Why I miss “free-range” childhood summers

I look back at my childhood as pretty idyllic. No, I didn’t grow up on Lake Wobegon, I grew up in North Jersey. My family lived on the “wrong side” of a sought-after bedroom community, with Bloomfield apartment buildings right behind our house and East Orange right down the street.

Free time meant riding bikes down to Bloomfield Avenue to hit the video arcades and grab a slice. It meant little league (on a field later discovered to have been built on a large radon dump). It meant hopping from house to house to house to see what friends were up to.

Our summers were particularly fun. So many of us were part of the local rec program. It meant spending each and every day playing whiffle ball in the sun and knock hockey when it rained. For the smaller kids, it meant arts and crafts. The group ordered pizza every Friday. And we had a collection of trips throughout the summer, from spending a day at the Jersey Shore or heading to Queens to catch a New York Mets game.

Those summers were about recharging our youthful batteries. As a bedroom community, kids were expected to achieve. We were pushed hard at school. We performed. We worked to get into the G&T program. And we wanted to make our families proud. We took classes and report cards and tests (even the standardized ones) very seriously.

Summers were our break from the school grind. A time for kids to remember to be kids. We didn’t take big extravagant family trips (my family’s “summer vacations” usually consisted of a few days down at the Shore). We didn’t go to expensive day camps or “enrichment programs” designed to give us a leg up the next school year. We were kids, and we were just allowed to be free-range children those summers.

So why so I want to walk down memory lane? As a parent of two children now about the same age as I was during those whiffle ball years, I’m aghast at what childhood summers have become. Those free range children are looked at with scorn, their moms and dads scrutinized for faulty parenting. Instead, summer months are now overscheduled messes designed to give a child a leg up, a greater advantage, or greater focus on “the prize.”

I look at my own kids, and their classmates, and feel great empathy for their generation. Too many are denied a real childhood. Too many are told, at the youngest of ages, that if an activity doesn’t help them get into a top-tier college, then it isn’t worth doing. Too many are given a warped sense of priorities at far too young an age.

In our community, parents are at near riot state because the school district questioned the overall value (and impact on the “whole child”) of an intense gifted and talented math program for fourth graders, a program that had third graders placed in intense tutoring programs so they would do well on the entry exam. Some parents were up in arms, the same parents that are pushing their kids harder and harder, demanding more tests, more accountability, and more self-inflicted pressures.

My son recently shared how so many of this fourth grade classmates are absolutely distraught when they get a check instead of the desired check-plus on a class assignment. Third and fourth grade parents are already scheduling their children for tough summers of marathon music lessons, academic boot camps, or other such “mental enrichments.”

All of it leads me to ask, what exactly are we parents doing? Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggesting that academics shouldn’t be a priority, nor am I saying that children shouldn’t make the most of their school years or the school experience. But we just accepted it when the free range children of old gave way to new helicopter parents. But those helicopter parents have now given way to an entire battalion of “academic attack” parents.

As a professional adult, my family, friends, and colleagues often reprimand me about the importance of taking vacation. Annually, I often lose vacation days because I don’t use them. When I do use them, I remain connected to the office dealing with issues of the day while on “vacation.” Yes, I know I have a problem, but that is a discussion for a different day.

But if it is so important for me, as an adult, to take vacation time to recharge my professional batteries, why is it not as important for kids to have that same time away from their grind?

It’s important for our kids to be academically successful. It is equally important for them to be socially and emotionally successful as well. We need fewer fourth graders spending their summer months learning advanced math and having nightmares about “just getting a check on homework,” and more spending a few days playing whiffle ball with their friends. We need fewer elementary school kids worrying about what activity will look good on their college apps, and more who are willing to play soccer or do cheer just because they think it will be fun.

Most importantly, we need more parents demonstrating some empathy toward their kids, understanding how tough childhood might be these days. For every kid who may want to spend the summer learning coding, there is another wanting to chase fireflies. For every kid wanting to “get ahead,” there are likely several others who just want to ride bikes and find a pool to enjoy.

After all, we are only young once.

Bio: Patrick Riccards is the Chief Communications and Strategy Officer for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, in Princeton, N.J. He also writes the Eduflack.com blog and is the author of Dadprovement (Turning Stone Press, 2014). Patrick is also an Ashoka Empathy Ambassador. He is on Twitter@Eduflack.