Typically, a bored teenager and a smartphone are a bad combination, but here’s a treasure hunt activity that will fill up a slow afternoon, and with a little luck, might even become a quest: Help your teenage children/grandchildren go on a photo-taking expedition to document everything they love about the home where their grandparents live, collecting some stories and discovering a few heirlooms along the way.
Having the “creative license” to choose what artifacts or what rooms in the home have meaning to them can be an interesting way to get your teen to connect with the past–and with Grandma and Grandpa. Ask them to take a photo of any room or item they are curious about. The result of this photographic treasure hunt will be several dozen photos of unique nooks and crannies in the home, and an opportunity for Grandma or Grandpa to talk with a teenager about what memorabilia is interesting and why. Here are a few examples:
Make Your Treasure Hunt into a Permanent Memory
To take this treasure hunt to the next level, you could even create a personalized book using a photo book creation site such as shutterfly.com. Recently, a close friend and her husband decided to sell the home they had built themselves and had lived in for thirty-six years. None of the children were in a position to purchase the home, yet they were all feeling a lot of remorse about the home belonging to someone else. We simply photographed images of the interior and exterior of the home so that the memories of the way it looked when Grandma and Grandpa lived there could be preserved.
Recent research documents the fact that children and youth who know their own family stories develop a sense of grit and resilience that other youth lack. Researchers have observed that this is because knowing the family story–the ups and downs in other family members’ lives–helps a child understand that others she loves have gone through difficult times and have survived. It helps a youngster make sense of the fact that every now and then, every family, and every individual falls on hard times, but that things almost always get better. So this is a terrific activity to help your teen develop family cohesion, adaptability, and communication skills that are the hallmark of healthy families. It’s why “playing together” matters so much.
