Is Giving Your Kids a ’90s Summer Even Possible?

Illustration: Hannah Buckman

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In this year’s run-up to summer break, parents have been nostalgic for what TikTok users are calling “’90s summers.” They remember the freedom they had as kids during those years — going to the public pool by themselves, biking around aimlessly, watching daytime TV with elderly relatives, and taking no-frills family road trips. The ’90s have emerged in millennials’ collective imagination as the last time “things were good.” The thinking goes that, back then, summer camp wasn’t an absolute necessity for working parents because unstructured time was socially acceptable. Maybe parents had more flexibility in their schedules (though this seems like revisionist history to me). There’s no question that summer-camp sign-ups didn’t require spreadsheets or stressful registration protocols and that the camps themselves were cheaper and less intense. In our minds, ’90s summers were the last gasp of unsupervised childhood. Nineties-summer nostalgia asks, Why can’t we go back?

It’s an emotionally charged question that invariably brings up defensive accusations of privilege and hoarded opportunity. Who can afford to replicate an era when parents didn’t have to work full time all summer except for a two-week vacation? My fellow parenting writer Amil Niazi wrote about wanting to have a “wild summer” with her kids a few weeks ago, and the very suggestion that such a thing could be possible incited intense debate in the comments.

For some parents, unstructured summers are a form of resistance against optimization culture, which demands that we continuously engage our children in enriching programming. But again, it feels as if there’s more to the story than what’s being told. In the New York Times, Hannah Seligson wrote about “kid rotting,” the rising sentiment among parents that maybe letting kids do nothing is better than a summer stacked with camps. Seligson’s piece gave voice to widespread summer-planning fatigue but also included comments from parents with flexible work and summer-activities budgets over $10K, which sounds awesome but, alas, does not apply to most people.

Seligson’s piece makes glancing mention of what I suspect is the true reason a ’90s summer is so hard to replicate, no matter your budget: Back then, there were no algorithmic feeds, no smartphones, no tablets. The difference-maker, as they say in sports, between today and summer break in the ’90s isn’t that everyone was more laid-back then about unstructured time. It’s that unstructured time itself was possible without being swallowed by the screens’ gaping maws. Even if you’re pretty lenient when it comes to access, the presence of screens introduces a tension and invites a narcotic toxicity that simply didn’t exist for ’90s parents. For those today, managing screen access can be a brutal, unforgiving task. It can really wear you down, man. A whole summer of that? It’s no wonder we’re willing to wake at 5 a.m. on a February Saturday to register our kids for camp.

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. Is it really possible to have a ’90s summer when YouTube Shorts exist?

What even is unstructured time in 2025? I am lucky to live in a neighborhood where kids begin running around by themselves about age 10. Mine don’t have much weekend programming; they tend to link up with their friends and disappear for hours at a time, on walks to the park and basketball court and corner store and back again. It’s pretty ’90s, to be honest, but not completely. I possess an inner alarm that goes off when a certain amount of time has passed without seeing any of the kids: I know all roads eventually lead to screens. The PS5 at our neighbor’s house has gravitational pull. Left to their own devices, the kids will always end up there. This is fine — great, even. But I can’t abide letting the hours unspool unchecked. If no one intervenes, the kids will never leave that room. I know there are plenty of parents out there who may read this and think, Raise your damn kids! Spend time with them! You try competing with screens six hours a day while trying to get some work done, Mary Poppins. Parenting has never required this of anyone before.

The hours we spent playing Nintendo in the ’90s didn’t damage us. But if you’re honest with yourself, you know it’s a lopsided comparison with the games and platforms of today. My kids’ pastime of choice is the PS5, but for many others, especially kids under 10, the default mode that activates when supervision recedes is hours and hours of the stupidest, most personality-eroding shit imaginable on YouTube or TikTok. Sure, we can let our kids rot all summer, but there will be nothing ’90s about it. Kid rotting in the ’90s was Nintendo and MTV; today’s version is slop engineered for maximum in-app time spent. It’s inhumane. It’s a factory where our kids are herded into stanchions like industrial livestock.

So for those who can afford it, camp it is. My kids have seen it all, day-camp-wise. One summer while we worked remotely from my in-laws’ place in rural northern Maine, we sent the kids to the only day camp within driving distance, which was run by the state in the elementary-school gym and was the most affordable camp I’ve ever paid for. It was basically summer day care for the local population with a bit of reading remediation thrown in to try to drag everyone up to their grade level. Every morning, they recited the Pledge of Allegiance and ate Pop-Tarts for their free state-sponsored breakfast. Its rough-and-tumble ’90s vibe kind of appealed to me. My kids hated every minute (except for the Pop-Tarts, which they loved).

When my mother died, in 2021, the very first thing I did was sign my kids up for their first-ever sleepaway camp, knowing my eventual inheritance would pay for it. I had always dreamed of sending my kids to a camp with long canoe trips through the Canadian wilderness led by teenagers armed with little more than a satellite phone and solid first-aid skills. My kids love it, and they’ve gone back every year since. (It costs about $5,500 USD for both of them to go for two weeks, and I start saving for it in October.)

I hadn’t considered this when we first sent them, but I have since learned that Nominingue, the camp my kids attend, is one of a shrinking number that don’t allow phones. “I’ve realized that the time kids are at camp is the longest stretch they’ll have all year without devices,” the owner, Erik Blachford, told me. “For so many kids, so much of their lives are quantified. Their sleep patterns are monitored — everything. This is the only time in their lives they have away from that. We used to take it for granted, but now we take that responsibility really seriously.”

This is where we’re at: A phone-free two weeks is a privilege that costs a lot of money. My mother literally had to die for me to afford Camp Nominingue — who’s going to offer a phone-free camp experience for the kids at the Pledge of Allegiance day camp in Maine?

Leisure is getting more political as income inequality drives us further apart, but it has always been political, even in the ’90s. You have always gotten the care you can afford. My ’90s summers were supervised by Oona, a 16-year-old who was (and is) like an older sister to me and was paid about six bucks an hour for around six hours a day of babysitting, five days a week. “Camp Oona” was what the parents called her completely improvised form of child care –— she was responsible for anywhere between two and four of us at any given time. “I don’t know how good I was at the child-care part,” she recalls now. I remember her boyfriends came over a lot, and sometimes they would barricade us out of her room, so we would camp out behind her door and try to spy. I didn’t care what Oona did. As an older girl, she was fascinating and cool no matter what. Could Camp Oona exist today? Teenagers are harder to book for long-term babysitting gigs than they used to be, so I doubt it. Even if I found someone to be the Oona for my kids, she would probably be on her phone all summer, and that would become my problem too.

The labor of summertime supervision we elide when we talk about giving our kids a ’90s summer is the daily work of redirecting them away from screens. Nineties parents could tell their kids to go out and play. Parents today are in competition with content creators whose entire careers are built on keeping kids engaged. While we’re griping at one another about the privilege to stay home with kids or to afford camp, maybe we should redirect our anger toward our shared enemy: an economy built on extracting shareholder value from our kids’ unsupervised time.