Give Your Kids a 1990s Summer

Jonathan Haidt would be proud

Children of the 1990s (me! oldsters!) love to sit around and compare notes. One of the things that was very different in that era was childhood. The most distilled version of 1990s childhood was a lazy, boring, hot summer.

In the summer, when I was growing up, we had a babysitter. This was a neighborhood girl that would come over every day. She was a pre-teen, only a few years older than us. Her name, coincidentally, was Summer.

Summer — the season — was pretty dull, but still every year we looked forward to it. I remember we used to experiment with cooking and baking. One year we made Orange Julius from scratch — that was a highlight, with the raw egg yoke and everything. We watched A LOT of daytime TV, and sometimes it was wildly inappropriate and trashy: Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, the Price is Right (at 11 am!).

We had a trampoline in the backyard we would jump on. Sometimes other kids would come over to use it and we’d play around with them. We played with sprinklers a lot, and sometimes we broke out a variety of neon colored plastic toys. Supersoakers were big. I’m pretty sure I had a rollerblade summer one year.

Sometimes we rode our bikes to the pool, where my mom had us enrolled in swimming lessons (it was about a mile away, by back neighborhood roads). The pool was freezing at 8:30 am and we hated it but mom knew we were spending too much time watching TV and was trying to force us into doing something positive.

In the afternoons, we would chase around the ice cream man. We’d drop everything the moment we heard that sound and just hit the street, in a dead run. We were always fiending for sugar. Sometimes we’d ride bikes to Summer’s house, which was always immaculate, and eat her superior snack food (fruit snacks and Lucky Charms), boxed Mac and cheese, and watch the Smurfs and Gummy Bears on her cable (which we didn’t have.) She loved Madonna and had a bunch of her albums, and even though she probably barely 2 years older than me, seemed so grown up and sophisticated.

I went to an overnight camp every year, for one week, which I looooooved. But I don’t remember day camps being a big thing the way they are now. Many of the kids I know now with working parents, they book their kids for camp the entire year, back to back. Science camp one week (it might have a Harry Potter theme) and then Zoo camp the next, or art camp, or theater camp.

I am NOT trying to be judgmental about that. If you’ve gotta be in an office, that’s sorta what you gotta do. There’s not the same kind of social safety net for average families anymore I think that there once was. It’s all highly individualistic and expensive AF.

People frown on preteen babysitters and a lot of girls don’t even do that anymore. Kids don’t ride around on bikes anymore in groups, kind of slowly and aimlessly like they don’t have anywhere to be or anything to do, the way we all did, all the time.

We’ve done day camps a little of that with our kids in the past also. And they always complain about it. Here I am super jealous; I want to spend the whole day at the zoo, dammit! But they say it is boring or hot and are generally unappreciative, even though these camps cost literally 10 million dollars.

This year my oldest is 10 and my youngest is 8. This is what I’ve read is called the “golden era” of childhood, between the ages of roughly six and 12. And so this year I decided, no camps. They’re both doing one week of overnight camp. But they’re not signed up for any other camps.