Grand Thoughts: The changing face of summer ‘vacation’

Summers aren’t what they used to be.

As a kid, even though I loved school, I lived for summer vacation.

My father worked a 9-to-5 job as a credit manager and my mom, a professional photo retoucher, worked from home. I never went to day care a day in my life. Until the summer before my senior year in high school, when I worked a part-time job at a fabric store, my summers, other than cheerleading and church camps, were completely open.

Most days were spent with friends at the community pool or at the movies, shopping or riding our bikes. At night, we’d stretch out on quilts and look at stars. We’d play kick the can and spend the night at one another’s houses. There was no pressure.

Sure, I had chores around the house that I willingly did every day, but the majority of my time was spent being a middle-class kid in a middle-class neighborhood making memories to last a lifetime.

Summer vacation wasn’t that much different for my own kids. Though I worked, my parents lived next door and the kids stayed with my mother. Other than daily swim practice and meets or ball games and practices, the kids had a lot of free time.

But that isn’t the case for my grandchildren.

My daughter Kacee, a working mom, has struggled to find day care and camps for the children while she works. Tilleigh, 8, is a competitive swimmer and practices every evening. During the day for the last two weeks, she and her sister, Evie, 5, have been attending theater camp. William, 2, is enrolled in a year-long day care.

The kids are busy. Because they have to be at camp, swim practice and day care early, they have a routine bed time. (I never had a summer bed time.) There’s no nightly game of kick the can or relaxing at night on a blanket to gaze at the stars.

For them, summers, for the most part, with the exception of homework, is not that different from winter, spring or fall – early to bed, early to rise.

I know things are different today than they were when I was a kid. We didn’t have iPhones, iPads, apps, Internet, video games or TV with a thousand channels. We had three TV stations (ABC, NBC, CBS) on our black-and-white TVs (my family got our first color TV when I was 13), radio, record players and board games. And mostly we played outside.

I know it’s unfair to compare yesteryear with today, but I do wish my grandchildren could enjoy the freedom of summer the way I did back in the 1950s and 1960s.

But who knows? They’d probably be bored.

Contact Karen Nazor Hill at khill@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6396.