When Katherine Goldstein was a child in the 1990s, growing up in Atlanta, she remembers languid summers spent swimming and riding her bike around the neighborhood while her father worked full time and her mother worked part time from home. Many of the millennial parents in her orbit have similar memories.
“Most of the people I know who are in their 30s and 40s spent July and August at a community pool, and there was not this sense that every moment had to be programmed,” said Ms. Goldstein, 41.
Ms. Goldstein, a researcher who lives with her husband and three children in Durham, N.C., also went to camp some years. But it seems a stark contrast to the annual frenzy many families these days enter as early as the fall, when summer is still several months away but the pressure to plan those school-free months reaches a peak.
While many parents — particularly those with office jobs — may view camp as the ideal and often necessary way for a child to spend summer break, others see it as a dreaded four-letter word that is synonymous with hefty price tags and stressful logistics.
What if, some are daring to wonder, my kid does nothing?
Call it kid rotting, internet parlance for indulgent lounging, or “wild summer.” This might sound anathema to those who subscribe to an ultracompetitive modern parenting culture, particularly in New York City, where signing up for camp is an arms race of who can remember to set calendar reminders months ahead of time. Some of the most coveted camps — like the ones offered by Central Park Zoo ($720 per week) and the American Museum of Natural History ($1,300 per week) — often fill up within minutes of opening registration.
In some affluent suburbs, the cost of multiple camp tuitions is on par with a new luxury car. Hali Berman, the founder of the resale site for camp gear and décor called Recamped, is spending about $40,000 to send her two younger children to attend eight weeks of full-day camp in Bergen County, N.J., and for seven weeks of sleep-away camp for her oldest child.
Lately, some are envisioning a summer vacation more like the one they may have experienced as children themselves, be it for financial reasons or philosophical ones.
When Lauren Weintraub told her 6- and 9-year-old sons they needed to go to camp this summer so she could finish her speech pathology courses, they freaked out. Last year “it was a fight every day to get them to go,” said Ms. Weintraub, a stay-at-home parent and travel agent in New York City.
After discovering that a full-time babysitter was out of her budget, Ms. Weintraub, 39, decided to take a sabbatical from school. She booked a two-week European vacation and was planning to “cobble together” the rest of the summer with a combination of local activities, help from grandparents and short road trips.
Ms. Weintraub says the entire trip to Europe will cost her less than seven weeks of camp for two children in Manhattan. Not to mention, she added, “I would rather spend my money on travel than a camp they don’t want to go to,” she said.
Summer vacation has become a parenting Rorschach test. Is it, as Ms. Weintraub views it, a time of the year that is “supposed to be chill,” or a three-month span for skill-building and résumé-padding?
Ilenia Pellicciotta, a cancer researcher at Columbia University, says she doesn’t mind that her 9- and 10-year-olds will be couch potatoes for some part of this summer. “They might not use their brains for some period, but my kids are exposed to so much,” said Ms. Pellicciotta, who has full-time child care. “They speak four languages and can afford to be lazy.”
Aimee Denaro Becker, a real estate broker in New York City, is continuing a yearslong streak of opting out of camp for her 6-year-old daughter. “It’s good for her to be bored sometimes. I remember being bored in the summertime and it didn’t make me a bad adult,” said Ms. Becker, who added that she can manage without camp or child care because she can work remotely.
Alina Adams, a private school admissions consultant in Manhattan, promotes a certain brand of summer boredom when she talks to anxious New York City parents.
“I tell them their kid will be more ‘ahead’ with their own experimentation, versus taking a class alongside other children,” she said. Registering for STEM camp, for instance, may seem like a great idea to a parent, but it can leave little room for a kid to explore their natural curiosities. “It’s all adult-driven.”
Ms. Adams spent many summers at home with her three children, who are now adults. One summer, the main activity was sitting on a bench in Central Park reading while her kindergarten-age son made piles of sticks.
“It’s the perfect age to leave them alone with their own ideas,” she said. (As for the stick piler, he went on to attend Stuyvesant High School and is now applying to Ph.D. programs.)
Here, though, is where the nostalgia of an older generation for playing outside with the neighborhood kids on hot summer days can come up against the reality of our modern age, where hours spent doing “nothing” can mean time spent in front of phones and TVs.
An unplanned summer isn’t permission for endless screen time, Ms. Adams emphasized, but rather about exploring what intrinsically motivates a child.
Avoiding screens is a big reason some parents send their children to camp, said Steve Baskin, co-director and owner of Camp Champions in Marble Falls, Texas, who is also chair of the American Camp Association. He believes it’s part of why demand for camp-going in the United States appears to be reaching record levels, based on his experience and anecdotal evidence from his colleagues.
For what it’s worth, he added, boredom is often a feature of camp, too, where kids are typically made to turn in their phones and tablets: “Camp is consistently about being bored. There is nothing to swipe at.”
Regardless of parents’ personal beliefs on the merits of a summer spent at engineering camp versus one spent playing with twigs in the park, the decision for what to do with children during these months often comes down to simple math.
“Most kids would rather be on the stoop at home,” said Juliana Braga-Babinsky, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority employee with twin 8-year-old boys. “I don’t think my sons like camp, but my husband and I are city workers, and the boys are aware of the financial strain.”
Her sons attend Summer Rising, a free Department of Education-run camp. After the program ends in mid-August, Ms. Braga-Babinsky and her husband burn through their vacation days until school starts in September.
When she crunched the numbers this year, Ms. Goldstein, the researcher in North Carolina, found that her camp tab would have tripled this year, to around $10,000 for nine weeks of camp now that her twin 5-year-olds are old enough to attend. She and her husband decided instead to plan what she calls an opt-out adventure, consisting of a month at home with a full-time babysitter followed by a family trip to Central America.
“The decision came from years of policy research looking at why America’s summer care system is so bad,” said Ms. Goldstein, who is working on a book about community-building. With their new plan, the family’s $14,000 summer budget will cover the five-week vacation and the sitter.
When I talked to my 7-year-old daughter about her summer itinerary, which as of April was glaringly empty, she asked me why she had to have plans at all.
“It’s only three months, Mom,” she said.
She had a point.
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