Where Are Your Kids Summering?

When I tell people my oldest is booked solid with summer camps, it doesn’t feel like bragging — it feels like admission. Like: Yes, I’m keeping her occupied. Yes, I’m pulling my weight as a responsible parent. Yes, I’m diverting major Roth IRA funds to camp tuition to ensure she’s supervised.

We need childcare in the summer. My husband and I both work. But plenty of kids with a stay-at-home parent (not working remotely) are booked, too

Yet when I was growing up, summers meant working parents and boredom at home, with sitters paid a fraction of what they earn today.

It wasn’t “constructive boredom” or “screen-free downtime.” It was just honest-to-God, staring-at-the-ceiling boredom.

I’d run around, shoeless and perilously un-sunscreened, with neighborhood kids.

My brother and I would bike to the mall (with stolen quarters for the arcade), break sticks, set up lemonade stands (on dead-end suburban streets), and watch black and white daytime reruns.

We didn’t need Mandarin flashcards or mindfulness camp.

Now, if you let your kid do nothing all summer, it feels like a parenting sin. And if you’re not carrying snacks like you’re FEMA, your child might starve — or worse, be mildly uncomfortable for 10 minutes.

So, how did we get here? And why does parenting today feel less about raising humans and more about managing a high-risk, high-reward investment?

Camp Schedules, Social Capital, and the Low-Key Class Signaling of Modern Parenting

If you’re a suburban parent, especially a mom, summer camp conversations carry the same weight as cocktail party chatter about the Hamptons.

“What are your kids doing this summer?” is never just casual curiosity. It’s a class check, a cultural vibe scan.

Just like the phrase “Where do you summer?” implies wealth, access, and connections. Summer camp rosters speak volumes about parental priorities — FIRE with kids or retirement at 70 — and their bank accounts.

On Reddit threads and Quora parenting forums, parents swap camp spreadsheets like war intel: STEM weeks, wilderness intensives, specialty music clinics.

One poster wrote:

“We’re doing tennis, violin, and a girls-in-leadership series. I wanted one ‘free’ week in August, but now I feel like she’ll be behind her peers.”

Behind? At age eight?

It’s not just about the child’s development. It’s about showing you’re the kind of parent who develops your child. If you can’t afford camp, the pressure to patch something together — or at least look like you’re doing something — is intense.

Last year, at all of five years old, my daughter indignantly huffed, “I don’t want to do hip hop, Mom. If you like it, you should just sign up for dance class.”

Touché.

I was impressed. Until I bribed her with a scooter to “stick it out” until the class’s end.

I want her to learn to struggle through things that don’t come naturally to her. When I was a child, I only did things that came “easy,” and I believe there’s benefit in dogged persistence, progression, and learning how to bold-facedly confront challenges.

And it’s résumé fodder.

Childhood as a Résumé

Joel Anderson writes in a Moneybox article that we’ve turned childhood into a résumé, and every camp is another line item.

It’s not about joy. It’s about competitive advantage dressed up as enrichment.

Ultra-competitive parents think summer camp gives their kids a leg up on getting into Harvard. And other parents, who probably know Harvard isn’t in the cards, don’t want their kids to fall behind their Harvard-striving peers or be at an economic learning disadvantage.

Everyone is plugging the gaps.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace, a mother of three and author of Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It, suggests this shift toward summer camps is triggered by our children’s uncertain economic futures.

“Parents today get their moral worth by how they act on the sidelines, how engaged they are as parents,” said Wallace, pointing to a 2020 survey of 6,000 parents she conducted with assistance from a Harvard researcher.

The survey found that 73% of parents believe that getting into a “selective college” is a prime ingredient for “later-life happiness.”

Such attitudes are fueling a new Cold War arms race.

“In the ‘70s and ‘80s, parents could be relatively assured — even if their kids were riding bikes all summer — that most likely their kids would be able to replicate their own childhood,” Wallace tells Anderson. However, economically, “Millennials are the first generation who are not doing as well as their parents.”

These fears have ignited a socio-structural imbalance that many progressive parents lament.

But they are not going to actively disadvantage their kids by not participating in the summer camp rush or moving to neighborhoods lacking “such good schools” in the name of equality.

And as many apologetically lament, “They get so bored without a lot of structure.”

Boredom is the New Boogeyman

There’s a deep discomfort around letting kids do nothing. We mistake boredom for neglect. In reality, boredom used to be the launchpad for creativity.

A Vox article explores what I’ve noticed (and perpetuated, if I’m honest) everywhere: Imaginative, screen-free play has plummeted. Fewer kids play outside unsupervised.

When questioning my peers, they cite fear of cars (errant drivers), strangers, injuries, or just the general unknown.

But here’s what that fear often masks: Parental anxiety about judgment. Letting your kid wander or play “too freely” signals that you’re not parenting hard enough.

Even the word “free-range” feels like it belongs on a chicken farm, not in a neighborhood. And yet, it used to just be childhood.

My kids don’t bike or walk to their friends’ houses. That’s not how it’s done. Moms text each other and arrange carefully curated playdates.

