaginary student that I named -- Chris Prepwell.

To be clear, LinkedIn is not really for kids. It's for adults looking to advance their professional careers. I say, "Who cares?" It's perfect...