Commentary: Kids in camp? Nope. Got a summer schedule? Nope. Cue the mom guilt

“How’s your summer?” a mom asked from across the living room at a baby shower in June. She was standing with a small group of other moms of my daughter’s classmates whom I hadn’t seen since school ended almost a month earlier.

“It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I replied, honestly.

From across the coffee table, their eyes widened, and their mouths skewed into disbelieving shapes.

I understood the sentiment. The moms on the other side of the table all work year-round full-time jobs that necessitate puzzling together child care for 11 weeks while school is out. For them, that care usually looks like a conglomeration of scattered camps that drastically increase their weekly mental load with challenges of transportation, different start and stop times, and clothing and supply lists for each kid and every camp. As one mom at the party described this stress, her eyes filled with tears, and she wasn’t even addressing the ridiculous monetary cost of keeping her kids supervised while she and her husband worked.

“You didn’t sign up for any camps, right?” another mom eventually asked.

“No.” I didn’t. I’m spending every day with my 5-year-old and 6-year-old. Our only planned activity is an hour of swim team three mornings a week that is run by a local college’s swim program and still feels exorbitantly expensive.

While recent headlines and TikTok videos about kids forgoing camp to “rot” or go “wild” or regress to the perfect “’90s summer” focus on outcomes, my family’s conversation was really about the cause: the financial realities of parenthood.

Like those moms, I made my summer plans primarily for financial reasons. They need camp so they can go to work; as a teacher, I have flexibility during the summer and don’t need child care so I can work — and camp would have cost more than my salary, anyway.

This past school year I returned to the classroom for my first full-time job since my oldest child was born in 2018, but I also continued my gig work as a freelance journalist. While my 8-3 job guaranteed a regular paycheck in this unreliable media landscape and matched my kids’ school hours, so we wouldn’t need to pay for additional child care, freelancing was still the bulk of my income. Thus, I found myself employed but still participating in an“infinite workday” as I filled my late nights and early mornings with writing.

By the time the first camp registrations opened in January, I’d proven that I could meet deadlines outside of normal working hours, and camp for two kids was unjustifiably expensive. My husband agreed with my plan to forgo camp, and I tried to quiet the guilt that my kids would be missing the art or athletic enrichment.

Five months later, I was exactly one week into our unscheduled time when the Cut asked, “Why not let your kids have a ‘wild’ summer?” The article argued for the benefits of leaving these months unplanned, “giving kids space to feel dreamy, inspired, excited, or nothing at all.” A week later, the New York Times followed up with its own question: “Is it OK for your kids to ‘rot’ all summer?” In its examination, the article goes so far as to declare that summer is “a parenting Rorschach test” revealing if a parent has a relaxed approach to raising kids as opposed to a focus on “skill-building and résumé-padding.”

Today.com pointed out that an unscheduled summer is impractical for working parents. “Good Morning America” argued that such boredom can be beneficial for this generation of overscheduled kids. The Cut ran a counter-argument to its original column that pointed out how taxing “screen management” can be at home, and Slate bemoaned the pressure that comes with planning“summer de-escalation.” At the beginning of July, Vox even questioned if kids are capable of experiencing the “delirious boredom” of a ’90s summer.

Much of this discussion has been out of touch. From the thorny linguistic implications of the phrase “rot” to the ludicrous notion that every aspect of parenting needs to have merit (even, ironically, doing less), it’s all missing the point that most parents don’t have the luxury of time for this level of analysis nor for the “best practices” that such analysis might suggest. They just feel the weight of judgment for failing to have that spare capacity.

It also should not go unnoticed that these articles are all written by women and quote women, which mirrors a universal truth about summer: Moms are surely more likely to be both the schedulers of camp and the caretakers of the children not attending them because they are managing about 71% of the planning, organizing and scheduling within their household.

After I told those other mothers that this summer was “the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I immediately felt “mom guilt.” Not because I think the empty time my kids fill catching dragonflies in the backyard or squirrelling away to their rooms to listen to audiobooks or cuddling with me in bed to watch an afternoon movie — all done amid constant bickering and wrestling — is more or less valuable than time spent in camp, but because my mental load is currently lighter than those of the other moms who were at the shower.

This — not whether your kids are at camp or not — feels closer to the real problem. Modern society isn’t built to support modern families. From agrarian-based school years to a lack of affordable child-care options and support for parents who are caretaking, every parent is doing the best they can within a system that is failing them in every season. (When the viral load surges this winter, I’m sure we’ll be back to talking about parents missing work to care for sick kids.) Summer is just a three-month microcosm of the larger issues facing parents and, more specifically, moms who are desperate for a lessening of their mental load.

Ultimately, I think that’s what all these articles are really arguing for when you read between the lines. Returning to the idealized ’90s summer of my childhood is less about what kids are doing and more about what parents aren’t doing. Maybe the one thing each perspective has in common is that parents, especially moms, are justified in wanting to do less cultivating and scheduling of their children, because we all deserve a brief foray into the seemingly endless summers of our childhood before this summer, like all summers, ends.

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Sarah Hunter Simanson is a parent, teacher and freelance writer in Memphis.