Summer is Overplanned, But It's Still Great Fun

April 12, 2015

The Boston Globe

My kids began planning their kids' summer vacation in February. Hand to God. I have the e-mails to prove it.

"Let's start with July," my daughter wrote to her brother, sister, father, and me, listing her two children's activities all the way through August.

She did this in the middle of the snowiest winter, ever.

She set up a Google calendar and filled in the squares with Golf Camp. York Beach. Soccer Camp. North Carolina. Melanie's Grand Lake.

Her brother, who lives in Manhattan with his family, wrote back almost immediately with his kids' schedules.

By the end of the day, all three of my children had their summers totally mapped out, every little calendar square filled. It's tempting to dis all this preparedness, to tell them all to take a chill pill. But parents today cannot be laid back. They work full time. They work two jobs. They're single. They're divorced. They share custody. "Shut off the TV and go outside and play, and don't come back until the streetlights come on" are words that would get them arrested today. The world has changed since the middle of the last century, and how parents raise their kids has changed, too.

There's a lot of hand-wringing about this, about how programmed our children are. They go from one planned activity to the next. They don't play. They have "play dates." And they don't explore. Not physically. Not on foot. Not alone for hours on end.

I spent my summer vacations walking everywhere. To the movies. To the library. To my best friend Rosemary's house. To church. To Tower Hill school, where on warm summer mornings all the neighborhood kids met to play dodge ball and to make bracelets out of long strings of gimp.

When I finally got a bike, I rode it around my neighborhood, down the street, downtown, stopping in fields to look for four-leaf clovers, following, after every summer shower, an always just-out-of-reach rainbow in search of that pot of gold.

Summers were freedom.

My children spent their summer vacations free to explore, too. They walked. They rode bikes. They hung out with friends and, when they were little, they hung out with me. We went to the movies together, the beach, Jolly Cholly's, Canobie Lake, Paragon Park, friends' houses for the day. Or we stayed home, and their friends came here.

But all this was before.

Before both parents worked full time. Before the idea of neighborhood as community disappeared. Before Etan Patz disappeared. Before there were missing kids on milk cartons. Before adults in authority were outed for betraying children they were hired to protect. Before Dunblane and 9/11 and Elizabeth Smart. Before cable TV and the Internet brought every child-related tragedy the world over to our attention every day.

Before. When the world seemed safer than it is.

Summer vacation? Of course it has to be planned and micro-planned because parents cannot leave their kids home alone any more, and they cannot take the whole summer off to watch them.

So they take their two weeks' vacation. And their personal days. And their sick days. And they investigate summer day camps and call their siblings and friends, and somehow they work it all out. And then they write "York Beach" on the calendar. And "Soccer Camp." And "Going to Mimi's." And "Going to New Jersey." And their kids look at all the squares with big bold print filling them. And they jump up and down and they yell and poke each other.

And then they count the days.

Days of constant juggling for parents. Days of trying so hard to please. And will please, and will, in just a little time, be the good old days for the kids of today.