They’re Teenagers Already!
How to have fun with teenage grandchildren
By Carol Radin
When they’re babies, you can take them on long stroller rides and watch them kick their toes in the breeze. When they are in elementary school, you can take them to the playground and the ice cream stand for a cone with extra sprinkles.
When they’re teenagers — then what?
If you are a grandparent lucky enough to spend a whole day with teenage grandchildren or even a whole week while they visit from out of town, you know that the activities the two generations can do together require some extra thought.
As seniors, we might be slowing down a bit and looking for manageable and mellow activities, while our teens are speeding up and developing new interests in high-sensory, complex environments.
So I asked several grandparents about the ways that they and their teen grandchildren enjoy their visits together.
While I compiled lists in my head of recreation complexes with admission fees that can be a fun day trip, the grandparents I spoke to have discovered that some of the more timeless outdoor activities still apply in the summer.
Right in your own backyard
Some grandparents found that starting with their grandteens’ own interests leads to great fun at little or no cost.
Cazenovia grandmother, Heidi Ravven, 73, has a 12-year- old granddaughter who visits her from out of state. On a recent visit, Lucy just wanted to hang out at the house, so Ravven actually dug into her vintage lawn game sets. They played croquet! And bocce! While these might strike many kids as dated, Ravven was surprised that Lucy liked bocce quite a bit. So, you never know. Bring out the badminton set, Frisbee or soccer ball for some casual footwork. Or get tie-dyeing kits.
Judy Drucker, 72, of DeWitt, knows that when her two teenage granddaughters come to visit, they are happy simply doing things that are different from what they do at home. Drucker and her husband, Dan Hurley, have eight grandchildren in their blended families. The two oldest of the cousins, Celia, going on 15 and Annaliese, going on 14, come from rural areas, so shopping itself is a field trip for them. They love a trip to Trader Joe’s, where they stock up on their favorite chips, dried fruits, frozen taco roll-ups and whatever else Drucker treats them to. Other big hits are Starbucks for tall drinks or a shop that makes a favorite they can’t get at home: Bubble tea!
“We’ll also involve them in what we’re doing, like we’ll wash cars and they’ll help,” Drucker said.
Such tasks as watering and weeding or washing lawn furniture become less of a task and more of a team contribution when the generations join in.
Speaking of yard work, it happens to be one of the activities of choice for Tracy and Ron Poushter’s grandson, Landon. Landon will sometimes visit them for a week at a time at their home in Jamesville. The 17-year-old already has advanced skills in repairing and building. Lucky for Tracy, 67 and Ron, 68.
“He can fix anything,” Tracy bragged. (Grandparents are allowed to brag!) “He can fix my car, our truck, motorcycles, outdoor lawn machinery.”
Ron Poushter has a truck with a snowplow and Landon can fix that, too. Tracy loves to describe a little table Landon built for her boat on one particular visit. Since he didn’t have paint, he meticulously trimmed the table with shiny black tape in a checkerboard design. He cut two-by-fours to make the table’s legs. Landon can spend hours that way, doing what he enjoys, side by side at home with his grandparents. And his grandmother still uses her checkerboard table.
Water, water everywhere
With our many lakes and rivers, water activities are always in. Several grandparents remarked that their teens love fishing and found that even the antsy-est teen could focus for hours while waiting for a bass or a carp to catch and release. Search online for CNY fishing sites.
Limestone Creek, Cazenovia Lake and Jamesville Reservoir are just a few. Webster Pond, a small and tranquil patch of nature on Valley Drive in the south of Syracuse, also offers one-morning Saturday and Sunday fishing programs for teens in the summer for a small fee.
And swimming and boating — of course! With a cooler full of food to grill during water breaks, the day is complete! The Finger Lakes, Oneida Lake and Lake Ontario are practically required when planning day trips.
The same goes for our public pools. Syracuse has Olympic-sized pools at Thornden, Schiller and Burnet parks, with picnic areas and, depending on the park, open playing fields, basketball courts and tennis courts for those who want to dry off. In Utica, two parks have public pools and in Auburn at least one. Check out city parks and recreation websites for the pools near you.
People can rent canoes or go on a boat excursion. The popular Green Lakes State Park has canoe and rowboat rentals, as well as scheduled nature walks on the trails. If your grandteen is a history buff, you might consider the 45-minute boat tour along the Erie Canal, which leaves from the Camillus Erie Canal Park on Wednesdays and Sundays. The park has a canal museum as well, a replica of the old Sims Canal Store. As an aside, speaking of history buffs, what about a day trip to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls or the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park in Auburn, to name just a few more of the historical sites that abound in CNY.
