Perhaps the greatest news for kids, with the gradual lessening of COVID-19’s stranglehold on life, is the opportunity to sign up for summer camp, play outdoor sports, swim, run around with friends and just be a kid.

Along with these opportunities comes the experience that children don’t often get during a school year — certainly not during a pandemic. Summer camp and summer sports give kids the chance to spend time with older kids who are not siblings. Camp counselors and summer program or sport team leaders are people who offer examples to emulate and to learn a few things from, provided by an older kid who isn’t yelling at you to get out of her room.

Summer goes by so fast when you are a kid, but July and August are packed with experiences and memories. Mostly freed from classroom structure and teacher oversight, summertime is when leadership skills start to get honed on the ballfield or during a camp program. 

Summertime is when the kid you mostly ignored, who sat on the other side of homeroom, becomes a good friend. Summertime is when you lose fights, win friends and replace homework with laughter; the only letdown is when twilight signals it’s time to go home. 

Most of all, summertime is when you watch and learn from older kids. You watch in awe at someone sending a baseball sailing or running faster than you can imagine and you ask them how they do it.

You watch someone older than you play guitar with ease and ask them how they got so good. You watch kids two years older than you break up a fight and you wonder how they earned the respect of kids who wouldn’t give you the time of day. 

To grow up healthy and safe, kids need role models. They can be adults, but older kids who carry themselves with confidence and humility, who don’t stay silent in the face of disrespect and bullying, are guides into teenage years and adulthood. 

We’re not all lucky enough to get one of these guides when we are kids, but summertime is a great opportunity to find one.