Sweating on Cement
The latest trend is boredom.
I’ve been closely following the online discourse about how to give your kids a “’90s summer.” According to the experts, parents are finding ways to make sure their kids embrace boredom, have unscheduled activities, and enjoy staying put. When I see this, I think to myself: why do we have to brand everything? Just say it—it’s too expensive to go to Europe, and camp costs these days are astronomical. I know this firsthand because I’m paying a ridiculous amount for my kid to do random activities for the length of the workday.
That said, I’m all for this trend. I loved the summers of my youth, when the highlight of my day was torturing the Jimmy John’s delivery guy by making him place my sister’s and my sandwiches in a bag attached to a fishing pole, which we’d then reel up and eat on our deck. Or when we’d bike to pick up food from the deli across the river and use the fake name “Astrid” for pickup because we thought it was funny. I lived for that kind of stuff. That’s what childhood is made of, but I don’t feel the need to package it as a parenting philosophy. Millennials are so into labels.
I’m getting to a larger point, which is that everyone I know lately seems to be having a similar conversation: could we be okay with less? This economy will do that to you. Maybe a Slip ’N Slide in the backyard is enough. Those road trips and camping fails Anne Helen Petersen wrote about? That’s the kind of thing kids actually remember.
My family used to take a long trip to Lake Metigoshe each summer. If you haven’t heard of it, I’m not surprised, it’s way the hell up in North Dakota on the Canadian border. But those are some of the most vivid memories of my life, and they included a 16-hour round-trip car ride with my parents.
Personally, I don’t want to give my kids a '90s summer. I want the concept of summer to change. I want everyone to feel permission to do less, be bored, and let the kids sweat it out on the cement.
You know what these kids are saying, “Who needs gelato when we have the creepy ice cream truck!?”
Perfect! Thanks. I'm 73, and I spent most of my Pittsburgh summers lying on my bed reading. Occasionally we'd change it up and go to my grandparents' lake cabin, and I'd lie on my bed there reading. Heaven! My younger brother would run around the neighborhood with his friends, and we rarely saw him until dinner time or when the creepy ice cream man Elmer showed up on his motorcycle.
One time when I was in 8th grade, my friend and I made a list of Where to Meet Boys and at the top of the list was Subway. If we had been at camp ... there's no way we would have brainstormed this way.