How to Encourage Your Teens’ Summer Hobbies

June 12, 2025 byEmily Ewen

4 min to read

Although most students look forward to summer break, boredom often sets in just a few weeks into the season. However, summer break can be a great time to encourage summer hobbies for teens that can help your child discover activities and interests that bring them joy.

What Are Summer Hobbies?

Summer hobbies give teens space to expand their minds and themselves in lots of ways by providing:

Outlets for energy
Opportunities to grow as a person
Opportunities to learn, beyond the academic
Avenues for establishing identity
Ways to make friends and find community

Why Should Teens Have Hobbies?

There’s a lot of pressure to “maximize downtime” or use it “productively” by working toward some future goal or career path, but there are significant benefits to just letting your child’s free time be reserved for things they simply enjoy.

Encouraging hobbies and free time centered around what your child likes to do and what makes them happy as people can have a huge impact on them. This personal time can:

Reduce feelings of stress
Help improve mental and emotional health
Increase feelings of self-worth and self-esteem

How Can Teens Make the Most of Their Summer Break? 

Encourage your child to pursue their interests by having an open conversation about what they enjoy doing and what kinds of things they’ve always wanted to try or know more about.

If your child is into history or sports, you can help them plan experiences and trips or find a summer team or camp to join, collect materials for projects if they’re into the arts or science, and help them brainstorm ideas for writing projects. Of course, as teenagers, they may want to do some independent exploration; if so, you can let them come up with ideas for summer break on their own and offer to support them when they need it or if they ask.

No matter how they go about finding them, summer activities for teens that give them the most satisfaction and fulfillment will always be ones where they are most engaged in doing something. Here are a few ways they can do that:

A family playing basketball as part of a summer hobby for teens.

Creative writing projects

Creative writing can let teens explore how storytelling changes—and what parts of it remain the same—across different mediums like novels, comics, or movie and TV scripts while letting them create a world within their favorite genre or experiment with something completely new over the summer. Encourage your teen to set benchmarks for themselves throughout, like daily word count goals or dedicating specific hours each week for writing, which can help build their time management skills and resilience.

Building a computer or exploring robotics

Spending the summer building a computer from scratch might be just the thing for STEM-loving teens. They can dive deep into the details of building a PC, learning to code, or creating a small robot.

Photography, pottery, or art classes

Taking a class that blends creative expression with hands-on activity can be incredibly satisfying. Whether they’re just starting out as a beginner or learning a specific new technique, group classes can be great summer activities to get teens outside of the house and socializing while they engage with their hobby.

Get moving

Physical activity is important, but it doesn’t have to be wrapped up in sports if that’s not your teen’s thing. Different styles of dance or gymnastics classes are a great way to explore movement in new and creative ways. An individual activity like running or golf can also become a great hobby for teens over the summer. Adventures like these can also be turned into weekend activities where you can bond together as a family.

Improv or standup comedy classes

Taking an improv or standup comedy class is not only a bit outside the box and fun but lets teens explore new methods of creative writing, performance, and storytelling while showing off their sharp observational skills and expressing their points of view in playful ways.

Learning a new language, instrument, or making music

There are hours of upon hours of lazy afternoons in the summer that can be filled by trying out an instrument or trying to learn a new language—especially if the language they choose uses a different alphabet! Teens can practice at home using learning apps, which gamifies the process or join in on a group class or individual instruction.

Preparing for What’s Next with Connections Academy

Summer hobbies are the perfect way for teens to explore their passions—online education does too, while preparing them for what’s next. See how online public schools like Connections Academy incorporate career and college prep into the curriculum to support your child’s future by downloading our free eGuide.   