We live in a culture that has made a full-time job out of optimizing childhood. The structured activities, the enrichment programs, the carefully curated summer bucket lists. There are entire industries built on the premise that unoccupied time is wasted time and parents have absorbed that message more than we might like to admit.
I too have been bombarded by this messaging enough to be influenced. The need to find camps and activities to entertain my son now that he’s in a classroom setting during the school year. To keep that consistency, always thinking of what’s coming up next school year. But when I think of my own childhood summers, the ones I remember most had next to no agenda. They were long and slow and a little boring in the best possible way. They smelled like sunscreen and chlorine and my dad grilling in the backyard. Nobody was optimizing anything. We were just outside, figuring it out.
That boredom we were so desperate to escape as kids? It turns out it was helpful to us. Unstructured time is where imagination lives. It is where kids learn to entertain themselves, negotiate with each other, and sit with the discomfort of not knowing what comes next, which is (if we are being honest) one of the most important life skills a person can have. And kids are telling adults it’s what they want too. The Harris Poll surveyed more than 500 children ages 8 to 12 across the United States and found 45% say they would rather play with friends in activities not organized by adults. 87% wish they could spend more time with their friends in person outside of school.
Summer is the one season that still gives our kids a permission slip to do nothing. The question is whether we as parents are willing to sit in it with them. Our fast-paced worlds and constant need to be “doing” have stripped us of our ability to enjoy the unstructured and unplanned without feeling a sense of guilt about doing so. There’s the obvious need to have sufficient childcare during working hours but the pressure to layer that with night and weekend camps, tournaments, lessons, tutoring. It’s no wonder kids get burnt out from their extra curriculars at such a young age.
Now I’m not suggesting abandoning all of your daily routines. A predictable structure to the day still helps everyone function. But there is a meaningful difference between a day that has some structure and a day that has been scheduled within an inch of its life.
Some of the best moments of this past year with my son have happened in between activities. Child-led walks around the neighborhood to burn energy before bedtime, lying in the backyard looking for shapes in the clouds and bugs for his bug jar because we had nowhere to be. The morning he decided his trucks needed a car wash and we spent an hour with a bucket and a sponge. Not planned, productive or educationally enriching yet perfect and just what he needed in the moment to let his imagination take over.
Summer is a permission slip for us, too. For the moms and dads who have spent nine months managing school schedules, homework, activities, permission slips of the actual variety, and the relentless mental load that comes with keeping small humans on track. Summer is not just for the kids.
Let the popsicle be breakfast occasionally. Let the summer bucket list have three things on it instead of 30 and feel zero guilt about the 27 you never got to. (That is the extent of the math I plan to do this summer.)
The goal of summer is not to arrive at late-August with a highlight reel. It is to be a little more rested, a little more connected and to make at least one memory that nobody planned for.