Why the Unplanned Summer Might Be the Best Thing You Give Your Child

Modern Parenthood Journal | Contributing Writer By Sarah Lebovitz Suria, PhD

Somewhere right now a parent is color-coding a summer spreadsheet and feeling, briefly, at peace.

It will not last.

She will finish the spreadsheet, look at how full it is, and feel a different kind of unease. She will not be able to name it exactly. She will close the laptop and start researching one more thing to add.

This is not a parenting failure. It is a very reasonable response to a culture that has convinced us the calendar is the product. Fill it well and you have done your job. Leave it empty and you have left your child behind.

The problem is that the calendar and the child are not the same thing. And the parent, if she is honest, already knows this.

The spreadsheet is not really for her daughter. It is for her.

The Color-Coded Calendar Is Not About Your Child

Every June, I watch the same pattern arrive in my practice.

A parent pulls up the Google calendar on their phone to show me what they have planned. It is color-coded. One shade for swim team, another for enrichment programs, a third for the coding camp not yet registered for but already researched. The child is seven. The summer is two months away. Most of it is already filled in.

I ask what the child likes to do when there is nothing scheduled.

“He doesn’t really get that.”

The aimlessness is making the parent uncomfortable. Not the child. The parent.

These are not careless people. They love their children carefully. They have read more about child development than their own parents read in a lifetime. What they are is afraid.

Afraid that an empty afternoon is a wasted one. Afraid that if they cannot point to what their child learned this summer, they have failed at something. Afraid, underneath all of it, that their child’s potential is a thing that can slip away if they look somewhere else for too long.

That fear is not irrational. It is the background noise of modern parenthood. But it is worth examining, because it is the thing driving the calendar.

Not the child’s needs. The parent’s nervous system.

What the Research Actually Says About Unstructured Summer Time

Self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan over decades of research, offers a useful frame here. Children do not internalize motivation simply because adults manage their time well. Motivation tends to become more durable when a child experiences ownership over what she is doing, rather than feeling continuously managed by someone else’s anxiety about her development.

A child whose time is consistently directed by that anxiety does not necessarily absorb it as drive. More often, she experiences it as pressure, expectation, or noise.

The parent filling the calendar believes she is building something in her child. What she may be doing is relieving something in herself. Those are not the same project, and conflating them is where the overscheduled summer comes from.

Boredom is not the enemy of a good summer. Parental discomfort with boredom is.

When we fill every hour, we are not protecting children from emptiness. We are protecting ourselves from watching them sit in it. That is an understandable impulse. It is not a child development strategy.

Research on self-directed play and childhood autonomy suggests that children benefit from regular opportunities to direct their own time and activity. Unstructured summer time gives children space to follow their own interests, solve their own problems, negotiate their own games, and discover what captures their attention when no adult is directing it.

The irony of the color-coded summer is that it optimizes for the wrong variable. It measures the parent’s effort. It cannot measure the child’s appetite.

The Gap Between How the Parent Felt and How the Child Did

Every September I have a version of the same conversation.

A parent tells me about her daughter’s summer. The camps, the programs, the trips. Then she pauses.

“She seemed tired going into school,” she says. “Flat, almost.”

I ask how the parent felt about the summer.

“Good,” she says. “I felt like I did everything I could.”

That is the gap.

The parent felt productive. The child felt managed. Both of those things can be true at the same time, and often are.

Structure Is Not the Problem. Anxiety Is.

I am not arguing against summer programs. Day camp is fine. A week of enrichment is fine. Structure, when it responds to a child’s genuine interest rather than a parent’s ambient anxiety, can be valuable.

What I am arguing is that the parent’s discomfort with unstructured summer time is worth examining before it becomes the child’s summer.

The question worth asking is not: What should my child be doing this July?

It is: What am I afraid will happen if she does nothing?

The Summer She Did Not Plan and What Happened Instead

One of those mothers called me in September.

Her daughter had done two weeks of day camp and loved it. But there had also been a stretch of unscheduled afternoons in July, the kind the mother had initially felt guilty about. She told me she had almost signed her daughter up for something three different times and stopped herself each time.

Her daughter had spent those afternoons outside, inventing a game that kept changing rules, pulling the neighbor kids into it, returning to it day after day until she had worked out whatever she was working out.

“She was different going into September,” the mother said. She paused, trying to find the word.

“More herself, maybe.”

Then she said: “I kept wanting to give her something to do. And then I didn’t. That was the hardest part.”

That restraint was the parenting.

The unplanned summer is a gift. It just requires the parent to give something up first: the comfort of the full calendar, and the feeling that a scheduled child is proof of a good parent.

About the Author