The Perfect Summer Doesn’t Exist

At precisely 7 p.m. on a Thursday night in March, I pulled up the items I’d pre-saved in my account for Vancouver Recreation Online Services, selecting each button as fast as I could. If I didn’t secure a spot for day camp now, it would be gone in 60 seconds.

My selections sloshed against the others in the queue, and then I won the lottery: I’d successfully booked my child into affordable summer day camps for most of the weeks on my list. I felt smug and a bit silly — I’d just successfully and viciously competed for line items like “Explorers Day Camp Jr. Week 2.” It was especially silly, I thought to myself, since he probably wouldn’t want to go.

Turns out I was right. I guess it should be unsurprising, but it’s weird to have a kid who has a similar anxiety profile as my own. It’s like looking into a mirror, then seeing my insecurities showing me a spelling test and dribbling a basketball, navigating the world at four foot five.

By the end of the school year, he was worn out and begging us to let him stay home, imploring us de-register him from the day camps. “They’re not a break,” he cried. He badly needed one. I could relate. I got refunds on the camps.

Now, he’ll be home with me this summer while I work remotely and attempt to beat back the darker aspects of the summer of “kid rotting,” namely the open ocean of YouTube Kids, that this could all rapidly become.

This may be wishful thinking, but I have some plans for us that I hope might bring some structure and levity to our days. We’ll leave the apartment on weekdays at the same time we typically leave for school and when my husband leaves for work. We’ll go on a morning walk, some days in search of a little treat. We’ll return home, he’ll find something to play with and I’ll start work. There will be Minecraft. There will be videos. There will be play dates some days. Later when I’m done, we’ll take the basketball to the park.

What am I doing? Is this big-city trad-wife-ing? Some busted strain of homeschooling? It reminds me of my home life in the early pandemic, when I interviewed for my senior editor job with The Tyee with Paw Patrol playing in the background.

It certainly isn’t the “wild summer” that is simultaneously an unplugged 2025 ideal and a source of resentful scorn in some parenting circles. Wide swaths of the social web for millennial parents are dedicated to a collective nostalgia for what’s referred to as “’90s summer,” with many posts telling fellow parents how they can simulate one in 2025.

People seem hungry for a summer that feels less hurried and structured than our contemporary realities often permit. Whether you’ve grown up with one or not, the allure of a summer full of the bike rides, mischief and romantic intrigue popularized in American cinema has an intoxicating pull.

In a tightly curated era in which millennials are expected to simultaneously load their kids up with enriching educational experiences while performing success in work and life, a season of unscripted spontaneity is appealing. It’s missing from so many maxed-out facets of contemporary parenting, where pre-registering for day camp months in advance is the only way many parents can manage their working lives when their kids are out of school.

It's compelling because it flies in the face of how so many people need to live. Day camps are a summertime child-care necessity for many working parents, particularly those who can’t work remotely. One need only dip a toe into the comments section on Amil Niazi’s essay in the Cut about her hopes to enjoy this season with her children to see the how harshly mothers are judged for their choices and circumstances. You’re indulgent and privileged for staying home with the kids in the summer; you’re an uncaring automaton if you don’t.

In a recent essay also in the Cut, Montreal columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton unmasks the resurgent interest in and hesitations around allowing children to have an “unplanned” summer this year.

“I’m calling it: anxiety over screen management is at least as responsible for the ever-increasing demand for camp as the desire to give kids a competitive advantage in sports or academics,” she writes.

“Is it really possible to have a ’90s summer when YouTube Shorts exist? What even is unstructured time in 2025?”

All paths lead to the iPad

The primary challenge I foresee with having my child home with me this summer will be mandating his time away from the screens on which I’ll be working, three feet away.

For school-aged kids in 2025, most meandering summer paths inevitably lead to the iPad or video game console, not the lakes or the campsites idealized by the enthusiastic readers of American culture writer Anne Helen Petersen’s popular Culture Study newsletter.

A recent edition about summer family vacations presented a nostalgic, stripped-down approach to family leisure that, like other writing about family and summer this year, seemed to hold mass appeal because it positioned itself against a more polished, Instagram-able strain of contemporary family life. Think an off-grid cabin and a decades-old canoe over the pristine vistas from a big-box mountain gondola or a branded theme park kids’ meal.

“The one thing that rings out from the hundreds of answers in last week’s thread is that a good vacation is not optimized,” Petersen wrote. “It is not over-planned or scheduled. It does not demand too much from any one person, or privilege one person’s leisure over all others.”

I agree with these statements in principle. But the wider reflections on family vacations — and particularly the kinds of families at the centre of those featured — are refracted through an unmistakable lens of whiteness that rules all those canonical “wild summer” movies, and which shape the popular imagination.

Wistful memories of summer road trips and camper vans aren’t necessarily nostalgic for people who did not grow up with them, but the power that the North American ideal of chest-pounding, hands-in-the-dirt summer camp holds on our collective consciousness is undeniable.

Still, there’s nothing inherently wrong with using a vacation to play out aspirational fantasies. Staying in a hotel, lounging poolside and going to Disneyland might seem gauche to white educated folks these days, but they are real, enduring sources of joy to many others who aren’t part of the Substack literati.

It’s tempting to romanticize the ’90s decade as a simpler, more pleasurable time than now. But there is no pure or superior past; there is only television.

I remember long summer days in 1990s East Vancouver, when I was in elementary school and in the care of my Cantonese grandparents while my parents worked. We’d eat instant noodles, Jell-o, and, from a pot on the stove, a simple dish that roughly translates to “beef and rice.” I’d watch hours and hours of The Joy of Painting with my grandpa, pro wrestling matches and daytime talk shows with my brother and Yan Can Cook with the whole family.

On some sunny days, we didn’t go outside until it was time to go home. But we were safe. And we were loved. For that, I’m very lucky. They weren’t wild summers like in the movies. But looking back at them now, they’re more similar to the summer I’m about to have with my child than I would have imagined.