Structured Summer Camps vs Free Unscheduled Time: What I Learned As a Mom and Teacher
I was folding soccer camp laundry on the couch last Tuesday when my 10-year-old son Leo and his best friend Javi leaned against the kitchen table, kicking granola crumbs across the vinyl. Javi, whose mom skips most structured camps in the summer, had just showed off photos of the pallet fort he’d built in his backyard, complete with a working pulley he rigged to pull up soda cans. “What do you even do all day if you don’t have camp?” Leo asked. Javi shrugged. “Mostly get bored, then build stuff. Last week I spent three days trying to make a baking soda volcano that doesn’t spew all over my mom’s roses. It still leaks, but I’m getting close.” Leo looked over at me, and said, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
This year, I filled most of June with three half-day camps: soccer, art, robotics. I work part-time teaching 4th grade, so I needed coverage, sure, but I also bought into the common idea that empty summer days lead to summer slide, that kids need constant stimulation to stay on track. All the other parents in my neighborhood group chat posted their packed summer schedules, so I followed suit, filling every gap so Leo wouldn’t be stuck at home “doing nothing.”
By the end of the second week of back-to-back camps, Leo was snapping at our dog over nothing and picking at his dinner. He told me his art camp teacher made him repaint his T-Rex because neon purple “wasn’t what real dinosaurs looked like.” Robotics camp required every kid to build the same race car from step-by-step instructions, and Leo never got to finish the cat-feeding robot he actually wanted to build. It hit me that I’d filled his days so full of other people’s plans, he didn’t have any space for his own.
Then a last-minute scheduling change left three full unscheduled days between the end of art camp and the start of his next activity. I was working from my home office, so I told Leo I needed two uninterrupted hours every morning to get lesson plans done, and he had to figure out what to do on his own. I was convinced he’d park himself in front of YouTube and stay there. First morning, he moped for 20 minutes, complained he was bored, watched 40 minutes of YouTube, then dug out his old Lego bin, then remembered the pack of sunflower seeds he’d gotten at the science museum back in April. By the end of that first day, he’d cleared all the weeds out of the strip along our back fence, and announced he was building a sunflower maze.
As a teacher, I see this play out in my classroom every fall. Kids who spend all summer in structured activities are great at raising their hands and following directions. But when we do our annual free exploration STEM week, where kids get to pick any project they want, at least half of them spend the first two days walking around asking, “What am I supposed to do? Is this right?” They haven’t had practice coming up with their own ideas, or fixing things that don’t work on their own. Structured activities teach great skills, but they don’t leave much room for that kind of self-directed problem solving.
I don’t think camps are bad, by any means. Leo still talks about the new throw-in he learned at soccer camp, and he made a friend who lives five minutes away that he bikes over to see every weekend. Camps are perfect when your kid wants to learn a specific skill, or when you need childcare to get work done. The problem isn’t camps—it’s filling every single day of summer with them, just because we’re scared of a little boredom.
I’ve landed on a mix that works for us, and it’s way simpler than I thought it would be. First, I split summer into one week on, one week off: one week of structured camp or activities, one week of completely unscheduled time. For the unscheduled weeks, I swap childcare days with Javi’s mom—she watches the kids on her work-from-home days, I watch them on mine, so no extra cost, no extra hassle. Second, I have one simple rule for unscheduled weeks: no screens before lunch. That’s it. I don’t have to police screen time all day, and it forces him to find something else to do in the morning when he’s most rested. Third, when he says “I’m bored,” I don’t jump in with a list of ideas or hand him my phone. I just say, “That sounds annoying. I know you’ll figure something out.” That’s the phrase I use every time, and I’ve been shocked at how often he comes up with something way more interesting than anything I’d suggest. I also keep a big bin of “junk” in the garage: old cardboard boxes, duct tape, empty plastic bottles, scrap fabric, extra nails and wood scraps. He can grab whatever he wants, no asking permission, no rules about how to use it.
Right now, half his sunflower maze is now a frog habitat. He dug a small pond, lined it with plastic from our old cracked kiddie pool, and caught three tiny bullfrogs that live there now. He spends 30 minutes every morning catching bugs to feed them, and writing down what they do in an old notebook he found. He’s learned more about problem solving and local ecosystems this month than he would have in any eight-week science camp.
This morning, Leo and Javi dragged an old pallet out of our neighbor’s trash pile, covered in mud, and headed back to Javi’s yard to expand the fort. My soccer laundry is still piled on the couch, there’s dirt tracked all through the hallway, and my backyard looks half like a science experiment gone wrong. We have one more swimming camp starting next week, the one Leo asked for because he wants to learn how to dive off the high dive. I already caught myself looking at August camp brochures last night, just in case I have extra gaps. I still don’t know if I’m doing it right. Some days Leo complains he’s bored, some days the mess drives me crazy. But this mix of structured camps and messy free time is working better than any perfectly scheduled summer I ever planned. I’m pretty sure the leaking volcanoes and half-finished frog habitats are the parts he’ll remember anyway.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Structured Summer Camps vs Free Unscheduled Time: What I Learned As a Mom and Teacher