Kids don’t wait alone at school bus stops, even teenagers. As more than one mom has told me, “Cars don’t always stop at the stop sign. It’s too dangerous.”

Tweens and teens are ferried to and from school so they don’t have to wait at dangerous, suburban street corners. (While I scoff now, in a decade I’ll be joining their ranks.)

When I see a child outside pedaling down the sidewalk, in my “desirable” neighborhood, I scan for their parents. We’ve all been rewired this way.

Children out wandering alone? Bored? Underparented? It looks like failure. It’s a lack of effort. A missed enrichment opportunity. A wasted hour that could’ve gone to Kumon or Capoeira.

Back in the Olden Days

To make sure I wasn’t recalling childhoods of yesteryear through rose-tinted lenses, I talked with Cinda Klossner, an educator of over 30 years with 25 years of classroom experience. She’s also a mother of two and raising her 10-year-old grandson.

“In the olden days, my kids would be out in the neighborhood playing all summer. I’d look out for their kids, they’d look out for mine. That does not happen now.”

When Klossner started teaching in 1989, summer camps were less common, not the full-blown institutional beast they’ve become today.

This current crop of kids doesn’t engage in spontaneous play. Kids don’t play; they have play dates. A verb has become a compound noun. Play is not an activity kids engage in; it’s a thing one puts on their calendar.

Kids are so “overscheduled” now, says Klosser, that they “have no imagination, no creativity. They have to be entertained 24/7 and always need to know what’s up next.”

No Boredom ≠ Harvard Readiness

All this overstimulation, says Klossner, is harming scholastic achievement.

Kids who can’t cope with unplanned moments can’t deal with boredom. And arguably, academia is still full of dull, stilted, uninspiring moments, no matter how many flashy enrichment programs or STEM tournaments exist.

When Klossner started teaching in 1989, kids could play quietly in the classroom for “indoor recess” with minimal boredom or adult intervention.

Then, even kindergartners needed only a few gentle suggestions, “Go do Play-Doh or sit in the corner and read a book,” and they could quickly redirect.

Now, says Klossner, they don’t know what to do.

“The kiss of death for indoor recess is when kids can’t be on iPads,” says Klossner. Hell breaks loose. “But during iPads, you can hear a pin drop.”

Ironically, the more we engineer a childhood worthy of a college essay, the less resilient our kids become when real academic demands hit. Structured summer camps build résumés but create kids emotionally unequipped for the scholastic grind they’re supposedly training for.

Harvard doesn’t hand out degrees to students who melt down when they’re not stimulated. Rigorous academia rewards persistence, concentration, and the ability to sit with discomfort, like a 90-minute lecture on cellular respiration or years of painstaking research.

Why are we so afraid of leaving open quiet, unstructured moments where intellectual endurance could be forged?

Crime’s Down, But We’re Parenting Like We’re in a Liam Neeson Movie

Let’s talk about the fear element in this equation that drives the summer-camp industry — this vague, pernicious yet persistent, ever-present fear. The one that has parents escorting high schoolers to the building’s front door, refusing playdates without direct supervision, and driving two blocks to a friend’s home “just to be safe.”

According to the FBI and law enforcement sources, the U.S. violent crime rate has dropped more than 50% since its peak in 1991/1992. We’re currently sitting at 363.8 crimes per 100,000 people — the lowest rate in decades.

Data source: FBI.

Raw numbers show crime is going down, as the overall population is rising.

Population data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2025 figure is the current estimate.

Here’s another glimpse at the data, looking at the incidents of violent crime per every 100,000 residents in the U.S.

Our streets are safer than ever. And yet, childhood freedom is in full lockdown.

Many children can’t go anywhere alone. Parents tag along — to the park, children’s friends’ houses, or stand outside to watch them cross the street.

It’s like a parent protecting a child in a war zone.

But the “better” the neighborhood, the deeper the insulation. Am I protecting my kids from real danger? Or am I shielding them from discomfort, boredom, and social judgment?

Childhood has become an exercise in irrational, socially reinforced, class-coded fear. Beyond safety, it’s about control and image. It’s about being the kind of mom who’s always one step ahead of the worst-case scenario, even if that scenario statistically never happens.

And here’s the kicker: The ones most terrified are usually liberal parents living in “good” neighborhoods — ones with far more “Black Lives Matter” signs than actual Black people.

Their children are among the safest, most protected, and mollycoddled in the world, and yet they parent like the world is a minefield.

This probably describes my kids. And while I admittedly don’t share the same fears as my more outspoken peers, I certainly parent to them. How else will other parents trust my offspring to be suitable, good-influence playmates?

The gap between fear and reality is where parenting performativity thrives.

When Suburban Camp Chatter Sounds Like Old Money Small Talk

The pressure of performative parenting drives, at least in part, the summer camp arms race. It’s not just, “Are you kids in camp?” But it’s how many, how specialized, and how competitive.

The full conversation isn’t about childcare coverage or genuine learning; it’s status signaling.

I do it, too.

