Before my oldest child started school this past year, I saw kindergarten as something of a finish line. At last, I could cross that childcare line off my list of fixed monthly costs – or at least cut it in half (I still have a couple of years to go with his younger brother). It’s a meaningful amount of money; so much so that I even entertained thoughts of (gasp!) working slightly less and thus needing less childcare for my younger son too, maybe even spending some time with both kids in which I am not panicked by an impending financial crisis.

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And then I discovered summer.



It happened the summer before school started, actually. Preschool had finished, kindergarten hadn’t yet begun, and I realized I had to figure out how I was going to work for the next 10 weeks with an energetic five-year-old bouncing off the walls. Apparently, the moms who had done this before had booked their kids into camp months earlier. Most programs were booked up, leaving two options: the most expensive camps or the ones that only ran from nine to noon. I cobbled together a mix of the two, to the tune of about $6,000 – an unexpected expense that I now had to figure out how to pay for while also having half as many work hours available as usual.



It’s a scenario most working parents I know dread yearly. While kids get excited for summer and stores start advertising the glory of summer vacation as early as April, working parents – especially those without much or any discretionary income – dread it. Not because we don’t want to take time off to take our kids swimming or to the beach, but because we can’t afford to. And so, along with the cost of summer camps and the reduced work hours and all the financial stress, we also get to look forward to yet another layer of guilt heaped on by a culture that thinks parents and especially mothers should be at home with their kids, while at the same time actively working against making that possible for any but a select few.

The school system is set up to suit a particular type of family: white, upper​​ class, nuclear​​ and with one stay-at-home parent

The school system, like so many systems in America, is set up to suit a particular type of family: white, upper class, nuclear and with one stay-at-home parent, or at least a parent whose job is not critical to household income. But that family set-up, these days, represents only about a quarter of American families. The vast majority need all hands on deck to pay basic bills, let alone summer childcare premiums.

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While some parents are able to schedule summer and pay for it, in advance, many cannot. This year, I was booking summer camps in June because I just didn’t have the money to do it sooner. Another friend told me she’s just figuring out how to work around her kid this summer because she doesn’t have the money to pay for camps. For low-income working families, summer is also a time of increased food costs, many of which can’t be shouldered. Every year, when school’s out, millions of American children go hungry. Although various non-profits, including the YMCA and Family Resource Centers throughout the country, pick up the slack when school lunch programs are inactive over the summer, according to the Food Research and Action Center, only one in seven children who needed food assistance last summer received it.



My family is thankfully not in that situation. Still, for us and many other American families, summer is about survival, and the idea of summer “vacation” feels entirely out of reach.