Structured Summer Camps vs. Free Unscheduled Time: What I Learned As A Working Parent
Last June, I sat at my kitchen table, Goldfish crumbs stuck to the camp sign-up printouts, credit card in one hand and a past-due soccer club bill in the other. With two kids, 10-year-old Mia and 7-year-old Jax, and me working half-days from home, I could only afford to cover full-time structured camps for one of them that summer. I’d always bought into the idea that idle summer hands lead to endless tablet scrolling and mom burnout, so I signed the always-bored Mia up for back-to-back art and soccer camps, and crossed my fingers that Jax would be okay with unscheduled time hanging out with my mom, who came over four days a week.
First week, Mia came home every day with a new watercolor tucked in her backpack, chattering about the friend she made who also liked drawing unicorns, and fell asleep 10 minutes into the drive home. Jax spent the first two days dragging every cardboard box we’d saved to the basement to build a fort, ate three popsicles before lunch on Tuesday, and wandered over to the neighbor’s yard to dig for worms by Wednesday. No one cried, no one asked me for anything every five minutes, and I thought I’d lucked out.
By the third week, the cracks showed. Mia started dragging her feet getting out of the car at drop-off. One night at dinner she said, “Everything is timed. We have to stop painting right when I’m almost done to go clean up, then we have to go to snack even if I’m not hungry, then we have to walk to soccer in a straight line. I don’t get to just do what I want.”
That same night, Jax surprised me. He pushed his mac and cheese around the plate and said, “My boat keeps sinking. I want to make one that actually floats. Can we look up how to do that this weekend?” He’d come up with that whole project on his own, over three weeks of messing around. I realized he’d never have had time to even think of that if his days were split into 45-minute blocks like Mia’s.
Of course, it wasn’t all perfect worm-digging and boat building. Some days my mom’s knees hurt, so she let Jax watch YouTube Minecraft tutorials for two hours straight, and I’d come home to him grumpy and overstimulated, the living room covered in cereal crumbs. I’d lie awake some nights feeling guilty, like I was short-changing him by not paying for camp. And Mia’s camps weren’t all bad: she learned how to mix watercolor paints to get the exact purple she wanted, a skill she never would have bothered picking up if she’d just been hanging around the house. She never would have pulled out the paints on her own.
Mid-July, a spot opened up in the local dinosaur camp Jax had been asking about, and Mia said she wanted a week off to just stay home. We swapped: Jax went to camp five days a week, Mia stayed at home with my mom. The difference was stark. Mia slept until 9 every day, something she never did during camp weeks, and spent three straight days painting a big mural on the back of our old garage door. No one told her when to stop, no one made her clean up before she was done. Jax came home from dinosaur camp every day bouncing, talking about how he’d learned what a T-Rex tooth felt like, and didn’t mind the schedule at all because it was something he cared about.
That swap made me realize the whole debate doesn’t have to be one or the other. Structured camps give kids access to new activities and people they wouldn’t connect with on their own, and they take the pressure off parents who have to work, which is a huge win. But unscheduled time lets kids practice figuring out what they like, and how to solve their own problems, instead of just following someone else’s plan.
What I do this year, that doesn’t cost a ton of extra money or take a lot of planning: I signed both kids up for just two half-week camps each, instead of filling the whole ten weeks of summer. For the rest of the time, I keep a sticky note on the fridge with 10 low-effort options for when they say they’re bored: walk to the pool, dig for clover in the backyard, call a friend to come over, build something out of recycling, go get ice cream at the corner store. I don’t come up with activities for them, I just give them a starting point if they’re stuck. It cuts down on the “I’m bored” whining without forcing me to be their entertainment director all summer.
Another small change I made: if they have a full week of camp, I let them skip the last half day one day if they say they’re tired. Most camps don’t care if you leave early, and it takes the edge off the constant scheduled pressure. I don’t push them to power through just to get what I paid for.
This summer, we’re three weeks in, and it’s not perfect. Last Monday, Jax spent two hours scrolling TikTok after my mom fell asleep on the couch, and I came home to a kitchen that looked like a tornado hit. Mia complained all day Wednesday because her camp’s swimming period got canceled for a rain storm. But last weekend, Jax launched that boat he’d been working on for a year, and it floated all the way across the pond at the community park. Mia just finished drawing the 12th page of her own comic book, the one she started during that free week last July. I still don’t always know if I’m doing the right thing, but it’s working better than when I thought I had to pick just one side of the debate. Some days we need the schedule, some days we need the empty space. That’s enough for now.
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