For kids, a ‘boring’ summer can be exciting of all

The Fourth of July has come and gone, and for many families, summer has reached its sweet spot. The pools are open. The bikes are out. Library reading logs are filling up. School feels far away. At least, that’s the nostalgic version, according to the Tribune News Service.

And yet, for many children in the city and suburbs, summer doesn’t look like that at all. Children of working parents, by necessity, are often enrolled in camps that run the same hours as the school day.

We empathise with those parents and exist among their ranks. When your job doesn’t come with a summer break, it can become difficult to give your kids the kind of laid-back experience many of us enjoyed in our youths. This is doubly true for single-parent households.

But as parents scramble to make it all work, here’s something to remember: Kids don’t need every hour of summer optimised. Some boredom is one of the healthiest parts of childhood. That belief is made visible in its purest form in the emergence of the “’90s summer,” an effort to liberate today’s tightly scheduled children.

What is a “’90s summer,” you might ask? For those unfortunate enough not to bask in the nostalgic glow of such memories, a ’90s summer means less screen time, plenty of outside play, roaming with your friends and embracing boredom, that fleeting magic that breeds creativity and the exploration of frontiers not yet explored by the young mind.

Essentially, it’s a trend in which parents are giving their kids unstructured summer breaks replete with the kind of freedom and downtime they enjoyed in their own childhoods. In various dosages. To be sure, a 2-year-old can’t do a “feral kid” summer. He or she is still the kind of handful that needs constant minding.

But for elementary- and middle-school age kids? They can handle a bit less rigidity. And the advent of devices such as the Gizmo watch — which allows kids and parents to communicate without all the bells and whistles of a smartphone — means that responsible kids can handle a little bit more independence while still having the backstop of a way to get in touch with Mom, Dad, grandparents or the babysitter.

Children grow by having unstructured time. The discomfort of boredom often becomes the spark for curiosity, creativity, independence and discovering lifelong interests.

As Oberlin College psychology professor Nancy Darling writes, “a bored mind is a busy mind.” When children aren’t constantly entertained, they learn to entertain themselves. They discover what they enjoy, solve problems and become more independent.

The idea shouldn’t be throwing them into a complete void, but pairing freedom with opportunity — providing access to books, art supplies, toys, outdoor spaces or friends — and then letting children figure out what to do with them.

None of this is an argument against camp. Many families need it, and many children love it.

And, of course, every family has different circumstances. Not every neighborhood lends itself to the kind of free-range childhood many adults remember, and safety has to come first. The point isn’t to eliminate structure. It’s simply to leave enough empty space for children to discover what they’ll do when no adult has planned the afternoon for them.

Even if you can only do it in small doses, finding ways to let kids unplug and slow down this summer, even if it’s after a day of fun at the park district, is good for everyone in the family.

Childhood doesn’t need to be optimised every waking hour. Some of its greatest gifts arrive disguised as boredom — an afternoon with nothing scheduled, a bike pointed toward a friend’s house, a library book that unexpectedly becomes impossible to put down. Those moments rarely show up on a calendar, but they’re the ones children remember decades later.