When June arrives, most adults picture well-earned rest, ice cream cones and long, warm evening conversations. But as a parent, the start of summer switches me into a completely different mental and logistical mode.
As the school break approaches, I suddenly find myself drafting a complex survival plan broken down into weeks and days. It's not that we don't crave family adventures together — it's the tense reality that the gears of working life don't stop turning, even during the hottest weeks of the year.
My husband and I are in the fortunate, genuinely grateful position that we both work flexible jobs from home, and our family budget can absorb the slightly pricier camps. But I know that's far from the average — and even from this comfortable, flexible vantage point, it's hard to ignore the facts.
Even paying for just two camps a month, purely so we can put in real, focused work during the day, adds up to an expense you can see with the naked eye.
If it's hard even with a safety net, what about everyone else?
When I'm filling out registration forms and tallying up the costs, I can't help thinking of the families who don't get to enjoy the freedom of remote work. Among my friends and in my immediate circle, I see exactly how much stress and stomach-churning anxiety the approach of summer creates.
The problem is twofold. Alongside the brutal financial outlay, there are the impossible-to-fill gaps in the calendar. Because even if a family makes every sacrifice and scrapes together weeks of camp fees, it's still impossible to cover the entire long break. There will always be those grey-zone stretches that somehow have to be solved.
On this front, too, we can now count ourselves lucky, because we're long past the toddler years: our daughter has turned ten. At this age, the role of peers jumps enormously, and we've started leaning into that advantage with other families. It's become completely natural that if three girls hang out and play at our place one day, they gather at another friend's house the next.
And the sleepovers turn out to be the real jackpot — they give the kids lifelong memories while handing us parents a quiet evening and at least one calm, productive morning. So, with the safety net of remote work and a supportive parent community, summer at our house really is lively, fun and easy to love. Yet even with all these options in hand, I couldn't call it a smooth ride.
This isn't me playing the martyr
I'm endlessly grateful for our opportunities, for the community of friends around us, and of course for the grandparents' help. I just want to say out loud, and honestly, what hundreds of thousands of parents feel every single year as they pore over the calendar.
Summer camp is no longer an extra luxury service, not spoiling the child or mere entertainment. It's the mandatory, expensive ransom we pay so that we still have a job in the autumn — and a battered but recoverable mental state.
Because let's be honest: the fact that we survive the summer at all is not the system's achievement. Parents playing chess with each other over days off, favours and sleepovers isn't some romantic social model worth aspiring to — it's forced firefighting. But until systemic solutions finally arrive, all we have left is the tried-and-true power of sticking together.
Why has summer camp become so essential for working parents?
Because working life doesn't pause for the school holidays. For many parents, camp is less about entertainment and more about having reliable, supervised care so they can focus on their jobs during the day.
What makes covering the whole summer break so difficult?
The problem is twofold: the high cost of multiple camps, and the gaps in the calendar that camps simply can't fill. Even families who pay for weeks of camp are left with grey-zone stretches they have to solve some other way.
How can parents make the summer more manageable?
Leaning on a supportive network helps enormously. As kids get older, swapping days with other families, taking turns hosting, and organising sleepovers can give both children great memories and parents some quiet, productive time.
Is relying on other parents a real solution?
It's a practical stopgap, not a fix. As the article puts it, parents juggling days off, favours and sleepovers is forced firefighting rather than a model to celebrate — but until systemic solutions arrive, sticking together is what works.
