Summer without kids is like bread without yeast

We've forgotten the point of everything

Summer on a Seattle ferry

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My family and I just wrapped up a big road trip that took us in a loop across seven states and much of the West. Technically the purpose of the trip was to visit a place called Fort Worden, a couple of hours west of Seattle, but we also visited memorable locales in a variety of other places along the way. And although long road trips with small kids can be challenging at times, it was a delight to watch my kids marvel at waterfalls, explore old World War II battlements with their cousins, and cower as we drove through the middle of a giant redwood.

I mostly tried to stay offline during this trip (sorry for not yet replying to all the comments on my last post, I’ll get to them) but at one point while scrolling late at night I came across a piece from Vox provocatively titled “The case against summer.” Because I was in the middle of a pleasant summer trip, I was intrigued.

The piece is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek lament about summer not living up to the hype. It’s hot, the food is mediocre, and most adults just work through the season anyway. What. A. Bummer. The piece attempts (with mixed results) to strike a humorous tone, but seems to be making a sincere argument that summer is overrated.

Here’s the problem with this argument though: Summer may indeed be overrated if you’re an unencumbered adult or a media yuppie in New York. But summer as it’s currently conceived is not designed for adults. It’s for kids. It only makes sense as a distinct part of the year — the best part, if you ask me — if you have or are close to children.

Again, I know this anti-summer Vox piece was meant to be lighthearted. But it also seems to epitomize the way we’ve largely forgotten as a society how kids have traditionally been a key part of life’s basic rhythms. Removing that critical component from summer vacation, or holidays, or (as I’ve previously written) weddings, or anything else is like making bread without yeast. It’s just flat.

That summer is about kids seems fairly self evident to me, but I’ll take a moment to elaborate. Obviously, kids are out of school, which is why many people who are fortunate enough to take vacations do them in the summer. But also, the warmer weather means greater freedom. I spent my summers as a kid riding my bike around town. When I got a little older, I bought a season pass to the local water park. As a teenager I had summer jobs, which weren’t as fun as the water park but did break up the year and offer a reprieve from relentless academic and extracurricular commitments. I went to Boy Scout camps in the summer and treks through the Sierras. Upon reflection, most of my fondest memories from my first 18 years come from the summer.

It certainly would be nice if adults all got three months off from work so that these experiences could continue¹.

But even though that’s not going to happen, I’ve discovered that there is tremendous pleasure to be had watching my kids experience these things. And though I may still be working most of the time, chasing my kids with a Super Soaker or helping them learn to ride a bike are among my fondest memories as an adult. Obviously everyone’s experiences are different, but the point is simply that the best summertime experiences are kid experiences, and that’s true whether you’re an actual kid or just an adult who gets fleeting access to the kid world.

In any case, the point here isn’t really to make a pro-summer argument. Rather, it’s to highlight anti-summer-ism as a symptom of our collective forgetting that family has long been accepted as the central part of life. When you dislodge family from the equation, many rewarding experiences disappear as well.

That forgetting extends to other parts of the year as well, for example in the form of increasingly adult-oriented celebrations of holidays such as Christmas and Halloween. That isn’t to say that adults shouldn’t celebrate holidays in adult ways. But it is to suggest that experiencing, say, Christmas for many years with no kids around at all becomes more and more boring — as I learned during the decade and a half of my adulthood when I didn’t have many kids in my life. During that time, I gradually became mostly indifferent to most holidays.

Sometimes this forgetting also isn’t just about time and rhythm. There’s a popular meme that involves people posting pictures online of public places from the 1980s and the present to show how they’ve changed. One of the most common forms of this meme are side-by-side pictures of McDonalds, with the 80s version being fun and fanciful, while the current version is sterile and slightly dystopian.

I understand that the 80s version of these pictures is slightly unhinged, but which picture looks like a place that welcomes kids? I would argue that McDonalds, of all places, was never supposed to be “cool,” and that the kid-friendly version is truer to what McDonalds is supposed to be. I ate at a McDonalds on my recent road trip that looked like the bottom picture, and it’s the aesthetic equivalent of meeting a Dementor (we’ve been reading Harry Potter on this road trip).

In any case, what’s really interesting about these pictures is that they’re almost universally posted to lament what was lost. No one, whether they have kids or not, seems to prefer the sterile-dystopian version of McDonalds to the fun kid-friendly one. Some of that is probably simple nostalgia, but it also perfectly captures what happens when the kid world is jettisoned. You’re left with bland subway tile and a vibe that’s halfway between Starbucks and a gas station. Indeed, those side-by-side McDonalds pictures are an effective visualization of the pro and anti-summer arguments. No wonder some people hate summer when their experience of the season is the metaphorical equivalent of a sterile-dystopian 2020s McDonalds².

The point here is that some things are meant to be experienced cross-generationally. Holidays, summer, McDonalds and, more broadly, life itself. Somehow, we’ve forgotten that that’s kind of the point of everything. Summer, and the world generally, aren’t designed purely for adult pleasure-seeking. They’re also meant to include kids.

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1. Some people of course go into school teaching just so they can continue to have their summers off.

2. I’m sure some people do prefer the modern McDonalds look, but I’ve never seen anyone post this side by side picture to make any other point than that we’ve regressed.