What summer holidays used to look like (and why it matters that they don't now)

Six and a half weeks. That is the average length of the UK summer holiday. In the US it is often around twelve weeks.

For a child, this is the longest unstructured stretch of the year. For the parents responsible for filling it, it is, in most modern households, the single most-anticipated source of low-grade dread.

The argument of this short piece is that the summer holiday, despite being the most-feared “I'm bored” period of the year, is also the most developmentally important one. Both things are true at once. What follows is the research case, and a small practical orientation for how to spend the holiday with somewhat less dread and somewhat more of the cognitive benefit that long unstructured periods used to provide.

How summer used to look

The longitudinal data on what children actually did with their time during the late twentieth century is not perfect, but it exists. The cleanest source is the 2001 Hofferth and Sandberg study at the University of Michigan, which compared time-use diaries from 1981 and 1997.^[1]

The headline finding: in just sixteen years, children's discretionary free time decreased by approximately 12 hours per week. The decrease was driven by more time in school, more structured extracurricular activities, more time in front of screens, and a significant decrease in unsupervised outdoor play. The decline in unsupervised outdoor play specifically — what the time-use literature calls “free-range” play — has continued steadily since.^[4]

By the Common Sense Media Census of 2021, the average American 8-to-12-year-old was spending 5 hours 33 minutes per day on screen-based entertainment, before any school or homework.^[2] UK figures from Ofcom are comparable.

A child whose summer day contained five hours of screens, two hours of meals and transitions, and ten hours of sleep has, by simple arithmetic, only seven waking hours left for anything else. Most of those hours, in modern children's lives, are also structured: camps, lessons, planned activities. The unstructured boredom-shaped windows that used to make up the bulk of summer have largely closed.

Why the unstructured time mattered

The developmental psychologist Peter Gray at Boston College, in his 2013 book Free to Learn, makes the most-cited contemporary case for what the lost time was doing.^[3]

Gray's argument, distilled: unstructured, self-directed free play — the kind that grows naturally out of bored time — is one of the central developmental experiences of childhood. It builds self-regulation. It builds problem-solving. It builds social negotiation, in the messy way that organising a game with three other children requires. It builds the felt sense of being in charge of one's own time, which Gray argues is one of the most important predictors of adult well-being.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, in a 2007 position paper written by Kenneth Ginsburg, came to a similar conclusion.^[5] Play, the paper argued, is so central to healthy child development that the modern trend of overscheduling children at the expense of unstructured play should be considered a clinical concern. Almost two decades on, that trend has not reversed.

The summer holiday is, in this framework, a developmental gift. It is the only period in the year long enough to allow the kind of self-directed play and bored-time-resolution that requires consecutive days of unstructured time to take hold. The first two or three days of the holiday are spent decompressing from school. By day five or six, most children begin to invent. By the end of the second week, the self-directed activity has acquired its own momentum.

That momentum is what we are talking about when we say the summer holiday used to do its work.

What changed

The combination of two trends has substantially closed the summer-holiday-as-development window.

The first is structure. Holiday camps, lessons, and organised activities have, in the last twenty years, expanded to fill many summers, often at considerable expense to families. The motivation is honest and varied: working parents needing childcare, parents wanting their child to have a “good” summer, social pressure not to be the family whose child “did nothing.” The result, in the time-use data, is that the unstructured portion of the holiday is now often a few hours at most.

The second is the screen. In households where unstructured time does exist, the default activity into which it collapses, for most children, is screens. This is not a moral failing. It is the predictable outcome of having engineered the smartphone and the algorithmic feed to be the most rewarding default option in a child's environment.

The point of the argument is not that camps are bad or that screens are evil. The point is that a summer made up entirely of camps and screens looks very different, developmentally, from a summer with substantial unstructured boredom-resolution. The latter is what the research suggests is in deficit.

What to do, practically

There is no perfect summer. Working parents need childcare. Some children genuinely benefit from a particular kind of structured activity. Camp will, for many families, remain a necessary part of the picture. None of this changes.

What can change, in most households, is the proportion. A summer that contains, say, three weeks of camps and three weeks of mostly unstructured time is dramatically more developmentally rich than a summer that contains six weeks of camps. A day with a structured activity in the morning and unstructured time in the afternoon is dramatically more developmentally rich than a day in which the unstructured afternoon defaults to a screen.

A small practical sketch:

• Build in unstructured days deliberately. Not “free time the child fills with screens,” but blocked days on the calendar marked as days when the structured activities are paused.
• Set a screen budget at the start of the holiday and tell the child what it is. Most family-tech literature suggests something in the range of one to two hours per day is workable. Whatever it is, the budget itself is what stops the default-collapse-to-screens.
• Be in the house, but not be the entertainment. The presence of an unhurried adult who isn't directing the child's activity is, in the research, one of the strongest enablers of self-directed play.
• Let the first three days of the holiday be the hardest, then stop dreading them. Almost every household reports a similar pattern: days 1 to 3 of any unstructured stretch are when the “I'm bored” chorus peaks. By day 7, the chorus is substantially quieter. By day 14, the children are inventing.

If you would like the small, dedicated practical pack the studio publishes for exactly this — a parent's manifesto grounded in the research above, plus 30 open-ended prompt cards for the kid and 30 daily log pages — it is the Summer Boredom Manifesto, in the Children's Collection. £7. Designed to be lived with for the whole holiday.

The wider argument, if you would like to read it: anomalymellow.com/why-boredom-for-kids, where the full research backing for the Children's Collection is laid out with twelve citations.

The summer is long, on purpose. It always was.