For a wilder water experience, I have yet to meet a teen who doesn’t like a trip to a water park for a day. Sky-high slides, pool currents, tunnels, tube-riding — what could be bad? Even sitting back and watching, as the grandparents will most likely do, is fun. Thunder Island in Fulton and Cascades Indoor Waterpark in Cortland are two complexes that are a short drive. (Thunder Island also has mini-golf and a go-kart track.) Roseland Waterpark is another, a little further away in Canandaigua.
The food marathon
“It’s a food marathon when they’re here,” Drucker exclaimed.
Together, she and her granddaughters get creative. They’ll do make-your-own ice cream sundaes, the fancier the better. For one meal, she’ll set up a pizza-making assembly line with an array of condiments and vegetables. Drucker also has a favorite bread recipe that she makes with the girls.
“I give each of them their own lump of dough for kneading and shaping. Then they can make individual loaves,” she said.
If they go out to eat, the girls like Thai food.
Ravven, too, likes to cook and bake. She will make a big pot of chicken chili, an easy one-bowl meal that Lucy likes and it keeps dinner simple, so that there is plenty of time for other activities.
Tracy Poushter’s approach to food is to make it a social occasion for her grandson, by inviting old friends of his over for dinner. Hungry 17-year-olds and a pan of macaroni and cheese — perfect! Burgers, check. Pizza, check. Wings, check.
“One day I have a full refrigerator. The next day it’s empty!” Poushter laughed.
For restaurant outings: Easy and casual, must include a bun or crust.
For the price of admission: outings on land and water
Miniature golf complexes come to mind immediately. Even the unskilled (like me!) can have a good laugh-out-loud when the ball zig zags 10 times and lands everywhere except the last hole under the windmill. (See sidebar for mini-golf complexes.) Grandparents who are avid golfers might also suggest a golf driving range for their teens to practice, like the Butternut Creek driving range in Jamesville, just east of Syracuse. And of course there are teens who already play, so doing a real game with them is a special occasion in and of itself. For the totally uninitiated who still want the physical exercise and challenge, many state and county parks have disc golf, which you play on park terrain.
For spectator sports, Syracuse and Auburn both have baseball stadiums, as does Rochester, if you don’t mind a slightly longer drive.
The Syracuse Mets, a minor league team and Triple A affiliate of the New York Mets and the Rochester Red Wings, a minor league team and affiliate of the Washington Nationals, have frequent home games and promotional nights with fun giveaways, discount food and special cultural theme nights. The Auburn Doubledays, a collegiate summer baseball team of the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League, holds games in June and July in a stadium where you have a perfect view from any seat; they too have promotions and giveaways, hot dogs and sausage sandwiches from the grill and the ever-essential crackerjacks and ice cream.
Destiny USA mall in Syracuse has Wonderworks, a large recreational complex offering a suspended indoor ropes course, an intricate canyon-like climb with stepping platforms, railings and ropes. You will want to merely observe with those. However, other interactive areas like Extreme Weather Zone, Space Discovery Zone, and Light and Sound Zone look more like walk-in environments that all ages can do.
Say yes to your neighborhood library
Our libraries have become multi-media community centers for educational workshops in the arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). When my grandchildren, still pre-teens, come to town, I always check the summer calendar of events at every Syracuse branch library. We’ve gone to see the Reptile Man as well as the Birds of Prey program. Yup, live snakes and lizards and hawks and claws for the latter. For teenagers, you will find that every library offers hour-long workshops that are age-appropriate: workshops in music recording, STEM, Dungeons and Dragons, Rubik’s cube time and so on.
The Liverpool Library will offer short summer sessions for teens like the Teen Lego Robotics Club, the Cube Club (Rubik’s cube) and one-hour cooking lessons with foods of particular cultures. Northern Onondaga Public Library’s branch in North Syracuse has a chess club and a tie-dye socks session. Every online search for libraries’ calendars of events opens up endless possibilities. Three libraries in the Syracuse area have “makerspaces,” which are fascinating hands-on laboratories where kids of all ages can find a corner that will captivate them for hours. Those are the Central Library in downtown Syracuse, the Fayetteville Free Library in Fayetteville and the Community Library of DeWitt and Jamesville, located in DeWitt. There, grandparents and teens alike can learn the how-to’s of 3D printers, a laser engraver, a vinyl cutter and a CNC mill (computer numerical control milling machine). Your teens might even show you a thing or two once you enter the room.
It’s all good
Our common refrain as grandparents when we stand head to shoulder with our tall and taller grandchildren is often “Where did the years go?” When they were little, you might have thought they could never be any better; then you discover that as teens they have dimensions that make them even more interesting and refreshing with their thoughtful observations about a whole range of issues. No matter what their new talents, skills and school interests are though, they still need what everyone needs and what grandparents can give them: a pause in their busy lives and a time to have fun and be just plain silly sometimes. Our grandteens ARE getting older, but to us they are still kids at heart.