Summertime isn’t free time for kids anymore

Mid-June means one thing if you’re a child. Freedom.

School’s almost out. Yippee, hurray, can’t wait.

Hey, you’re not cheering. Oh, I know why. You’re not a child, right?

You’re a mom. Or a dad. Or the neighbor of a mom or dad. You’re a grown-up, anyway. And you know exactly wha

t all that freedom for kids can mean. Trouble.

Short of that, without the school routine, summer stretches out like a long, sleepy afternoon. Some children get bored and cranky. Others get lazy, and summertime turns into screen time, with way too many hours spent watching TV or sitting at a computer. And lots of kids get lonely without seeing school friends.

I know, our wonderful local libraries keep children busy with summer reading programs. The YMCA of Snohomish County, Boys & Girls Clubs of Snohomish County, Camp Fire, area churches and other groups offer overnight camping, day camps and other opportunities.

Families patch together summers, with a week or two — more if you’re lucky — of vacation together, plus camps, baby-sitters, the kindness of relatives and neighbors, and crossed fingers.

What keeps a 6-year-old safe, happy and occupied all summer may not work for a 12-year-old. With a son who’ll soon turn 13, I’m one of many parents in Snohomish County struggling to schedule a summer for him that’s worthy of the word — summer.

I’m old enough to remember what summer used to mean. It wasn’t trouble. It really was freedom.

My mother didn’t work outside the home. The summer before I turned 13, I spent many nights sleeping over at a friend’s house. We camped out in her tree house, the same tree house from which she had jumped and broken a leg when she was in fifth grade.

Here’s how spoiled I was: My parents rented a cabin on a lake in northern Idaho for three or four weeks every summer.

July, when I was a kid, was simply paradise. We would swim and play on the beach all day, eat dinner outside and flop into bed at night on the cabin’s screened sleeping porch. I once went an entire July without wearing shoes.

At the lake we were allowed to run wild, in the best sense of that phrase. All it meant was walking in the woods, skipping rocks in the lake, catching perch with our cheap fishing poles, buying penny candy from a little store next to the gas dock, everything summer used to mean.

When I wasn’t in Idaho, I spent my childhood summer days riding my bike to Spokane’s Comstock Park pool. I was on the park’s swim team, but mostly I went to hang out and see friends. Our moms didn’t expect us home till dinner.

We had that much freedom by the time we were 9 or 10.

I still go to an Idaho lake every summer. The cabin rental is for a week, not a month. I’m still trying to patch together a plan for the rest of my son’s summer.

Last year, he went to a day camp where some of the kids were five years younger than he was. They went to parks, beaches, the Everett Public Library and the YMCA. To him, the schedule felt a lot like being in school.

If he wasn’t there by 8:30 a.m., he couldn’t go on the outings. And by 5:30 or 6 p.m., he was worn out by long, noisy days with lots of younger children.

Where, in a summer like that, is the time to sit under a tree and daydream? That may be a pastime lost forever, but I know for sure that large portions of my childhood summers were spent doing exactly that — sitting in the shade because our mom didn’t want us in the house, braiding pine needles, thinking about stuff, and drawing pictures on a pencil tablet.

My brother once got a water-ski rope out of our garage, attached it to his bike and pulled me down the street riding a skateboard and holding onto the rope. I still have an inch-long scar on my knee from that stunt. Nobody got in trouble, we just got out the Band-Aids.

Here I am, almost 50 years later, with a calendar and information about day camps, sports camps and overnight camps.

There are brochures on my desk, all sorts of options.

None of them look like summer — as I knew it.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; muhlstein@heraldnet.com.