By Evie Ebert
June 17 was the first day that I’ve ever had to get three kids to three different places for the day, even though the youngest is 2.5 now. Before she started pre-K last September, she and my youngest kid were in daycare together. One destination. When she matriculated (lol) to daycare, she started riding the bus in the morning with our oldest. One destination. Clean! But now that she’s a public-school kid like her brother, she’s been spat onto the hostile rocky shores that is the American school-age kid summer.
If you are reading this, you probably already know that in the U.S., we suspend school for 10 to 12 weeks in the summer. The solutions for what we are to do with these children in the meantime are as confounding and irrelevant for most families as the agricultural origin of summer break. Most of us don’t have an extra caregiver we can pull off the shelf to manage kids over the break. Like the majority of households, my husband and I both have to work, not because it gives us spiritual fulfillment but because the bank still owns most of our house.
Since I have a WFH laptop job, we allow them to rot on the couch while doing a speed run of Netflix for the one-off school closures during the year. I hunch over my little emails in the adjacent room hoping they don’t encounter a jar they can’t open or whatever, and it’s no big deal. (Actually, it’s a relief to not try to put them in whatever ‘day camps’ pop up around school closures anymore, which they hated going to and which I hated convincing them to go to.)
So it’s a patchwork of summer day camps for the middle-class American family then, lotteried into by frenzied parents (jk, it’s moms) in January, hundreds of dollars per week per kid for the opportunity to provide lunch, two snacks, and transportation both ways to a camp that ends for the day at, inexplicably, 3 p.m.
The last time I wrote about this (Summer is Jail), someone emailed me that they couldn’t take more of my descriptions of “how much it sucks to have three children.” Huh. I figured it was pretty clear that I love having three children? It was my dream? I am moved on a daily basis that they even exist, that we lassoed them down from the celestial plane and now they walk among us, demanding “mo’ cheese” or explaining Minecraft mods. I’m just disappointed that the systems meant to support families are the Bluesmobile at the end of the movie and we’re supposed to pretend it’s not falling apart as we drive it. And I don’t mind saying so.
I appreciated novelist Edan Lepucki’s recent newsletter on divesting from what she calls the “summer camp industrial complex.” Her family crunched the numbers on three kids, three schedules, and three months of camp and decided that she would take a hiatus from her full-time freelance work and BE the summer childcare this year.
And like, damn. I wish I could!
There was a time when I would have sold buckets of plasma to afford as much childcare as possible, because putting in full-time hours with babies and toddlers absolutely wrings the life out of you. Now that my kids are school-age, hanging out with them is not as “adorable” or “sweet” as it used to be, however it is way more straight-forwardly fun. I would love to bop around with them for the summer, going on hikes, chilling at the pool, tie-dying shirts and shit. I agree divestment is an intriguing solution, but for whom is it really possible?
Recently, a headline was following me around IG, the gist being, “What’s the deal with summer day camp? Why can’t kids just hang out? Modern parents fear their children being underscheduled!”
Interesting. Wish you had talked to one (1) parent about their motivations behind summer-camp enrollment. Parents have to work? Wages have not kept up with inflation? Our infrastructure is built for cars, not people? Most kids need a parent to drive them to the house of any of their friends?
It reminds me of the cursed Twitter threads during the formula shortage in 2021, when geniuses would suggest that parents struggling to find formula should just breastfeed. I would personally love to underschedule my children, but until they can walk to a safe and engaging third space or we can afford our life on one income, I will be doing the cursed summer camp registration dance steps alongside my peers.
Probably someone smarter than me has proposed an equitable systemic solution to the problem, and probably other countries already have a tidy little system we could attempt to replicate. I’m too tired to do the research though, and I have three lunches to pack.
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