STOP LETTING SUMMER HAPPEN TO YOU

My wife and I recently sat down with a pen and a paper calendar and started mapping out the next five months of our lives. It sounds intense. It kind of is. But after last summer, we’re fully bought in.

Here’s the thing: New York City public school kids have about nine weeks left before the city unleashes its longest season. Summer break runs eleven weeks — from the last day of school all the way to the Thursday after Labor Day. Eleven weeks is a long time. It will either happen to you or you’ll make it happen for you.

We learned that the hard way. In years past, we’d spend most of June and July saying “we should really do something this weekend” and then… not doing anything. Last year we flipped the script, planned ahead, and had what I can only describe as a blowout summer. So we’re doing it again.

Camp is non-negotiable

Both kids are in summer camp for most of the summer. This is a hill I will absolutely die on. I grew up going to camp, then working at camp all the way through college. The independence, the friendships, the being-outside-all-day — there’s nothing like it. Camp is the anchor of our summer, and everything else gets built around it.

Then we fill in the rest

Once camp is on the calendar, we start stacking the weekends. And here’s the thing that sneaks up on you every single year: once you pencil in birthday parties, family obligations, and random pre-scheduled events, you realize you have way fewer free weekends than you thought. It’s a little deflating at first, but it also forces you to prioritize.

This summer we’ve got a July 4th weekend trip with the kids locked in. My son and I are going glamping for a night — just the two of us, which I’m already looking forward to more than I probably should admit. We’ve got a few pool days, a couple of date nights, and a handful of day trips scattered in.

The hard part: the gap

The genuinely nerve-wracking piece of the puzzle is what I think of as The Gap — the stretch between when camp ends in mid-August and when school starts after Labor Day. That’s close to four weeks, and when you have two parents working full time, four unstructured weeks is a logistics problem that doesn’t solve itself.

I don’t want to get too political here, but this one gets me. The NYC DOE and the UFT signed a contract that prohibits school from starting until after Labor Day. I support teachers and I support the union — most of the time. But whoever signed off on that agreement clearly never looked at a calendar with a working parent’s eyes. This gap wasn’t some surprise. It was completely predictable, and families are left holding the bag every single year.

I’m not saying school exists purely as childcare. It doesn’t. But childcare is part of it, and pretending otherwise while leaving already-stretched parents scrambling every August is its own kind of failure.

My kids are the lucky ones. We can find and afford quality options to fill the gap. Their grandparents are involved — some might say overly involved, and I mean that with love. But hundreds, probably thousands, of NYC families don’t have that. They don’t have the flexibility, the budget, or the backup. It takes a village to raise kids, and right now the village is dropping the ball.

We’ve cobbled together our own plan — a few mini camps, some PTO days, grandparent coverage — and it works. But it requires planning well in advance, which is exactly what most families don’t do, and then spend August in full anxiety mode.

We’re not doing that this year. The calendar is on the fridge. The summer is happening on purpose.