Summer Stock
I taught summer workshops for teens for a few years. These workshops were based on electives and were rather pricey for students to attend. In complete honesty, it was really just a bougie summer daycare and I always felt bad for the teens because the admins were super neurotic about the “education” aspect to the point where the curriculum was as boring as possible. They’re kids, they want to spend their summers having fun, but rich helicopter parents expect something different.
One year, I had this absolute monster of a kid. He was thirteen years old, rowdy, inappropriate, didn’t do any work, constantly throwing things around, etc. The admins tried to boot him from the school, but his grandma had begged us to keep him on board. Since they were paying good money, the admins agreed to keep him there under the terms that we would just “leave him alone.”
I didn’t agree with that at all. No kid should just be ignored. So I didn’t follow that instruction. I would always try to encourage the kid’s weird jokes and interests, and would take him on a walk around the school grounds every day. I always gave back as good as I got with the sass, and he got a kick out of it. We explored weird classrooms and kicked around rocks and joked about whatever YouTube videos he was into.
We got to talking and he started to trust me. Eventually, he told me about his life. His parents both worked in the airline industry and, as a result, they were filthy rich with homes all over North America. But this also meant that they were never home. During the school year, he was mostly alone with them just popping in here and there.
In the summers, they would fly him to his grandma’s house, who lives in our dinky city, and she would care for him for the summers before he would get flown out to wherever the heck his parents were staying for a couple of days to pretend they were a loving family. The cycle would then repeat. He was aggressively lonely, didn’t believe that anyone cared about him, and was constantly acting out as a result.
It broke my heart. He would skateboard all over the surrounding cities. For a couple of summers, I would run into him in the weirdest places and times. Think outside of dingy bars on late Saturday nights, or randomly in the huge metro city in the middle of the week, or driving by him skateboarding on the side of the highway, etc.
He had no one looking after him and no concern for his own wellbeing and safety. The absolute lack of care or concern for him was heartbreaking, and I tried to do what I could. But ultimately his parents didn’t actually break any laws based on his home state rules and regulations. And his parents are, again, filthy rich. This meant that, in the eyes of the law, he was “well provided for.”
Even worse, everyone around him thought they were great parents for sending him to this expensive summer workshop! I still think about him every now and then, even though it’s been years since I taught him. I really hope that he’s doing okay, wherever he is.