Summer Child Care Is a Special Kind of Hell

Photo-Illustration: the Cut; Photos Getty Images

Death, taxes, and the yearly panicked scramble for summer child care, these are the only real guarantees in a parent’s life. And here it is, almost July again and I’m thinking, Shit, is school already over? Where are the kids gonna go? Just like I did this time last year. Just like I’ll probably do a year from now. If you have school-age kids then you already know that the patchwork of care that you managed to assemble at the start of the year — the before- and after-school stuff you essentially duct taped together in September — completely falls apart as soon as summer break rolls around.

I remember the first summer that my son had off from school. I logged on to the city’s YMCA portal on the last day of kindergarten thinking I could get some day-camp spots for him for the weeks after. Ha! What a fool I was then. After asking around, I learned that, actually, you have to sign up for those in January or February, waking up at 5 a.m. to snag even the most basic of spots while praying you might get a week here or there at something slightly more desirable, a camp your kid might even enjoy.

Not that I enjoy this arrangement either. There’s nothing I love more than an unstructured, slow summer, one where the biggest plan of the day is a long-anticipated ice cream or a dip in a cold lake. If it were entirely up to me, we’d all be spending our days drifting from the pool to the playground and back. But with two young kids and a baby, that lack of structure feels like a trap once the heat hits, because the kids want to be moving and playing and doing while I, unfortunately, have to be working. Nothing makes it more glaringly obvious that capitalism is at odds with kids like summer vacation.

That first summer with no care I was mostly freelancing and my daughter was in full-time day care, so I was able to spend most of my days hauling my son from the splash pad to the wading pool to whatever free activity we could find. We made pinch pots at the contemporary art gallery and bookmarks at the library. I squeezed in work where I could and it was grueling trying to manage all those deadlines, but for the most part we made it through. The next summer I got on it early and registered my son for a slew of the most “affordable” day camps (which still ate up a significant chunk of my earnings) and cobbled together some before-and-after care, too, because I had to be in an office for most of those days. My son hated the camps so every morning he screamed and held on to my leg before I would drive away gutted, reminding myself that I was paying for him to be miserable every day. And that was a good summer because I’d managed to find spots for every week I needed.

When I broached the chaos of summer care on X, the response from parents included words like “mental breakdown,” “overwhelmed crying,” “state of panic,” and “brutal.” Parents said they were already dreading the perpetual scrambling, and one even said more than the stress of her job or housing or her elderly cat, the No. 1 thing causing her to break down was that child care, particularly in the summer, was impossible to find in her city.

All of this is made worse by the fact that there are less and less free places for families to hang out, so even cobbling together something outside the camp chaos feels increasingly impossible. One mom, Olivia, told me she brings her laptop to the community pool so she can work while her kids swim. Another offered that she designed and edited an entire magazine while her kids rode horses at a nearby stable, having to get creative when a colleague heard a horse neighing in the background of a call. Other parents told me about dragging their kids around to work and errands in a pinch over the summer or employing a bored teen to supervise their kids, neither feeling like a great choice.

My husband’s job has a generous parental-leave plan, and when we were trying to figure out the best time for him to take time off to help with our baby who was born in February, we agreed that it would make most sense to do it over the summer because with our daughter heading to kindergarten in the fall, it would be easier and cheaper to focus on spreading out care between us for the older kids.

As much as it would be great to have one parent taking off every summer to hang with the kids, this is obviously not a permanent solution to an ongoing issue. I’ve often thought about starting a workweek co-op with other parents where we could take turns watching each other’s kids while another took a meeting or plowed through some emails. Come July, we could do it from a park or a pool.

It’s obvious we need a summer-care revolution, to nationalize the camps or, I don’t know, offer a form of summer leave from work? Because clearly whatever we’re doing now just doesn’t work. And is anyone even productive at the office in July and August? We’re fooling ourselves about the amount of work that’s really getting done between camp drop-off and pick-up and some radical transparency would greatly benefit everyone. We all need a break to recharge and prepare ourselves for the chaos that the start of a new school year brings. But in the meantime, if anyone’s looking for me, I’ll be taking my Zoom calls by the inflatable pool until September.