Bring On the Feral Summer!

Kids deserve freedom amid hyperscheduled lives.

My child, in his natural environment

A number of years ago, I felt so concerned about my kids staying busy throughout the summer months, and me being able to work, that I signed them up for day camps every single week of July and August.

It was a terrible summer. They hated it. They complained at every drop-off, and I felt exhausted. It took up far more time than I’d anticipated, driving to and from the camps twice a day, and I still had to pack lunches! I was reluctant to make other plans because I’d paid for the camps.

My kids still remember that as the worst summer ever, and we’ve since gone in the opposite direction—almost no structured activities, apart from evening soccer, a single week of sleepaway camp, and sporadic part-time jobs. The days stretch wide open in front of my three boys, mostly unscheduled, for them to use as they wish. They’re older now (10, 13, 15) and don’t require direct supervision, so I can hole up in my office; they come find me if they need anything.

Kids Need Freedom

The memory of our notoriously overbooked summer came to mind this past week, when I got a call from CBC Radio, Canada’s national radio broadcaster, asking if I would do a series of interviews on the benefits of unstructured playtime in the summers (here’s one of about 20). The producer told me about a trend that goes by a few names—the ‘80s and ‘90s kid summer, feral child summer, and the more provocative “kid rotting”.

Many Millennial parents, it seems, are trying to recreate the summers of their own childhood memories that consisted of roaming free on bikes, eating popsicles, and basking in the sunshine with friends. Not surprisingly, there is pushback from other parents who think such an approach to summer is an unrealistic privilege that makes working parents feel guilty.

Allison Venditti, the Toronto-based founder of Moms at Work, an advocacy group for working mothers, told CBC, “Way to make people feel even worse. It’s like, ‘Oh, you can't pay your mortgage, and you can’t spend the summer letting your child be free?’ That's heavy for people.”

I suspect I was brought in by CBC to provide a counterargument to Venditti’s stance because, as most readers will know, I am a huge fan of unscheduled, free, independent, minimally supervised play. While I recognize and sympathize with the challenges inherent in keeping (particularly young) children occupied, safe, and entertained while trying to work all summer long, I think that parents might be forgetting some important considerations.

It’s More Attainable Than You Think

First, it's not all or nothing. Any amount of unstructured playtime is beneficial for children, and right now they are getting far too little of it in general. If you have to work a 9-to-5 job outside the home, then carve out opportunities for play after work and on weekends. Resist the urge to sign kids up for organized activities beyond what’s absolutely necessary. Instead, send them to the park or on a bike ride with friends, let them camp out in the backyard and have a fire, turn on the sprinkler or buy a bunch of water balloons, and just let them be.

Independent play is also a muscle that needs to be trained and exercised to remain strong. It takes a while for kids to get good at it. It might feel like a struggle initially, but if you stick with it, your kid will get better at entertaining themselves. Make it easier by creating a stimulating analog environment full of things to do, e.g., art and craft supplies, board games, library books, building materials, baking ingredients, a sandbox, slack line, trampoline, treehouse, basketball net, costume box, a pull-up bar, squat rack, etc. These items will change based on your kids’ age, gender, needs, and interests.

Related Post: Buy Real Toys

Is your schedule more flexible than you realize? If anything good came out of the Covid-19 pandemic era, it might be the ability to work remotely, if not full-time, then at least periodically. Consider any flexible working arrangements you could make with your employer during the summer months; even one or two days per week at home can create great opportunities for children to enjoy de-scheduled time.

Take advantage of flexible work hours. When my kids were young, I’d often start work at 5AM and finish shortly after noon. While it was painful to get going that early in the morning (and be disciplined about bedtime the night before), I was always happy when I did, because it meant I finished a good chunk of work before they got up, and we still had almost half a day together once I was done. (I’ve always worked remotely, which helps, though my husband has done similar early starts with his office job.)

Are there alternative childcare arrangements you might consider? Why does it always have to be this limited binary of full-time parent care (usually mom) versus a full-time camp? Our individualistic culture tends to be so uncreative when it comes to caring for kids. Could we go back to sharing care with partners, extended family, neighbours, older teens, or close friends? As counterintuitive as it sounds, more kids often means less work because they entertain each other.

