Do today’s teens need to treat their summers as resume-builders, filling their time with academic, philanthropic, and extracurricular activities? Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshmen at Stanford and the author of How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success, doesn’t think so. In this piece on the New York Times parenting blog, she relates that in her time at Stanford, she met many students who’d grown up as over-scheduled kids in the hopes of getting into the right college, but who arrived on campus and found themselves “… stuck in perpetual ‘now what?’ mode, hoping someone else would answer that question for them.”

So she’s advocating for a different kind of summer, one where teens get serious…about doing nothing.

“That’s why I want summer to feel like summer again. Childhood to feel like childhood again. Children to be just plain children again. Unfettered by adults’ fears. Unshackled from adults’ expectations. Free to play — yes, even as teenagers — free to live their own lives and learn something about who they are, and who they hope to be. I hope my own children might spend summer running around with friends, then come home breathless and wide-eyed from adventure, in an afternoon that would turn into evening, with little regard for bedtime or what was on the schedule for tomorrow. I want 10 weeks of deep breaths and exhales.”

Given the escalating pressure on kids today, it’s refreshing to see someone with knowledge on the subject—as both a collegiate dean and a parent—advocate for a more stress-free approach. I’ll just add one twist—maybe kids don’t need to go to either extreme?

My high school summers were filled with plenty of time relaxing, hanging out with friends, and generally being a normal teenager. But I also went to soccer camp and worked part-time washing cars at a limousine company (a job in which I later got tapped to chauffeur in a pinch—better money, and better stories!).  I enjoyed all of it, and that was probably in no small part because I made those choices for myself, not to please my potential colleges or otherwise get ahead of the competition.

Summer is a perfect time for kids to be kids, free from the constant pressure of grades, tests, and other measurements. But it can and should also be a time to let motivated, curious, engaged kids feed those instincts in a way that makes them happy.

Summer doesn’t have to be spent doing it all or doing nothing.  For most kids, something in between will probably be just right.

For any student who needs ideas, start here.