Where Are Kids Going When School’s Out for Summer?

Child care has not been easy to acquire in B.C. for a long time. Though the province’s $10-a-day child-care initiative has increased the number of subsidized child-care spaces, there aren’t yet nearly enough spots available to meet the demand for care.

When the last school bell rings in June, access to child care gets even more dire: school’s out, and so are the kids.

This creates a dilemma for working families, especially single parent-led families, when the cost of living far outpaces wages.

“They have that routine that schools provide them. We saw how much of a disruption that can be when that isn’t available during the pandemic,” said Sarah Dow-Fleisner, an assistant professor of social work at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus.

In the absence of schools, families turn to summer programming offered elsewhere. If they have the money, there are for-profit businesses that offer day and overnight camp options.

But families on a budget rely on subsidized or free programs offered by non-profits and institutions like libraries and charities. And those organizations struggle to secure funding for summer child-care programs, said Dow-Fleisner.

“In the wake of the pandemic, we saw a lot of child-care centres, a lot of summer programs did not continue to get that stream of funding in. A lot of them had to shut down,” she said, adding there should be multiple funding streams and grants for summer programs from the federal and provincial governments, while many places must subsidize funding by charging parents enrolment fees.

“It highlighted a pre-existing issue for many families in terms of finding quality and affordable opportunities for their children to have a place to be in the summer.”

Aly Waddell from the Victoria Native Friendship Centre said the non-profit had problems finding enough funding last year for summer youth programming, and this year they don’t have the capacity to offer programming for kids under 12.

But they are able to provide a six-week summer day camp for urban Indigenous youth ages 12 to 17 that includes daily meals and is free for families.

“Often [families] will be lower-income and rely on those free camps because for-fee camps are often really expensive, even for someone who is average income,” said Aly Waddell, team lead of youth programs for the Victoria Native Friendship Centre.

In addition to offering kids access to cultural activities like drum making, physical activities like sports, opportunities to make friends and spend time outside, summer programming offers working parents a safe place to leave their kids, Waddell added.

“Sometimes people don’t have family support and this can make it even more challenging if they don’t have someone to watch their kids,” she said.

School’s Out Summer

The United Way of British Columbia has been offering School’s Out, an afterschool program for kids in Grade 1 to 7, for over a decade, partnering with local community organizations across B.C. to offer the free-to-subsidized child care.

Last year they expanded the program to offer a summer program, School’s Out Summer, because of family feedback that summer programs have been scarce since COVID. They have partnered with 20 community agencies across the Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley to run Schools Out Summer programs for seven to eight weeks this summer.

“The affordability [gap] just went through the roof after 2021. So our response was to support and help bridge that gap,” said Jasica Grewal, director of community impact and investment for the United Way of British Columbia.

“We’re looking at supporting kids who need it the most, and that’s often newcomers, folks who’ve been made to be on the margins, racialized families,” and low-income families, said Grewal, adding these families have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and rising cost of living, including housing.

Depending on the partner organization, which include neighbourhood houses and immigrant and refugee-focused non-profits, School’s Out Summer runs anywhere from two to five full days a week.

But it’s not a child-care program, Grewal said, adding they intentionally made family engagement opportunities part of the program, like inviting parents and caregivers to participate in the programming for the last half hour of the day, or holding family barbeques.

“The parent doesn’t have to be there with them. But the School’s Out Summer component specifically has a family engagement part of it, because we found that that’s a real key part of belonging and developing that resilience, especially with the younger kids,” Grewal said.

“Anything that supports those social connections that will live well-beyond the actual program hours with our families.”

How summer care benefits kids

When children, especially those under 12, do not have summer care, they are exposed to more screen time and sedentary, indoor activities, with less routine and interaction with kids their own age than they get during the school year, Dow-Fleisner said.

“You need interaction for the development of emotional regulation [and] executive functioning, which includes planning and being able to focus and concentrate,” she added.

Access to nature is particularly difficult for kids who live in urban areas. In B.C. 70 per cent of renter households live in apartment buildings, which Dow-Fleisner notes rarely have green spaces for kids to play outside.

Getting urban youth to spend time in nature requires reliable transportation and — depending on the activity you want to do there — may require expensive equipment, the Victoria Native Friendship Centre’s Aly Waddell added.

“It can be really hard to do that, and I think every youth should have those opportunities,” she said.

A school teacher in the United States before she became a social work professor, Dow-Fleisner said she could tell which of her students participated in summer programs and which students did not.

“It takes just a little bit longer to get back into that routine, to be able to concentrate, to be able to focus, to be able to work with their peers,” she said, adding summer programs help all kids develop physically, socially, emotionally and cognitively.

For kids who are already more vulnerable, whether that’s thanks to a disability, financial and food insecurity at home, or being from a recent immigrant family that lacks community connections, not having summer programming can be even worse, Dow-Fleisner said.

“Having a place to go where there are snacks and food are incredibly important. And so you take summer programs away, now all of a sudden you don’t have that continuity of learning, you don’t have that continuity of peer connections and you don’t have that continuity of food, which is really important for kids and their development,” she said.

Parents who struggle to access affordable summer programming for their kids are exposed to more stress, scrambling to piece together care opportunities or balance working from home with child care. Some even have to quit their jobs to care for children.

Available data shows the burden of arranging and providing child care typically falls to women, Dow-Fleisner noted, adding little data is available on non-binary and same-sex parent families. This can hinder women’s careers and, in the case of women-led single parent homes, be financially devastating for families.

“If you’re stressed out because you don’t have a place for your kid to safely be during the summer, that’s going to increase your family stress. Family stress and high parenting stress are some of the biggest predictors of maltreatment,” Dow-Fleisner said, including abuse and neglect under “maltreatment.”

Not all families facing stress are in danger of abusing their kids, she added. But the definition of neglect includes not only people who choose to neglect their kids, but also those who are unable to find care for their kids while they go to work, Dow-Fleisner said.

“If I’m not able to provide a safe place for my 10-year-old and I leave them home alone, technically that could be considered neglect,” she said, adding the stress can lead parents to engage in harsher parenting with their children to keep them safe.

“Had there been proper avenues for those families for their kids to have a safe place to go, now we start decreasing some of those additional problems.”

Year-round child care needed

Given these potential outcomes, Dow-Fleisner says she doesn’t understand why additional child-care supports aren’t made available for families all year round. At the very least she wants government employers, including publicly funded universities and colleges, to provide year-round child care for their year-round employees.

Waddell wants to see more summer program-specific funding opportunities for non-profits like the Victoria Native Friendship Centre so they can provide camps for kids and teenagers.

She says the centre usually pulls from its regular grant-derived program funding to run its summer camps.

“Which can be difficult when you want to plan for fun activities and outings for youth, but you’re also having to make sure that we have enough funding for the rest of the year and the programming we want to put on,” she says.

Dow-Fleisner would also like to see governments identify “child-care deserts,” invest in creating year-round child-care spaces for school-aged kids, ensure child-care providers earn a salary that keeps up with the cost of living and invest in public transit so families without cars have access to safe, reliable and affordable transportation to and from summer programs.

“Early childhood and summer program educators are responsible for what we consider the future of our country,” Dow-Fleisner said, adding they have very low salaries.

“If we want healthy kids and happy kids, we need to have happy and healthy caregivers,” she says.

Despite holding a fundraising campaign specifically for the School’s Out programming, the number of School’s Out Summer programs available this summer doesn’t meet the demand.

“The need outweighs the resources that we have available,” said the United Way of British Columbia’s Grewal.