I’ve written before about a weekly kid swap I did for almost three years with a woman in my small town. We were strangers, but we each had a baby the same age, and we were both trying to finish school part-time, so we agreed to take care of each other’s baby one day per week. This worked out beautifully; our boys had built-in playmates, and we paid zero dollars for stable, high-quality, home-based, emotionally invested childcare. To this day, our sons, who are now towering teenagers, are best friends; and my son views the other woman as an aunt-like figure, whose phenomenal Greek cooking he still seeks out as often as he can.

What Are Adults So Afraid Of?

There are some bigger philosophical questions in this debate over structured vs. non-structured summers. Sometimes I wonder how much this is truly a child supervision problem or more of an adult control problem.

Societally, we now subscribe to an intensive parenting philosophy, where we assume children need to be stimulated and entertained every minute of the day, often in a well-meaning effort to give them a leg up in a highly competitive world. We don’t want to “squander” two precious months’ worth of potential training if we think it could make or break our child’s future chances at getting accepted to a noteworthy university.

We don’t stop to think about how we adults also need a break from the grind of daily life; that’s why we take vacations. Our kids need that, too! They are coming off of two months of intensive academics, athletics, and getting schlepped around from place to place, day after day. They deserve a pause, a general slowing-down of life, an opportunity to engage in “fallow” time, which allows for restoration and rejuvenation. It will reset their mental and emotional baseline and allow them to hit the ground running when school starts up again.

Relatedly, many parents ignore (or may not realize) the fact that boredom is a profoundly rich and creative state for kids, one that may feel uncomfortable in the moment, but that a child must move through in order to get to the other side, where they will then discover new hobbies and interests. When we deprive children of boredom, we ruin their chances at becoming good at new and hard things because they never find themselves forced to confront empty time and come up with ways to distract themselves.

Speaking of uncomfortable territory and distraction, how much of this debate is, at its core, about digital devices? On some level, conscious or not, could it be that parents realize an unstructured summer will likely mean unfettered screen time unless they crack down and implement tough rules at home—which they do not want to do, because it’s hard—and so they would rather outsource that job and pay for pricey camp programs to do the dirty work of limiting screen time?

Steve Baskin, chair of the American Camp Association, thinks this is definitely the case. He told the New York Times that, based on his own personal experience and anecdotal evidence, demand for summer camps appears to be approaching record-breaking levels in the U.S. in large part because parents are trying to avoid screens, and many camps confiscate personal devices upon arrival.

While I’m all for device-free summer camps and taking drastic measures to help kids rediscover the wonders of the analog world, I can’t help but feel saddened that parents can’t do that for their kids in their own time, at home, on a regular basis. Living offline should not be the exception for these kids, who deserve a play-filled childhood, replete with opportunities for exploration, contemplation, and boredom.

Related Post: If Not Screens, Then What?

Finally, and most controversially, why is it all about the parents? Yes, I know there are practical considerations, and I really don’t want to come across as being out of touch with reality, but I am sometimes frustrated by how anti-kid our Western culture tends to be. Children are viewed by so many adults these days as an inconvenience, a nuisance, something to be managed and controlled to minimize damage to the parent’s income, influence, career progression, vacation potential, and more.

Why do we do this to them? It’s such a sad way to live, and it’s so grossly unfair to these little humans who we have chosen to bring into the world and then are made to feel like they’re always getting in the way. Can you imagine how it feels to be a kid whose parent is constantly grumbling about how difficult the summer is—the summer, of all things, which is meant to the highlight of a child’s year! That poor kid could end up feeling guilty for no other reason than merely existing, all because the parent didn’t expect their career to undergo a single bump or blip by having a child.

That’s not how it works! To be a parent is to live life thoroughly interrupted. There is no other way.

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution to the question of how to handle summer with kids, but I do believe that more unstructured play is always better, that any unstructured play is better than none, that we have a responsibility to create conditions conducive to that unstructured play, and that, when in doubt, we parents should draw inspiration from our own favourite memories of what was good, fun, formative, and profound in our own childhood summers, and then strive to give our own children those same opportunities.

It’s OK to do it messily and imperfectly. It’s normal to feel like we are not living up to the standards of our nostalgic memories, but we do owe our kids a chance to make their own.

You Might Also Like:

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