Is It Normal to Be Ready for Routines After a Fun Summer? Parenting Tips for Easing the Transition
It’s 11:27 a.m. on a Tuesday in mid-July, and I’m leaning against my kitchen counter watching my two kids roll around on the back lawn fighting over a dented $5 water balloon pump they forgot existed for six weeks. The sink is piled with three days of snack bowls, the 8-year-old hasn’t put on pants that aren’t swim trunks since Friday, and we just finished our fourth screen time argument of the day. Summer’s been great—we camped at the state park, ate ice cream for dinner twice, stayed up late to catch fireflies in a mason jar, and turned our driveway into a chalk mural that’s still half there. But I just whispered under my breath that I’m kind of ready for routines again.
I used to feel guilty for this. For the first few years of parenting, I bought into the idea that a perfect summer is an unstructured summer. I scrolled through posts from other parents talking about ditching schedules to let kids lead their own play and felt like if I was craving a little order, I was doing something wrong. I was failing at the whole slow-living mom thing, rushing the best years of my kids’ childhood.
It took my younger kid’s sudden return to bedwetting to make me stop and notice the pattern. We went to the pediatrician, who ruled out any physical issues, and then asked how our daily schedule looked lately. When I told her we get up anywhere between 7:30 and 10 a.m., go to bed between 8 and 10, and plans change by the hour every day, she nodded. She said loose structure sounds great in theory, but most kids under 10 don’t have the internal self-regulation to handle that much open space every day for weeks on end. They don’t have the words to say they feel unmoored, so it comes out as fighting, meltdowns over tiny things, or regression like bedwetting.
That clicked. I started paying attention, and realized I wasn’t just tired of the mess—my kids were tired too. Two weeks ago, they spent an entire hour complaining they were bored, even though all their toys were spread out across the living room. Last week, my 8-year-old melted down at a playdate because his friend had a blue popsicle and he got red. He never does that. It’s not that he’s a bad kid, it’s that he doesn’t have any steady markers to his day, so every small disappointment feels bigger than it is.
I mentioned this to my sister, who’s a 4th grade teacher, and she laughed and said she feels the same way every single July. She’s had the entire summer off, she loves her time with her own kids, but by the third week of July, she’s ready for bedtimes and bell schedules and lunch that doesn’t involve picking half-eaten goldfish out of the couch cushions. She gave me a few simple, low-effort things to try, instead of jumping straight into a full back-to-school schedule that would ruin what’s left of summer.
We started with just one fixed routine first: breakfast at 8:30 a.m., no exceptions except for special early trips. I didn’t overcomplicate it. The options are oatmeal, scrambled eggs, or cereal—no 10-minute standoff asking “what do you want to eat?” If you sleep in, you still eat at 8:30, or you wait until snack. The first day my 8-year-old complained that summer was supposed to be lazy. Three days later, we drove to the pool, and he mentioned offhand that he wasn’t hungry halfway through the drive, unlike the past three weeks. It was a tiny shift, but it stuck.
After a week, we added one more thing: 15-minute daily resets three times a day, right after breakfast, after lunch, and before dinner. Everyone picks up their own things off the floor and the table, one person unloads the dishwasher, one person wipes the counters. It takes 15 minutes, tops, and it keeps the mess from piling up to the point where I’m stressed just looking at the kitchen. Last week, we added consistent bedtime: wind down at 8:30, lights out at 9, even on nights we have friends over. Within a week, the bedwetting stopped.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that routines don’t have to kill the fun of summer. We still go to the pool most afternoons, we still get ice cream on Fridays, we still skip everything to go to the zoo if we feel like it. The difference is that we have small guardrails now, instead of an endless stretch of unplanned time. The practical bits that work for us are simple: don’t overhaul your schedule all at once, start with one small routine a week; talk to your kids about it in plain language (“We’re adding a few regular times so everyone knows what to expect, and we still get to do all the fun stuff”) instead of framing it as a punishment for bad behavior; leave plenty of space for the unplanned fun, because that’s still what summer is for.
I used to think routines were just for parents, to make our lives easier. I didn’t realize how much the constant open space was draining the kids too. They don’t complain about not having a schedule—they just act out, because that’s the only way they know how to communicate that everything feels a little off.
Today, we still had that fight over the water balloon pump. The sink still has a few extra snack bowls in it. We’ve got two more weeks of summer break left, and I plan to enjoy every messy, fun minute of it. I just won’t feel guilty anymore for being a little ready for the routines that come after. It’s not that I don’t love this time with my kids. It’s that we all function a little better when we know what’s coming next.
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