My oldest, age six, has back-to-back camps lined up. My youngest is still in daycare. We’re lucky. But I’ve realized I often enroll my daughter in “things” because that’s the thing to do.

We fear boredom. But more than that, we fear our kids being left out. And we fear what it says about us if we don’t curate a childhood experience as complex and costly as a wedding.

As one Reddit parent admitted, “If I let my kid just be bored all summer, I’d be judged by other parents. I hate that it feels like I’m failing if we don’t fill every hour.”

It’s easy to frame this as helicopter parenting or our overachievement culture. But at its root? Class anxiety. The camp arms race reveals who has resources and who doesn’t.

In Minnesota, summer camp fees for my six-year-old average $358 a week — no snacks or meals included. My husband and I pay extra for extended care (an extra 1-2 hours of supervision after camp ends). Otherwise, the figure would be closer to $300.

I’ll be brave and share what we’re paying and what we’re getting for $358 a week. (The overnight camp was excluded from the mean calculation.)

For some of these camps, however, the session is only 3 or 4 days.

My $358 weekly camp figure seems on par with what other parents pay, based on casual conversations and Reddit threads.

In one instance, a parent wrote about an $8,000 summer science camp being sold out, or a “bargain” camp priced at $300 a week that “usually sold out immediately.”

Families who can’t afford that patch together free programs, babysitting help, or nothing at all — and their kids (bless their hearts!) get labeled “unsupervised,” “behind,” or “at-risk.”

We’ve built a summer economy around the idea that boredom is dangerous and structure is salvation. The price of entry is steep.

What If We Just Let the Kids Be?

Kids can’t deal with boredom anymore. But if kids aren’t bored anymore, it’s because of us: We won’t let them be.

We fill every gap with snacks, screens, and scheduled activities because we think it’s what they need, but maybe it’s what we need. Our fix-it instinct. Our fear of judgment. Our guilt over time apart. Maybe our own addiction to our phones and screens creates a need for children to be constantly engaged by outside stimuli.

But boredom is a teacher. It’s the birthplace of creativity. Of self-directed play. Of figuring things out.

Roberta Golinkoff, a child development researcher, said it best: “That rubber ball can play a thousand games.”

When kids have space and time, they invent “steamroller,” “crocodile,” or just roll around until someone laughs too hard to keep playing.

Children still want to play tag, hide-and-seek, or Ring Around the Rosie, even if they don’t know the rules. The desire for wild, free-range play isn’t gone. It’s just buried under structure and supervision.

“Let the kids play,” Golinkoff urges. But to do that, we have to back off.

We have to stop conflating stillness with failure. Let kids eat when they’re hungry, be bored when they’re bored, and figure out what they like without us orchestrating it all.

We’re not raising résumés. We’re raising people. And sometimes people need a little space, a little hunger, and a little nothing-to-do to discover who they are.

Financial Freedom Isn’t Boring

Letting kids be bored is as financially freeing for your wallet as it is emotionally liberating for your offspring.

The $6,000 you didn’t spend on chess intensives and French immersion camp? That could cover a family road trip and pad a hefty chunk into their 529 college savings plan, or your IRA.

If you’re a high-earning parent saving for early retirement, that one summer off the camp circuit could be worth over $23,000 down the line (assuming you invest it with a 7% return over 20 years).

Multiply that figure times several years of summer camp and you’ll wind up saving a bundle – easily hundreds of thousands of dollars.

All these structured summer activities are adding years to your working years, pushing out your retirement date.

And while learning to program robots is a great experience for kids, having a fat college savings fund is even better. Also, when every Ivy League college résumé highlights advanced, summer robotics camp skills, it no longer becomes a differentiating advantage.

If I were on a college entrance board glancing summer curricula, free-range play with dirt and sticks would impress me a whole lot more than any STEM program. The ability to self-regulate and self-entertain a whole summer through, that’s a true stand-out achievement. A little boredom today is a great teacher for our children’s hypothetical futures.

Let Them Be Bored. Let Them Be Hungry. Let Them Live.

The best memories probably aren’t made at $8,000 STEM camps or in pristine Montessori classrooms. They’re made in the nothingness. In the wait. In the hunger pangs before dinner. In the weird game they made up with rocks and sticks.

What our kids need more of isn’t structure. It’s space. Maybe we need more chaos and less comparison.

I have three one-week gaps in childcare coverage this summer where I’m going to try something radical: Make my six-year-old daughter roam around outdoors and play by herself.

All her friends will be away at structured camps, but she can scooter around the neighborhood. Have outdoor picnics with stuffed animals. Play on the swingset. Sell lemonade. Or just sit and scowl at me through the screen door.

There’ll be a learning curve as she (and I) learn how to cope, and I have the luck and privilege of being able to work from home.

However, I suspect I don’t need to curate every minute of my daughter’s summer, and she’ll be okay. Maybe the return on free-range boredom will beat the return on all the rest.

Because here we are — a generation of burned-out adults, hustling for early retirement, who at least got to roam barefoot through summers of dirt and daylight.

And now we’re burning out our own kids before they even lose their baby teeth.

Chew on that.

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