Structured Summer Camps vs. Free Unscheduled Time: What I Learned From Testing Both With My Kids
Mid-June last year, I spread the school’s summer activity brochure across our kitchen table, sticky with popsicle juice from my two kids leaning in to peek. Ten-year-old Leo prodded the robotics camp blurb with his popsicle stick. “All my friends are doing this. Can we sign me up?” Seven-year-old Mia had already rolled the edge of the brochure into a spyglass and was squinting at the fruit bowl across the room. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to dig for dinosaur bones in the backyard.”
I was torn. I’d fallen into the trap the year before, filling every day of summer with camps, playdates, and swim lessons, and by mid-July both kids were having nightly meltdowns over nothing. But I’d also bought into the quiet fear that too much unscheduled time would equal too much screen time, that they’d forget everything they learned over the school year. So I compromised: I signed them up for two weeks of back-to-back half-day structured camps first, then left the next two weeks completely blank. No plans, no scheduled activities, no drop-offs. I just wanted to see what would happen.
The first two weeks went the way most structured weeks go. We rushed out the door by 8:15 every morning, I forgot Leo’s soccer cleats once and had to drive back home, I packed three different snacks because camp banned nuts and Mia is allergic to coconut. By 3pm when I picked them up, both were red-cheeked and quiet, and they’d snap at each other before we even got to the car. Leo would flop on the couch and scroll YouTube for an hour before dinner, Mia would refuse to help set the table because her hand “hurt from painting all day.” By the end of the second week, Leo told me he was tired of camp. “We have to raise our hand to go to the bathroom. I just want to stay home.”
The first morning of unscheduled time, they slept until 9, which was a miracle. By 10, Leo was slouched on the couch, sighing dramatically. “I’m bored.” I felt that little twitch in my chest, the one that makes me want to jump in and offer 10 different activities to fix it. Instead, I just nodded and handed him a granola bar. “Boredom feels yucky. Want me to leave you to this?” He shrugged, and went back to staring at the ceiling.
An hour later, I heard him rummaging in the hall closet. He pulled out that unopened Lego space set he’d gotten for Christmas, the one I’d forgotten existed. Mia wandered outside and started digging by the oak tree, just like she said she wanted to. By the end of the day, they’d dragged three old moving boxes into the living room and started building a fort. They worked on it for three days. They made up a whole story about explorers stranded on a jungle planet, argued over who got to be captain, drew maps on the back of old grocery bags, and only asked for my help when they needed tape to hold the roof up.
It wasn’t all peaceful. It rained all day one day, and they bickered from 9am to 3pm over who got to use the blue marker. Mia drew a smiley face on the living room wall that I had to scrub off with baking soda. There were multiple days where they did watch two hours of TV after lunch. But for the most part, they occupied themselves.
I always hear people frame this as an either/or question, but after that summer, it’s clear to me it’s not. Structured camps give kids stuff they can’t get on their own: Leo learned how to dribble a soccer ball around defenders, and he still has the little drawing robot he made in STEM camp on his shelf. He made a new friend who lives two blocks away that he still plays with. But when every single day is broken into 45-minute blocks of scheduled activities, kids never get to practice the messy work of figuring out what they like, solving their own fights, and bouncing back when their idea doesn’t work.
I don’t pack more than two weeks of structured camp back to back anymore. That’s the first small change I made that stuck. If you work full time and need camp for childcare all summer, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. I just tell working parent friends to leave one full weekend day a week completely blank, no birthday parties, no planned activities, just whatever the kids want to do. When kids say they’re bored, I don’t fix it for them anymore. I just say “Boredom’s uncomfortable. Want a snack while you figure it out?” That’s it. I don’t offer ideas. I leave a bin of old cardboard, markers, and leftover craft supplies in the hall closet, and a shovel and a bucket by the back door, and that’s enough. I don’t need to plan fancy activities for unscheduled time.
Right now, we’re halfway through this summer. We just finished a week of half-day swimming camp, and this week is completely blank. This morning, I walked out into the backyard and found Leo teaching Mia how to do the cannonball he learned at camp, charging me one chocolate chip cookie for admission to their homemade kiddie pool water park. The fort they built two weeks ago is still taking up half my living room, I’ve stepped on a Lego three times this week, and there’s dirt tracked all over the back porch from Mia’s ongoing dinosaur dig. I still don’t know if I’m getting this summer thing right. Next year, Leo might want to do full-day camp every week, and Mia might decide she loves art camp and wants to go every day. Some summers you need the structure, some summers you have space for more mess. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
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