This summer, we cancelled our YMCA memberships.
I want to say that casually, like it wasn't a whole thing. Like I didn't sit with it for longer than I should have, running the mental math on guilt versus sanity, before finally just... doing it.
We're not doing swimming one night, soccer the next, baseball this day. We're not doing the thing where every evening is a scramble to get someone fed and changed and out the door for an activity they stopped caring about six weeks ago. We're not doing the thing where my husband and I look at each other on a Sunday night and realize we haven't had an actual conversation in two weeks because the schedule ate us alive.
This summer, my eldest has baseball twice a week. That's it. We'll have a few camps sprinkled in to break things up. And the rest? The rest is just... time.
Here's the thing nobody really says out loud: the pressure to schedule your kids into oblivion isn't just cultural, it's financial. Summer camps alone — just camps — cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars and they don't even cover all ten weeks OR LUNCH. Add swimming lessons, soccer, baseball, art class, and whatever else you've signed them up for because you panicked in February, and you're looking at a number that makes your eye twitch. The implicit message is that boredom is a parenting failure. That idle kids are somehow your fault. That a good parent fills the calendar.
I'm not a good parent by that definition. And I'm increasingly okay with that.
I'm also someone whose nervous system does not do well with too much on the go. I like a schedule, I need a schedule, but there's a difference between structure and suffocation. When every evening belongs to someone else's activity, there's no margin left. Not for me, not for my marriage, not for the kind of slow, unstructured time that actually lets a family just be together instead of just moving through space in the same direction.
So we opted out. My eldest is thrilled about it, for now. He doesn't yet know that "nothing planned" eventually becomes "I'm bored and somehow this is your fault." But that moment is coming. And when it does, I'm ready.
I made him a chart.
Not a schedule. A chart. A list of everything available to him, because apparently when you're seven, you forget that Lego exists the moment you're not actively playing with it. The dog. The backyard. The books. The art stuff. It's all there. The options are not exactly limited.
What he does with that is up to him.
He can build something. He can read. He can lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling and be dramatically, thoroughly bored. That's allowed too. Boredom is not an emergency. It's not my emergency, anyway.
Because here's what I actually believe, underneath all the guilt and the noise: boredom is where creativity lives. It's where kids figure out who they are when nobody's handing them a script. It's where the weird ideas come from, the made-up games, the afternoon that turns into something nobody planned.
Boredom figures itself out, you just have to leave room for it.
But we are so afraid of boredom! And I get it, a bored kid is loud and underfoot and occasionally insufferable. But a kid who has never had to sit with boredom and come out the other side is a kid who doesn't know how to adapt. And eventually that kid becomes an adult who doesn't either.
This summer, I'm choosing the Tuesday with nothing on it. The one where we figure it out as we go. Where my boys remember that they're actually pretty good at entertaining themselves, and I remember that my job isn't to curate their every waking hour.
It's uncomfortable. It's a little countercultural. And I'm pretty sure it's right.
Talk soon,
Tara
CEO of Chaos & Co.