Readers Say

For readers with young children, summer is no vacation

Between high costs and limited availability, parents are scrambling to meet their child care needs.

Liam Colton, 13, freezes in a scrum during a game of steal the chicken at Camp Harbor View on Long Island, Mass., on July 18, 2022. Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe

By Zipporah Osei

June 28, 2023

4 minutes to read

School is out for students across Massachusetts, and as most kids look forward to two months away from the classroom, parents are hoping that their child care plans get them through the summer.

The average parent pays close to $1,000 per child for summer child care, and what’s worse, availability is limited. Many camps fill up quickly or only offer partial coverage, leaving parents — particularly those who work outside of the home — to fill in the gaps. Boston.com readers told us in a recent survey that their summer plans involved a lot of planning and coordination.

“So much planning! We do two family vacation weeks traveling to the Cape and New Hampshire for a week, each. We will rely on grandparents for a couple partial weeks and will pay for six weeks of camp,” said Ardria C. from Framingham. “We had to book the camps the day they opened back in the winter.”

Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who has studied summer care, wasn’t surprised to hear about the balancing act that parents have to pull to manage child care over the summer months.

“We, culturally and politically, have not made an investment in child care, particularly for young children. We’ve decided that for children under a certain age and during certain seasons of the year the care of children is a family’s responsibility and not a broader social responsibility,” she told Boston.com.

The result is a patchwork of support that leaves working parents at a disadvantage. Increasingly, families in the U.S. have both parents working outside of the home, which means they have to rely on a mix of summer camps, daycare, and support from friends and family.

The hunt for summer child care

For many families, the planning starts as early as January. Gloria M. from Medford has a daughter who just finished kindergarten. She described looking for summer child care as “akin to an FBI agent hunting down a serial killer.”

“I had a whiteboard with different camps listed including the dates, the hours, whether or not extended day was offered, and when the signup was, or if I had already missed the sign-up, and if there was a waitlist,” she told Boston.com. “It was level 10 insanity.”

Despite her best efforts, she was still waitlisted for one of the camps she needed and has yet to figure out a child care plan for the last few weeks of the summer.

“If you told me last year, how much I would miss full-time, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. all year round daycare, I would’ve laughed,” she said. “Now I just cry.”

As vital as summer camps are for many families, the business model isn’t ideal for parents or providers, Lenhart said. Camps are expensive to run and require a lot of seasonal workers, which means the supply doesn’t meet the demand.

“To do it affordably, it needs to be subsidized,” she said. “Certainly in my own community, the camps that fill up immediately are the local recreation department camps that are affordable and offer care for kids that doesn’t cost very much.”

Massachusetts is one of the most expensive places to raise a child and the cost of child care is one of the big reasons why. Boston.com readers have previously told us that the costs were “crippling” and expressed support for legislation that would provide relief to families.

Generational changes

Readers dealing with the headache of summer care also shared their own memories of summers growing up. Some said they spent time with neighborhood children and others recalled memories of summer-long overnight camps, all with the sense that summers were easier in decades past.

Melody from New Hampshire described her summers as a kid as “complete freedom.”

“Two weeks of Girl Scout day camp and the rest was just running around outside in my quiet neighborhood in a small town,” she said.

“A lot of things have changed about American life in the last 20 to 30 years,” Lenhart said. The cost of child care has soared in the last three decades, more new parents are living far away from their extended families, and even if they did live closer to family, Americans are retiring later in life, so grandparents may not be reliable babysitters.

Despite all this, Lenhart cautions against looking at past generations with rose-colored glasses. For many children, summers meant “watching TV at home and raiding the fridge” while adults worked.

“We have some beautiful, golden memory of that we cavorted in fields and fell into ponds and played in fire hydrants as little kids over the summer. The reality of it is actually not that,” she said. “Certainly for families of color where for much longer periods of time, all parents have worked.”

The value of unstructured exploration

Summer camp remains out of reach for many American families. Lenhart’s study, “The Summer Care Gap,” found that almost half, 46%, of parents of children ages 4 to 14 say that it is somewhat or very hard to afford camps for their child or children. One reader told us that they’re still paying a monthly bill for a camp they booked back in February.

Instead, these families combine resources and rely on a patchwork of day camp, babysitters, and support from loved ones. Summer vacation endures in America because adults understand the value of providing children with unstructured learning and play even when school isn’t in session, Lenhart said.

“We can have year-round school but we choose not to do that,” she said. It’s never really taken off, partly because I think we see, culturally, a value in doing and learning and experiencing and growing outside of school.”

That commitment to exploration outside of the classroom leads to many difficulties for working families that could be addressed with structural changes. Lenhart would like to see more state and federally-funded summer programs for kids as well as more flexible work for their parents.

“Ideally, we would have a broader sense of cultural responsibility to help all kids become the best version of themselves that they can be and that’s why we have public education,” she said. “And ideally, that’s why we start to do a better job of supporting kids and families over the summer.”