Amazingly, it literally did not occur to me to ask this, ever in my entire 35 years of existence, until last night. I have never experienced a summer (either growing up or after having kids of my own) where one or both parents wasn’t/weren’t* home 24 hours every day.
So it turns out I have no idea. If both parents work all year round (by far the norm for my demographic I would guess?) then what the heck do they do with their kids during the summer?!
*Huh. I don’t know which to use here.
In my case it’s either vacation, since I’m divorced they get two vacations, and summer camps. Summer camps are not cheap, at least not in the DC area. I remember going to a camp here and there as a kid, for a week or two, but I can’t imagine going all summer long, when are they supposed to get out and explore the neighborhood?
To my knowledge kids don’t explore neighborhoods anymore, because it’s now considered irresponsible to ever not have line of sight on your kids…
When I was a child, I had babysitters in the summer. They were neighborhood girls, about 13 years old, who could supervise me in the kiddie pool and make Kraft mac & cheese. We spent a lot of time scoping out the other kids in the neighborhood, I remember.
Later we moved and didn’t know anyone, and I was in a child care center all summer. There was a classroom for elementary-aged kids like me.
That ended when I was 11 and it was legal for me to be home alone. Then I was just home alone.
When I was growing up, it was a mix of day camps/summer school, staying with retired relatives, and low cost babysitting by neighborhood stay-at-home parents.
8 weeks of sleep away camp. Sounds expensive, but it was a YMCA camp and I went on “camper ship”. “explore the neighborhood?”. And find what, a new and exciting kind of crack vial? Between other kids who went to camp and scheduled summer visitation for divorced families, no one was around anyway.
I freaking loved it, and later worked at the same camp.
Thanks for the replies so far.
I’m hoping to hear from current parents as well.
YMCA camp is $120 per week for eight weeks. At four kids, that’s about $4000 a year!
…time to tell my wife she’s never going back to work after all…
I can’t believe this never even occurred to me. It’s just never come up before.
Day camp.
How it works for places I’m familiar with around here (including where my son is right now), most day care places are ‘early learning centers’ during the school year, which is basically kindergarten-lite with a lot more play time, but gradually gets them used to the idea and routines of school before they get there, and they do actually learn stuff. These places also do before/after care for the kids who are old enough to attend school. (The school buses pick up kids at the day care centers, as well as the neighborhoods.) And during the summer, they do ‘day camp’ for both the preschoolers and the school kids.
From the parental perspective, it’s all quite seamless: at whatever time of year, both before and after they start school, you drop them off at the same place in the morning, and pick them up at the same place in the evening.
The age when it’s OK to let your kids roam has indeed changed since I was a kid; I remember wandering the neighborhood with my friends when I was 5 years old, and nobody thought twice about it, back in 1959.
But another thing that’s changed is the number of kids in your typical neighborhood. When I was growing up, there were a metric ton of kids my age on my street. My son doesn’t have that good fortune; there are hardly any kids even near his age within an easy walk. At day camp, there are plenty of other kids for him to play with. At home, he gets to play with mom and dad, unless we arrange a play date.
I’m already OK with his exploring the woods with friends, if we know who the friends are, and which approximate direction they’re going. (He’s turning 6 in a few days.) But I think it’ll be another year or two before I’m comfortable with his exploring completely on his own. Right now, if he falls on the rocks in the stream and breaks a leg, I want someone with him who can get help.
Daycare or a babysitter. It depends on what you can get and afford.
I’m a current parent of a 9 year old and a 6 year old, and both my husband and I work full-time. There are a couple options: 1) Full-time babysitter/nanny, 2) Daycamps with extended care options that you pay extra for (camps generally run from 9:00-4:00. Around me, you can find them run by organizations such as the park district, YMCA, local universities, churches, and the like. They are basically the same organizations that offer after-school care during the school year.
Did you see the part where financial assistance is available? And, separate from attending on reduced prices due to financial need, Camps vary in their pricing structure (even among y camps) but few to none require siblings to pay rack rate when they attend together.
Yeah, I never thought that much about it until the past couple of years, either. My mom was a teacher, so growing up it always seemed normal to have a parent home during summers. Also, Christmas breaks and spring breaks, too, when the same issue arises.
Our oldest starts kindergarten next month, so this issue will become a reality for us next summer. I am given to understand that his school has a summer program for families facing this same question. His former daycare (Primrose, one of several national or regional franchise-based chains) has one for school-age kids, too, that is open to everyone they have room for and can pay the tuition- I assume a lot of other Primrose branches and other daycares offer something similar. Plus, there’s a variety of summer camps, as noted. So, there are options available to those who can afford them. As you observed, even the YMCA is not cheap.
I really don’t know what low-wage single parents do.
Good information, thanks. (And no, the meaning of “camper ship” went right past me actually. Sorry about that!)
‘Extended Day’ at their regular school for my two elementary schoolers. It is the same as regular school except with more fun activities and no true academic classes. They do this during the school year as well to cover the gap between the end of the school day and the end of the normal working day except during the summer it is all Extended Day. They ride the bus there and back just like regular school so that really helps.
I have no idea what people do in school districts that don’t have this option. It doesn’t seem like it would be very manageable at all for most people without it.
Looking at the community center in my hometown currently, they currently run summer day camps at $110 a week, with discounts available for low-income children. I know funding for summer school has dwindled, but some communities also offer recreational summer school classes (I took lots of art over the summers.) Churches, too, offer various low-cost camps.
Low-income parents also rely heavily on their family and community networks. Most low-income communities have stay-at-home parents who are willing to act as a informal home daycares-- either for a bit of extra cash or as part of a general system of favors.
Daycare for an infant in this area costs $250-$400 a week. I wonder if the YMCA will take the baby…I could save fortunes! But it’s worth remembering that a second income is about more than money in your pocket now. The career advances and raises also affect future income.
A combination of everything. We used babysitters some weeks, took independent vacations some weeks, used day camps some weeks, and occasionally we took a kid each into work for the day.
Thankfully they’re 14 and 15 now and don’t need daily supervision.
Our six year old is spending her summer at the local YMCA’s day camp. We drop her off each morning before work and pick her up when we get back. They go on field trips (museums, zoos, etc), go the beach every Friday, and have swim lessons twice a week. She loves it.
When I was a kid, my father worked days and my mother worked nights (telephone operator), so one or the other was home with us in the summer.
However, I work full time. When Little Divine was tiny, he was in daycare, so that continued in the summer. Once he started kindergarten, and until now (going into 5th grade), we worked out a system in the summer where his dad takes one day off per week to stay home, I take one day off to stay home, and I hire a teenager to be with him the other three days. He is lucky to have same-age friends in the neighborhood (the same block) to hang out with.
The sitter’s main responsibility is to fix lunch for both of them and make sure he doesn’t kill himself, although I provide craft activities, science project kits, cookie-making kits, games, slip n slide, etc. to keep them occupied. I had the same sitter for three summers, and the sitter I have this year is on her second summer. I can’t afford to pay very much, but to a 14-year-old with limited opportunities to earn money, it’s not bad for a relatively low-stress part-time job (although I think it is probably frequently boring for the sitter).
His dad and I end up using up a lot of vacation time this way, but we are both lucky to have employers who are willing to accomodate this for 10 weeks of the summer. Little Divine will be 11 next summer; I’ll have to make a decision over the winter as to whether or not he is old/mature enough to stay home alone (with me coming home at lunchtime to fix lunch and check on him) or if we’ll need a sitter for another summer.