May 2026
Summer Fun, Future Foundation
Every summer, parents of high school students ask a version of the same anxious question:
“What should my student be doing this summer?”
Translation: How do I make sure my child doesn’t spend ten weeks horizontal, half-awake, and communing with TikTok?
Fair question.
Yes, summer can include camps, internships, volunteer work, jobs, and college visits. But I want to suggest something more foundational -- and oddly overlooked in our digital age: Does your student have a craft?
By “craft,” I don’t mean a hobby that gathers dust after three weeks, or a résumé-padding activity that mysteriously disappears after college applications are submitted. I mean a skill, practice, or creative discipline that your student returns to again and again -- something that requires patience, attention, and human judgment.
My happiest and most hopeful students almost always have one.
One of my students has played the trumpet since fourth grade. Music is his solace, his social world, and the source of his distinctiveness. Colleges recruited him because of it, yes -- but far more importantly, it has become part of who he is. The trumpet is his familiar companion, though not always a cooperative one. (Brass instruments, like teenagers, can be temperamental before noon.)
Another student makes adorable sock animals -- “sock-imals,” as she calls them. She carefully selects sock texture, color, and size, then adds eyes, ears, hats, and expressions. She gives them to friends and family who need encouragement. What began as playful creativity slowly became something deeper: empathy. Her craft is not only making objects; it is reading emotions and responding to people with care.
Another student discovered her place in theatre -- not center stage, but backstage. Lighting. Makeup. Ticket sales. Crisis management. If an extension cord fails, an actor loses a prop, or someone suddenly dissolves into drama (the emotional kind), she calmly solves the problem. Without her, the curtain simply doesn’t rise.
In a world increasingly anxious about AI and automation, this matters.
The students who thrive will not simply be those who earn good grades or accumulate credentials. They will be people who know how to do something deeply human -- something requiring taste, judgment, patience, dexterity, creativity, or emotional intelligence.
Jodi Kantor on Craft and Need
In her thoughtful new book How to Start, journalist Jodi Kantor argues that fulfilled people develop a “craft” -- a special expertise that becomes distinctly their own. Looking at successful adults across many professions, she concludes that the happiest people are practicing something they know how to do well, something that cannot simply be outsourced to an algorithm. She argues that craft endures precisely because it is human. Even in a rapidly changing workplace, these skills remain durable.
Kantor pairs craft with something else: need. The sweet spot comes when a person’s developing abilities meet a genuine need in the world. Her own decades of investigative reporting prepared her for the explosive Harvey Weinstein investigation -- work requiring not just courage, but extraordinary professional precision.
Can You Name Your Student's Craft?
Summer, then, is a wonderful time to ask new questions of your teenager:
What are they drawn to make? What do they practice without being nagged? Where do they lose track of time? What kind of challenge feels oddly satisfying to them?
And perhaps the most important question for parents:
Are you naming and affirming the skills quietly emerging in your student?
Sometimes a teenager’s future begins not with a grand plan, but with a trumpet, a sock animal, or a backstage headset.
At Admission College Counseling, one way I help students identify these emerging strengths is through a Motivated Skills Profile. This questionnaire helps students name both their innate and acquired abilities -- often leading to surprising self-understanding.
Be in touch to find out more.
Summer is long. Maybe this is the season not merely for keeping busy, but for discovering a craft.