Stop Trying to Make 90s Summer Happen

Thirty years later, the world my kids live in is unrecognizable from the one of my youth.

image via Unsplash

When I was a kid, I longed for summer break. The ideal of three blissful months of wandering the neighborhood, sticky from melted popsicles and smelling of chlorine, knocking on doors to see if I could rouse any of my friends while our moms sipped TaB and did Jane Fonda videos, utterly ignoring us— perfection. In Ohio where I grew up, summers represented a brief respite from the bitter cold and snow, allowing truly spontaneous outdoor time. It was rare that I would be enrolled in a camp because my mom’s very part-time work schedule didn’t require it, and even then, only a 3-day volleyball clinic or similar. We mostly just hung out, and yeah— it was glorious. I can tell that I am not the only one who remembers this time in this way. All the parent-scold authors this year have jettisoned the 2024 favorite, “you only get 18 summers with your kids!” and taken up the mantle of returning to a 90s summer. “Don’t schedule anything for your kids,” they urge. “Let them hang out and be bored. Entertain them less. Let them stay up late and catch fireflies.”

The first time I heard this chestnut, it did briefly awaken some nostalgia in me before I realized that these 90s summers I so cherished hadn’t vanished because we’ve failed to see the value in rest, relaxation, and unstructured time. They’d simply ended because the world my kids live in is utterly unrecognizable from 1995. This year, I didn’t even notice it was summer until a flyer for something called “Sprinkler Days” came home in my preschooler’s backpack. Like most parents in 2025, I am at work every day, during those same hours when my mom was reading People magazine and making leisurely lunches. Far from sleeping in, I am struggling to get my kids out of bed in time to head to daycare, which mercifully still lasts all year regardless of the antiquated agrarian school schedule. Rather than catching lightning bugs, I am trying to persuade my children that yes, it really is bedtime even though the sun is still up. We have school in the morning. We are living our normal lives, only warmer— and for me, busier as the event calendar ramps up about one thousand percent during the summer months. I know that this will only get harder when they are school age and I must wake up at 5am some frosty January morning to battle my WiFi and the iron wills of other working moms for a few coveted all-day camp slots.

Even if I wasn’t working, the informal village of parents and older siblings who collectively watched over the younger children no longer exists. The number of parents who can afford to truly stay at home has diminished greatly. My own mom’s peace of mind at knowing that wherever we wandered there was likely an adult around to deter us from our craziest kid impulses is no more. The older sibs, not hanging out at home in between shifts lifeguarding or at the mall, are focused on athletics or other activities which have only crept further into the summer months. Put simply: we can’t expect the kids to be home when no one else is. The crucial ingredient of a 90s summer— lots of other children running around unscheduled and wild, with plenty of adults nearby— is a relic. In 2025, deciding that your family will cosplay 1995 is more about curating an intentional vibe (more work) than recreating what my 90s mom was actually doing: what was most accessible and workable for her, without a second thought (less).

Looking back, I have fond memories of these summers not necessarily because they were superior, but be cause I was a child, free of major responsibilities and surrounded by friends. This looks different now, but I have no major concerns that my kids are worse for wear if their summer ice cream truck is sno-cone truck day at daycare versus one they chase down the street. As their mom, however, I am a lot more stressed out than I need to be not only because of the insane misalignment between childcare schedules and work (a system that will inevitably force a reckoning sooner than later) but because society expects me to do both. I need to be an accomplished career woman and provider and also give my kids a magical summer that defies every aspect of our 2025 infrastructure. I need to give my kids enrichment opportunities, but not too much because that will rob them of spontaneity. I need to give my kids the independence to wander, but not so much that a neighbor calls the police to inquire about who, exactly, is responsible for these children. We need to teach our kids to code to fight the bogeyman of “summer learning loss,” but we also need to give them 1,000 Hours Outside.

It isn’t lost on me that, back in the unstructured days of neighborhood wandering, the panic of the day was that children needed more enrichment during the summer to ensure they didn’t forget what they learned at school. This push-pull of encouraging parents to do more, more, more, culminating in a bait and switch where we are simultaneously admonished for doing too much is interesting to me not only because it’s crazy-making. It illustrates the fundamental tension of modern parenting. We understand that the standards we’ve set for ourselves are unrealistic given the background conditions. We are working more than ever, less likely to live near family or friends, to have retired and energetic grandparents or affordable teenage babysitters, and more likely to experience a public where children are distinctly unwelcome. It’s clear that without fundamental, structural changes we can’t do much other than hand wring and write thinkpieces teasing at a “mystery” that has absolutely been solved, over and over again. That is: parents and kids can only thrive when we aren’t in a mode of constant scarcity (not enough hours, not enough childcare, not enough wages, not enough job security, not enough community because, ironically, everyone else also has not enough). As a result, we continuously swing the “doing too much/too little” pendulum back and forth trying to find an equilibrium that vanished well before MTV stopped playing music. We are stressed not because of what our summers look like but because summer hasn’t changed even though our lives have changed so much. It really is an Emperor Has No Clothes situation.

I can’t snap my fingers and make it the 90s again, but I can give my kids a real 90s summer. Like my parents, I can decide that I am only going to do what I can do with the hours, finances, and kids in front of me. Sometimes, by necessity, that’s more and sometimes it’s less. While I will make a point to be the maximum amount of flexible when people in my orbit are battling impossible summer childcare schedules, I refuse to imbue summer with any kind of special power. I’m not going to make it an elaborate set piece instead of just a season. The truth is that we don’t need to curate a specific experience just because the temperatures outside are climbing. We can even accept that as times change, it’s okay for our kids to someday be nostalgic for streaming the Minecraft movie instead of going to Blockbuster video (RIP to the unique carpet smell). Ultimately, the pressure is off: childhood is fun because it’s childhood, not because we spent it at the pool versus the YMCA day camp. The most 90s thing I’m doing this summer is refusing to measure any absurd KPIs to determine if my kids are bored or scheduled enough. I might just log off a little early this Friday and, courtesy of day camp watching the kids, pop open a frosty Diet Coke and read People magazine.

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