Structured Summer Camps vs. Free Unscheduled Time: What I Learned As a Parent and Teacher
Last June, I stood at the kitchen counter folding soccer cleats and camp flyers, while my 10-year-old son Leo leaned against the fridge scrolling the printed options with a half-eaten popsicle dripping on the floor. “All of these start at 9 a.m.,” he said. “That’s earlier than school.” I tapped the art camp flyer, the one with a rainbow painted by a 9-year-old on the front. “Your friend Lila is going, and they give out free popsicles every Friday.” He just shrugged, pushed off the fridge, and dragged his half-built Lego spaceship over to the rug by the back door. That was the end of the conversation, and it left me staring at the stack of flyers, rethinking every plan I’d made for the summer.
Two summers before, I’d filled every single week with structured camps. As a 4th grade teacher, I’m wired for routines, and I’d bought into the common worry that empty summer days would turn into endless screen time, wasted learning, and kids who forgot everything they learned the year before. But that summer, Leo got a stomach bug halfway through and missed a full week of soccer camp. That week, he didn’t touch his tablet until after dinner every night. He dug a 2-foot hole in the backyard looking for “dinosaur bones,” baked raw chocolate chip cookies that we threw out, and spent four straight days adding towers and secret passages to a Lego castle that never got touched after camp started back up. When I picked him up from camp the next week, he slumped in the car seat and said, “I’m too tired for homework tonight,” and we didn’t even have homework. That’s when I started wondering if we’d gotten it all backwards.
So that year, after the popsicle conversation, I only signed Leo up for one week of camp: the Lego engineering one he’d mentioned once back in April, when we passed the community center sign. The rest of the 10 weeks stayed blank. I didn’t plan any daily activities, no mandatory summer reading charts, no trips to the museum every other week. I only set one rule: no screens before 3 p.m., and max two hours a day after that. That’s it.
The first three days were rough. Leo wandered the house opening the fridge every 15 minutes, sighed loudly while sitting on the couch, and told me at least four times a day “there’s nothing to do.” I almost caved. I pulled up the community center website three separate times to look for last-minute open spots. But I thought about what I see every week in my classroom: when it rains and we have indoor recess, more than half my class just stands by my desk waiting for me to tell them what game to play. They don’t pick up a crayon, they don’t suggest a game of tag to their friends, they just wait for direction. Boredom isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed immediately, I realized. It’s a feeling kids need to learn how to work through. So I didn’t offer him any solutions. I just said, “I know, boredom feels awful. Why don’t you go see if Mia next door is free, or check the garden for tomatoes?”
By the end of the first week, the boredom faded. Leo and Mia dragged all our old cardboard moving boxes out to the back corner of the yard and built a two-room fort. They added a window out of old screen mesh, strung leftover Christmas lights, and built a little rain gutter out of a cut plastic bottle to catch water for their plant shop. They sold picked dandelions and leftover cherry tomatoes to people walking their dogs for 25 cents apiece, and made almost $12 in three weeks. Leo dug up a 3×3 patch of our lawn to plant the apple and orange seeds he’d been saving all spring. He wrote a 22-page comic book about a Lego Jedi who runs a cookie shop, complete with dialogue bubbles and fight scenes.
When his week of Lego camp finally rolled around, he loved every minute of it. He came home every day chattering about the battle robot he built, dragged me out to the driveway to watch it push a soda can across the concrete, and talked about it for weeks after. That’s when it clicked for me: the question isn’t structured camps or free time. It’s how much of each, and how to fit them together without filling every minute.
From what I’ve seen as a teacher and a parent, most families err on the side of too much structure, not too little. If you’re looking for a starting place, here’s what works for us: cap full-day camps at two or three weeks total for an elementary-aged kid, instead of filling the whole 10 weeks. If you need full-time care because you work, opt for half-day camps instead of full days, or do camp every other week instead of back to back. For the unscheduled time, pick one or two simple ground rules (like our no screens before 3 p.m. rule) and leave the rest open. You don’t need to plan activities, you don’t need to push learning worksheets. Self-directed play is learning: counting change for a dandelion shop is math, writing a comic book is literacy, fixing a fallen fort wall is problem solving. It just doesn’t look like the learning we do at school.
This year, we’re planning summer again. Leo asked for the Lego engineering camp back, and he’s already asked for six weeks of open time to finish his second comic book and expand his apple seed garden. I’m teaching a summer writing workshop for three weeks this year, so I added one extra half-week of outdoor camp for the days I’m busy. Some days I still worry: I see other parents posting photos of their kids at camp with medals and art projects, and I wonder if Leo is missing out. Some days he still complains of boredom, some days I break my own rule and let him watch extra YouTube when I have a lesson plan to finish. It’s not perfect, and I don’t know if it’s the “right” choice long term. But right now, it works. Leo goes to bed happy, he talks about his day like it’s his own, and that’s more than I can say for the summer we filled with camps from start to finish.
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