The end of the endless summer 

Are the lazy days gone forever?

Ah, summer: just the mention of the word evokes memories of endless lazy days — trips across country in the family station wagon, cook-outs at the beach, sleep-away camp, bike rides, ball games and hotdogs, swimming lessons, popsicles, lemonade and long drowsy afternoons spent doing nothing in particular. At least that’s the way most post World-War-II-era Baby Boomers remember the sunny leisurely months between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next.

Typical of Boomer nostalgia is this recollection from Urban Institute analyst Matthew Stagner, Director of the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute.

“I grew up in a small town in Kansas, where we were literally on our own all day,” says Stagner, who has co-authored a national analysis of how modern children spend their summers. “I have very fond memories of those days. If you had a bike, you had the town.”

But as Stagner and other Boomer parents know all too well, summers are very different for their own children. Modern kids aren’t collecting memories of lazy days, biking around town or organizing pick-up games with their neighborhood pals. They aren’t sleeping late or hanging out. Most have no idea what it would be like to spend three months unsupervised, unscheduled and unschooled.

With a majority of parents working outside the home, and the world a more dangerous place, many parents believe it’s no longer safe to leave children unattended for long periods of time. Nowadays children are likely to be up and out of the house with their working parents — being enriched with learning activities, participating in supervised kid adventures or sports, in daycare or summer school or in the care of a relative or older sibling.

“Childhood has become like hard labor,” says Berkeley psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, author of Spoiling Childhood: How Well-Meaning Parents Are Giving Children Too Much – But Not What They Need. “We need to reintroduce nothing time, time with no schedules. We need to let things flow. Part of it is a values issue: the busiest family is considered the most successful.”

Even “fun” activities can be a drag when they are compulsory and run on schedule. Preschool California Public Affairs Director Susanna Cooper is a working Sacramento mother who says she loves her job and plans great summer activities for her children. Nonetheless, Cooper says she can’t help but feel sad when her preschooler wakes up on summer mornings asking wistfully when he’ll get another “stay-at-home day.”

“An unscheduled summer childhood is possible when a parent is home,” Stagner says. “But if mom and dad have to be up and out of the house by 7:30 every morning, it’s a whole different situation.”

Boomers who remember enjoying endless summer days tend to share a few crucial common characteristics: they lived in a world safe enough to roam unsupervised; most had a parent – usually a mom – at home; and school was something kids usually did nine months a year, with little need for extra tutoring or enrichment to boost academic advantage or round-out college applications.

“For better or worse, though, life is different now,” says social worker and family therapist Gary Direnfeld, who spent his childhood summers at the family cottage with a dozen other kids fishing, water skiing and “roaming all day.”

“Parents are overburdened and many kids suffer a disconnect from family values and important formative experiences,” says Direnfeld, who writes and lectures on family issues and testifies as an expert witness in Canadian family courts. “There are greater dangers – real and imagined. Sinister activity not only lurks, but actively lures kids. As such, parents today must rely on structured activities to keep their children safe from harm and engaged in wholesome activities. If parents can make themselves available, then maybe kids can have more unstructured time as the parents would be around, sometimes, to keep an eye on things.

“We thought that we got away with things during our summers at the cottage,” he adds. “The truth is, mother always knew where we were and who we were with. This made all the difference.”

Parents’ dilemma

Certainly, modern children still love summer and look forward to vacations. Many still explore and discover the world around them. Families still take trips together; kids have free time. Parents who can manage it arrange their work schedules around their children’s vacations, and many pass up the chance for additional family income and professional advancement so one parent can stay home while the kids are young.

But for many families at both ends of the economic spectrum, summers are not carefree. “Whether children are being dragged to 75 programs or locked in their apartment all day because it’s too dangerous to go out, summer problems stem from the same anxiety,” says Ehrensaft. “Parents need to find programs for their children so they can go to work.”

Many parents spend hours poring over calendars, city recreation guides, camp directories and bus schedules, carefully plotting out detailed schedules of activities to keep their children busy and safe all summer. Affluent and middle-class families often push their children to fill their days from dawn to dusk, enriching them with high-powered academic tutoring, exacting sports training and other forms of structured betterment.

Parents who can’t afford to send their children to special camps to learn scuba or rock climbing or to university summer programs for art, math or writing are often desperate to find lower-cost ways to keep their children safely occupied. Education experts say that while their more affluent classmates are beefing up their academic skills during the summer, poor children are losing ground. While the sons and daughters of the affluent are learning about the classics with a summer trip to Greece or Rome, working-class and poor children may be stuck in a sweltering apartments watching TV all day until their parents get home.

Stagner, who co-authored the nation’s only analysis of summer childcare activities, is worried about the disparity between summer activities available to rich and poor families. He thinks policy-makers and lawmakers should be too.

The federal government has invested billions of dollars in federal achievement mandates like No Child Left Behind, Stagner says, but has failed to ask critical questions about what programs are available to children during the crucial summer months.

“What good is this investment if student gains erode or disappear during the summer?” he asks. “Until they know for sure, policy-makers should at least maintain current limited spending on summer programs – especially for low-income children – and promote high-quality childcare year-round.” First of all, he says, policy-makers and educators need to know how children are spending their time during the summer.

While middle- and upper-class families have some very attractive options when it comes to summer programs for children, Stagner says, “others may have to settle for less enriching activities or leave their children unsupervised. Are these less fortunate children at risk of physical, social or emotional harm? Will they suffer academically? Remarkably, no one knows.”

