How to Keep Your Kids Occupied During Winter Break

If you’re like most parents, you probably started thinking to yourself around mid-December, “Hey, what can possibly be more fun than having my kids home for two solid weeks in the dead of winter? Bring it on!” The fact is, winter break can be a terrific opportunity to get to know your kids better—or, failing that, to keep them occupied with thankless chores or a teetering stack of Game Boy cartridges. Here’s how to survive until the young ‘uns head back to school.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Let everyone sleep in. One of the joys of winter vacation—for kids as well as adults—is not having to get up at seven or eight o’clock in the morning to head off to work or school. If your kids are late sleepers, take advantage of their indolence by treating yourself to a leisurely breakfast early in the morning, before they come downstairs and usher in the attendant chaos.

2. Parcel out at least one hour of homework a day. It’s a common complaint among teachers that kids manage to forget two months of schoolwork for every one week of winter vacation. Keep your kids sharp by insisting that they take time every day to read a book (odds are they were assigned one before the break started), or to write one sentence per day of the inevitable “what I did over winter vacation" essay.

3. Send them out to shovel walks. Granted, this is only a viable option if it happens to snow over the winter break. If it doesn’t, call up some neighbors and see if they need their garages cleaned out, or their leaves bagged, or their discarded Christmas trees snapped apart and mulched. Remember, it’s not polite to take more than 20 percent of your kids’ earnings as a “finder’s fee.”

4. Turn on the TV. You can’t really blame kids for parking in front of the tube from Christmas to New Year’s; that’s pretty much what adults do, too. If you want to be left in peace, put a TV in your child’s bedroom and let him spend the day there with siblings and friends. If he was lucky enough to receive a PlayStation 3 for Christmas, let him play as much as he wants, short of blindness or convulsions.

5. Discourage whining. What do you think would happen if you knocked on your boss’s door at work and announced you had nothing to do? He’d give you a big, thankless project, of course, and expect you to turn it around in two hours. The same principle applies to kids: once a seven-year-old has climbed down from cleaning the gutters, he’ll never say the words “I’m bored” ever again in his entire life.

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