Structured Summer Camps vs. Free Unscheduled Time: What Really Works For Kids
I was folding stray soccer socks on the couch last week when my 10-year-old Mia dropped a stack of summer camp flyers on the coffee table and said, “Can we just not fill every week this year? Last year I was more tired than I was during the school year.” My 7-year-old Jax didn’t even look up from the half-built Lego moon base spread across the floor. “I don’t want any camps,” he mumbled. “I need to finish this.”
A couple years ago, I would’ve brushed this off. Every parent I know talks about keeping kids engaged over summer, avoiding the summer slide, making sure they don’t spend three months glued to their tablets. The local mom group chat blows up every February with camp sign-up reminders, and I used to feel that cold panic that if I didn’t lock in spots right away, my kids would fall behind, or miss out, or waste their break. Last year, that panic plus a big work deadline had me booking six straight weeks of structured camps for Mia: soccer in the morning, art in the afternoon, a week of STEM robotics at the local rec center. Jax did half-day preschool camp three days a week. By the end of the third week, Mia was snapping at Jax for breathing too loud while she ate after-school snacks, and she cried one night because she didn’t have time to finish the comic book she’d started drawing.
Then, a planned family camping trip got canceled when my husband came down with COVID, and we suddenly had a full open week with no plans, no carpool, no drop-offs at 9 a.m. I spent the first night panicking, scrolling for last-minute drop-in activities, convinced the week would end with two bored kids driving me crazy while I tried to hit a work deadline.
It didn’t. Mia climbed into the attic looking for extra sleeping bags for the canceled trip and found a dusty box of my childhood toys, old VHS tapes, and a stack of 90s Baby-Sitters Club paperbacks. By the end of the first morning, she’d roped Jax into building a “backyard museum” out of the junk. They cut construction paper into entry tickets, drew signs for each exhibit, charged the three neighbor kids 25 cents to get in, and spent the entire five days tweaking displays and running guided tours. I only had to break up one fight, over whether my old Cabbage Patch Kid qualified as a “historical artifact.” For me, it was a surprisingly productive work week—they barely bothered me, except to ask for tape and more construction paper.
A month later, I talked about it with my sister, who’s a 4th grade teacher. She told me that most kids don’t get any practice solving the problem of “what do I do now?” when every minute of their day is planned by an adult. When you go from school schedules to camp schedules, you never get to practice making your own choices, figuring out what you enjoy, working through the discomfort of being bored to get to something creative. That’s not to say structured camps are bad, she said. If your kid is obsessed with horses, a week of horse camp is amazing. If you need full-time childcare to work, camps are a lifesaver. It’s when camps become the default, when we fill every gap because we’re scared of empty time, that we miss out on what unstructured time gives kids.
After that week last year, I started testing small changes that have worked for our family, and I’ve shared them with other parents stressed about the same question. First, instead of sprinkling single camp days across the whole summer, we block it into chunks: one to two weeks of camp (only the ones the kids ask for, not the ones I think they “should” do) followed by two to three weeks of completely open time. If you work full-time and can’t do long open blocks, start small: reserve one full weekend day a week with no plans, no soccer practice, no birthday parties, no errands. Put a rule in place that no one gets screen time before lunch on those days. That’s it, no big schedule overhaul needed. Second, when your kid says they’re bored, don’t jump in with a list of ideas. I used to do that immediately, worried boredom would lead to fighting or screens. Now I just say, “Boredom’s okay. Let me know what you come up with.” Nine times out of ten, they figure something out in 10 minutes that’s way more creative than anything I would’ve suggested.
I know the biggest worry most parents have is that unscheduled time equals lost learning. But what I saw that week of the backyard museum? Mia read three of my old Baby-Sitters Club books to write exhibit descriptions. She counted quarters, made change, and drew maps of the museum layout for guests. Jax figured out how to build a stable stand for a fossil he found in the backyard, testing three different designs before it stayed up. That’s reading, math, engineering, problem-solving—all the stuff camps say they teach, but they learned it on their own terms.
This year, we have one week of horse camp for Mia and one week of Lego engineering camp for Jax booked. The rest of the summer is mostly open. I still scroll the mom group chat sometimes and see all the amazing camps people are signing their kids up for, and I still get that little twinge that we’re doing something wrong. Some days are messy: they leave glitter glue all over the coffee table, they fight over who gets the pink bike, and some weeks I let them watch more TV than I’d like because I have a deadline to hit. Last weekend, they spent three hours digging a six-inch deep hole in the backyard looking for “pirate treasure” Mia made up, and got dirt all over the new back porch I just power washed. I stood in the doorway watching them, covered in mud, arguing about how deep to dig, and I couldn’t really be that mad.
We’ll see how it goes. By mid-August, I’ll probably be ready for them to go back to school and stop leaving half-finished craft projects all over the house. But so far, the best parts of summer have been the parts that weren’t scheduled anywhere.
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