Now I Have to Plan My Kid's Perfect Unplanned Summer?
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All through elementary school, I attended not a single summer day camp. To use today's parlance, we spent our summers 'rotting.' We rambled around our little town to find friends who were free to hang out, visited the corner store to buy ice cream sandwiches, played board games if it was raining. But mostly, on fair days, we set up camp at the small beach club on the little lake 2 miles from our house, read books, played for hours in the water, got someone else's mom to drive us home so we could stay a little bit later. My sister and I used to compare 'summer legs,' covered with bug bites, scrapes, and the permanent dirt that combined with our tans to leave ghostly impressions of our Teva straps on the tops of our feet.
Am I nostalgic? I am. Even at the time, I was nostalgic. I saw myself experience these summers as if looking in from the outside; during long New Hampshire winters I pined so much for the last day of school that it sometimes made me a little bit sick. I favored chapter books published before I was born, depicting the childhoods of the turn of the 20th century, and so viewed my own experiences through that gauzy lens. Winter was for flute practice, overheated classrooms, the less friendly groups of kids that school forced me to be around. Summer was when I could have the rambling adventures children my age were supposed to have, with my actual kindred spirits. We packed picnics, like Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. Canoeing across the lake, clambering on rocks by the shoreline? Some real Swallows and Amazons behavior.
This year, my feral old-school childhood summers became a debate, a fad, a little bit of a status symbol. 'Why not let your kids have a 'wild' summer?' asked the Cut in late May. 'Is it OK for your kids to 'rot' all summer?' queried the New York Times earlier this month. These articles feel fairly useless, or even frustrating, to any family without a nonworking summer parent, or to any parent whose child would seize on a planless summer as an excuse to stare at her phone for 14 hours a day. They seem downright bizarre to people who live outside the blue-state, coastal places where one kid's summer of camps—aimed at enhancing and enriching a developing mind—requires an elaborate sign-up strategy and $14,000 in fees. (Where I live, in Ohio, the most expensive camp in town sets you back $250 a week, and I've never had trouble getting my daughter a spot somewhere good enough.) But there's something fascinating about this newfound devotion to summer de-escalation, in search of a connection to a bucolic past.
Sociologist Annette Lareau famously called the dominant ethos of upper-middle-class parenting 'concerted cultivation.' 'Summer kid rot' shows how part of cultivation is now, also, de-cultivation. We readers of many legacy-media parenting articles may not be MAHA, but we're certainly quite carefully antimodern. 'Giving your kids everything' has become 'Taking some things away'—day camp, structure, screens, your own overbearing cruise-director presence—in a carefully calibrated recipe meant to produce the very feelings I get when I remember running across the lawn at the tail end of a family friend's barbecue, at twilight on the Fourth of July. Yes, I know this makes it sound as if I grew up in a magic-light ad for a Republican gubernatorial candidate; in some ways, I kind of did. Surely some of my classmates were 'rotting' in the TV way, not the fireflies way. But it's too late: This is what a perfect childhood summer feels like to me.
Edan Lepucki, a novelist and Substack writer, wrote a newsletter entry last year about her own plan to skip camp for her kids, making her an early adopter in the summer-rot space. Lepucki is a college lecturer who doesn't have to teach in summer, with a full-time remote-working husband, three kids (5, 9, and nearly 14), and relatives nearby for occasional child care swapping, located in a high-cost-of-living area. For her, the price of camp would have been exorbitant, so she saw the choice to skip it in 2024 as a pragmatic one. She's doing it again this year, with the exception of one week of camp and some family travel.
How's it going? 'They're watching TV, reading, drawing, playing Barbies/figures, playing 'baseball' in the yard with a tennis ball and a wiffle ball bat,' she wrote in an email. She doesn't think of this as being the same as 'rotting,' and said she would not let her teenager sleep in super late every day or have the kids 'die on screens for hours.' (These particular kids don't have access to iPads or phones.) It was the way Lepucki talked about a no-camp summer in her Substack last year—'What is childhood if not long afternoons of sunshine and fun, your backpack cobwebbing at the back of the closet, homework a far off concept as you burnish an image of your brand new, back-to-school self? What paradise!'—that first made me wonder if I was doing enough to make my own kid's summers feel properly endless.
This is the third year since my own child grew out of having preschool coverage for the summer months—the third year of her day-camp era. There are a few things that have made her summers very different from mine: She's an only child, like an increasing number of American kids. Neither parent is a teacher, like my dad was, with the summer off to drive kids around; our neighborhood is walkable, but until this year, she hasn't quite been old enough, by today's standards, to ramble around and look for kids to hang out with. Besides, most of the other kids we know are … well … at $250-a-week day camp.
Despite all this, three weeks into summer, she's acquiring that spaced-out, blissful look; she's deep into piles of middle-grade graphic novels, discovering an affection for Nerds Ropes; she's running into friends at the pool when we go together on the weekends. I know, this is her life, and it's 2025, not 1900 or even 1983. I know it's ridiculous to put on a little Truman Show for her, to strip away just the right parts of modern life so she gets those good feelings I still return to at moments of unmoored anxiety. But even so, next year, friends and I are planning a 'rot camp.' We'll find a good week to leave our calendars mutually blank. One or two of us who work from home in a walkable neighborhood will serve as base. We'll text people we know, figure out what other kids are home; we'll give them some spending money so they can feel what it's like to choose what to do. Yes, we're trying to subtly plan out serendipity, a year in advance. Yes, we're concertedly cultivating. No, my parents didn't think nearly so hard about providing me with my own Happy Hollister days. So I promise that if the kids end up watching a little TV, I'll try to relax.
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