Summer camps are cancelled, and kids will be at home this summer with nothing much to do while their parents work. Parents, you might be scared, but you can do this! I know, because my family had The Summer of Boredom last year, on purpose. Here’s what happened, and what I learned.
One year ago, late spring 2019, My husband and I had been procrastinating about registering our children for camps and arranging summer childcare.
My angst grew as summer approached, but we were tired. Tired of rushing around to too many activities, tired of learning the logistics of new summer camps and classes, tired of trying to register for camps that were already full by February. We kept putting it off, even as babysitters were getting booked and camp waitlists were getting longer.
Then one day I had a thought — what if we simply don’t sign up for anything? We could let our daughters, then ages 7 and 4, hang out with us at our house, playing and being together as a family with nothing much to do. My husband and I both remembered having long days of unstructured time as children, and we could give our children a summer like we had. I asked my kids if they wanted to do this, and they were excited about it. They were tired of rushing too.
To me, the idea of NOT signing up for camps felt liberating, a small act of rebellion against the expectations we usually place on children.
Our biggest logistical problem — which will feel familiar to parents working from home in the age of the coronavirus — was how to get any work done with the kids around all day. I was going my office to work a few days per week but had some scheduling flexibility and days off. My husband was working full time, from home.
We didn’t have a firm plan in place when the summer began — we figured it out, week by week. In the end, we patched together a combination of alternating our work schedules, calling in the local grandparents and our babysitter a few hours per week, plopping our kids in front of a TV show when we were desperate, and letting them play by themselves for much of the day.
There were 79 days of our “Summer of Boredom,” and somehow, we made it work. We spent many days in our PJs until after noon. My daughters would make forts in the living room and start art projects on the kitchen table. They learned to make dandelion chains, a favorite pastime of my own unstructured childhood. My seven-year-old child read chapter books in our hammock, learning the joy of reading to herself for pleasure, and figured out how to make waffles without assistance. She missed school so much she started writing a research report about fairies one long, mid-August afternoon. My four-year-old poked around in the backyard for hours, looking for roly-polies in the dirt and pretending to be a dog.
Sometimes they would harass us to entertain them, but they would eventually give up. They would play together for long stretches of time, creating elaborate pretend games together, then get into an argument and coming back to bother us some more.
At the start of the summer we made a list of things we wanted to do; outings, like paddle boating at the park, and tackling the craft projects that were still in boxes. We did maybe half the things on our list.
They trashed the house. Every day.
They begged us for TV and watched much more than usual.
Not surprisingly, the biggest challenge was trying to do our work with them at home. One Wednesday in early July we had no childcare, and I ran back-and-forth between home and my nearby private practice office three times so my husband could be relieved of childcare duties long enough to do a little focused work throughout the day.
I wasn’t as productive as usual, and got behind on some things. At some point in the summer I was so overwhelmed, I wondered if The Summer of Boredom was a terrible mistake. But we stayed the course.
Leading up to our Summer of Boredom, I read article after article about how today’s children are too busy and would benefit from more unstructured time. Children have forgotten how to be bored, the argument goes, and childhood anxiety is on the rise because of the pressure we place on children. If our neighbors’ children are doing science camp, Mandarin lessons, and competitive soccer this summer, don’t we need to too, so our children won’t fall behind?
In my therapy practice as a clinical psychologist, I’ve seen what happens when adults don’t know how to tolerate boredom. We can all get into maladaptive behaviors when we try to avoid the discomfort that arises when we aren’t constantly distracted from our thoughts and emotions.
Given five minutes with nothing to do, and people will smoke, have a drink, binge eat, and compulsively reach for their phones. I can relate; prior to the pandemic, I was so used to being busy that unstructured time felt foreign and uncomfortable. As a society, it seems that we’ve lost the ability to sit with boredom.
The Summer of Boredom taught us that our children don’t need to be entertained as much as we thought. They learned to be bored and create their own entertainment. They became better playmates and their sibling bond grew stronger. I’m not going to pretend it was all fun and joyful — it was very hard sometimes — but it was nice to have more time together as a family. Children are resilient; they were okay, even with the extra screen time.
Admittedly, last year was very different from this one. Last year, when my husband or I had time off, we could take the kids on outings like the pool, the museum, and the water park with their cousins. We would walk to the library and stay a while. We had play dates and swim lessons, and a few hours most weeks with a babysitter or grandparents. We broke up the summer with camping trips, and I escaped to a work conference.
This year, those options won’t all be available because of social distancing closures. No doubt, it will be harder in many, many ways this year.
Now that I look back on The Summer of Boredom with the perspective of a year gone by, I can vaguely remember it being hard and overwhelming. The work I got behind on? It didn’t matter in the end — I did enough to get by.
And the upside? My children had the gift of long summer days to savor, like I had as a child. To this day, my children can entertain themselves for hours; when we have stretches of time off at home, they usually go off and play by themselves. We are benefiting from that skill now that they are home again due to the pandemic.
We had hoped for a middle ground this summer - a balance of camps and time at home. But instead we are getting ready for The Summer of Boredom, Part 2. Good luck to us all!