Stagner says he and his colleagues are concerned about two of their findings: While affluent families spend 34 percent more on child care during the summer than they do during the year, poor families spend 24 percent less, and are more apt to rely on relatives to watch their children.

“What are parents getting for their money?” Stagner asks. “Parents, educators and policy-makers need to know whether spending less on care means that low-income kids are getting less enriching care and whether this will hold them back when September rolls around.”

Thus far, the Urban Institute findings have made news only on the lifestyle or features pages. Stagner says he’s disheartened that policy-makers show so little interest. “If we want kids to thrive,” he says, “we should pay more attention to the out-of-school months.”

University of Minnesota Professor William J. Doherty, who heads the Marriage and Family Therapy Program in the university’s Department of Family Science, has collected statistics on the year-round decline of leisure time as part of his research on “overscheduled kids, underconnected families.”

He urges harried and overly busy parents to reclaim their time with their children and get off the frenetic activity treadmill.

“Family vacations have declined by 28 percent since the early 1980s,” Doherty says. “Family dinners have declined by a third, and children ages 3-12 have lost 12 hours per week of free time. They play less and their unstructured time has declined significantly.”

Doherty, who says his family summer vacations gave him precious time to play with his father when he was a child, says the decline in unstructured time has implications for schools. Architects of testing mandates are getting it wrong, he argues.

“We are so preoccupied with academic testing that we are in danger of killing off childhood by treating it as a time for product development,” he says. “Recent studies show that family meals are a more potent predictor of academic success than time spent studying or in school. A rich and deep family life is the best foundation for all forms of child development, including academics, and summers and vacations are crucial times for these family connections.”

Constructive Boredom

Whether they are under- or over-scheduled, most modern kids lack opportunities to be creative, imaginative and inventive, say childhood experts. In a 1999 column headlined “The Benefits of Boredom,” San Diego Union columnist Richard Louv writes that kids develop “negatively numbed minds” when they spend every free moment glued to the TV screen or computer monitor. Kids who are left with time on their hands and no electronic entertainment are forced to become inventive.

“Constructively bored kids,” Louv writes, “eventually turn to a book, or build a fort or pull out their paints (or the computer art program) and create, or come home sweaty from a game of neighborhood basketball.”

Some parents don’t think they can afford to let their children relax for too long. After all, this is the era of school accountability and world-class academic standards and federal No Child Left Behind achievement goals. When California Baby Boomers were in high school, a “B” average and decent test scores guaranteed them an affordable four years at the University of California or California State University. Eligibility requirements and college costs have risen dramatically since then.

Academic schedules have also changed, with some 20 percent of California children attending schools on year-round schedules. The year-round calendar has its detractors and advocates. Believing that mandatory year-round schedules threaten to ruin summer, writer and mother Billee Bussard established an online journal called SummerMatters.com. Bussard says children need freedom from rigid schedules so they can learn “to manage their free time. Boredom can be a learning experience, too.”

“I have no problem with schools being open longer hours and in the summer for enrichment, and even to offer childcare services,” she says. “But I am opposed to mandatory change to a year-round calendar. I am convinced that the real motive (for year-round calendars) is to provide childcare so corporations can demand longer workdays and work weeks.”

Advocates for year-round schools argue that the schedules can be family friendly, giving parents peace of mind, providing summer enrichment for kids. Parents with children on year-round schedules can take their children on more frequent shorter vacations throughout the year, they say.

The private Beacon Day School in Oakland takes the year-round concept one step further; operating on a year-round, 240-day school calendar. Beacon founder Thelma Farley, who spent 20 years teaching in public schools, said the longer school year is liberating for families, partly because it gives children more time to master required subject material. “Students don’t have to spend hours every night on homework, and there is more time for electives,” Farley says. “Parents can spend more time with their children throughout the year, and they can take them out of school for vacation whenever they want.”

Ehrensaft favors letting children have a real break during the summer if at all possible. But she says year-round schools can provide valuable structure and engaging activities for children who have little opportunity at home for either.

Not everyone thinks that non-stop summer activity is such a bad thing.

Tina Woo Jung, Public Information Officer for the California Department of Education, says it’s important to give kids plenty to do during the summer. “During summer vacations, my brain cells died,” says Jung, who grew up in Detroit, the daughter of immigrants. When she was 11, she began working at the family restaurant. Her duties kept her productively busy. Jung has searched unsuccessfully for hard data to back up her anecdotal claim that ”if you keep kids busy, they stay out of trouble. Everyone I talked to in the agency says that’s common knowledge,” she says.

Although she can’t cite any specific studies, Jung does have living proof that her hypothesis is sound. Her “overachieving” stepdaughter happily handles a full year-round schedule of academics, music, sports and community service and is thriving. “If you keep kids busy,” she says, “they’ll thank you in 20 or 30 years.”

But for parents like Jean Dunn-Gallagher, Senior Director for Continuing Education at the California School Boards Association, less is more. She and her husband take a month-long family trip to Cape Cod every summer to give their two sons a big chunk of unstructured time.

“Our biggest decision is what to pack for lunch on the beach each day,” she says. “I don’t know why, but things happen that don’t normally happen,” she says. “Every year I see little mental growth spurts. The boys are relaxed; we’re relaxed. We aren’t working towards accomplishing anything. There’s no goal or objective or pressure. I don’t think many people get to exist like that any more. They don’t know how to do it.”

Carol Brydolf (cbrydolf@csba.org) is a writer for California Schools.