‘Kid rotting': why parents are letting their children go wild this summer
Name: Summer kid rotting.
Age: The name is new, but long school summer holidays started spreading in the 1840s, thanks to the US educational reformer Horace Mann.
Appearance: Laidback and a little messy.
What's this Kid Rot then? Does Kid Rock have a brother? No, it's a 2025 way of describing 'letting your kids do nothing in the summer holidays', also known as a 'wild summer'. American parents are fighting back against (or giving up on) expensive, overscheduled summers of camps and activities for their offspring. 'What if, some are daring to wonder, my kid does nothing?' the New York Times reported.
A return to the old ways, huh? When I was young, we were sent out with a penknife, a tin of pipe tobacco and a bottle of dandelion and burdock on the day school broke up. It was strongly suggested we should not return home until 1 September. No, you weren't.
No, OK, we weren't. We spent six weeks bored out of our minds, watching TV and fighting. We'd have loved expensive, overscheduled summers! Well, some US parents are sick of paying through the nose to keep their kids out of trouble – one interviewed by the NYT spent $40,000 (£30,000) on occupying her three children for eight weeks. Inflation is making summer camps unaffordable for many: a survey found 30% of parents go into debt or defer payments. And while the situation isn't as bad in the UK, it's still a struggle for parents: research last year found UK summer childcare costs £1,000 a kid on average.
Ouch! And kids don't even seem to enjoy organised summer stuff much: 'It was a fight every day to get them to go,' one parent told the NYT. 'He cried every single day at drop-off,' a journalist at the Cut said of her son's summer camp.
Maybe a bit of boredom isn't so bad. Being bored is being rebranded as the better option for pushy parents. 'I tell them their kid will be more 'ahead' with their own experimentation,' a US educational consultant reassures her anxious clients.
But 'their experimentation' will be whatever the algorithm decides – kids will be glued to YouTube, won't they? Yes, screen time is a concern, and if the little darlings manage to enable in-app purchases, your iPad could prove a more expensive babysitter than the fanciest camp.
If they're going to be screen rotting all day every day, parents could at least put them to work - give them a bitcoin and a day-trading account and see how much money they can make by September. A bitcoin is currently worth 81 grand – you'd get a lot of fancy summer camps for that.
Do say: 'We're having a wild summer.'
Don't say: 'Yeah, we're going large at Glasto, microdosing in Mykonos, then an ayahuasca retreat in Peru. What are the kids doing? No idea.'
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