Side-eyeing the ’90s summer trend

Recently, in the r/workingmoms Subreddit, one poster wondered if she stood alone as an elder millennial who doesn’t have a reverential nostalgia for childhood summers. “Am I the only ’90s kid who didn’t have the classic ‘bike around with a pack of neighborhood kids’ summer??” she asked. She definitely wasn’t, but I could see why she was concerned: Generations of young people have been weaned on visions of summer as a catalyst for transformation. But for the ’90s kids who grew up on them, ’80s movies like “The Goonies,” “Meatballs,” “Stand By Me,” “Dirty Dancing,” “The Lost Boys,” “The Sandlot” and many others made summer seem nothing short of life-changing.

“All my favorite movies were like ‘teen on a family vacation gets caught up in local hijinks’,” says Erika, 40, the rare ’80s baby who identifies as Gen Y. “Summer was supposed to be when sh*t happened.” Not for her. “They weren’t awful,” she says. “They were just boring.” So a year or so back, when she began to notice influencers rhapsodizing about planning a “’90s summer” for their own children, she took notice. “Nostalgia is basically substituting what you feel now for what actually happened then, right? I have no nostalgia for childhood summers because nothing happened.”

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Growing up in a small Southwestern town as an only child, Erika’s summers were neither good nor bad, neither deprived nor indulged. “My mom had to work, so I stayed with my grandparents and watched TV, and when I was 12 or 13, I babysat for a few different families.” Now living in a city that offers a bounty of options for her own kids, Erika feels lucky to be able to patch together summers of everything from community-center ceramics and swimming classes to farm and sports camps. “It’s crazy that I feel lucky to spend a ton of time and money to plan summers for my kids so I can do the work my employer expects. But I want them to have great memories that I didn’t. And now women on Instagram are like, ‘Stop freaking out about what your kids are gonna do this summer and just let them be kids, let them be unscheduled, and just chill.’ And I’m like, babe, I would if I could.”

The prospect of having a ‘90s summer — or a wild summer, a feral summer, or a slow summer — has had social media in a headlock in the last two years, and doesn’t seem to be going away. ’90s summer is about what you’re not doing: Not going on any big trips, not filling all the empty time with activities, not beholden to a routine — as proponents invariably put it, “just letting kids be kids.” In Amil Niazi’s May 2025 column from The Cut, “Why not let your kids have a ‘wild’ summer?” she provides a foundational example, writing, “There is a part of me that really does believe summer is a sacred experience that should remain unscheduled, unplanned, and even a little uneventful.”

Niazi is among a number of women writers in their 40s pushing back against the idea that summers should be filled with enriching activities and structured fun. And there’s nothing wrong with the belief itself. But it’s an ideal that ignores economic reality in favor of rose-tinted nostalgia, and in doing so, sets up mothers who work outside the home — as roughly 75% of mothers with school-age children do — to feel like failures. American summers were built on the blueprint of the single-income nuclear family with a breadwinner dad and stay-at-home mom. The fact that they continue to be speaks volumes about a culture still clinging to an outdated set of gender expectations.

In 52% of two-parent households, both adults work full-time, according to Census Bureau data, and about 25% of children 17 and under live in single-parent households. A 2019 study by the Center for American Progress found that 39% of all workers — and 80% of low-wage workers — get no paid vacation time, and no paid sick leave. Cost and availability are the main barriers to summer planning, and both are significant: Camps generally run by the week, ranging anywhere from $300 to $500 in most urban and suburban areas; they almost always require upfront payment. The low-cost options hosted by Parks and Recreation departments or YMCAs are so sought after that parents approach waking up at 5 a.m. on a February morning to secure a spot for their kids like the Thunderdome. Many parents save their own PTO for the summer, but, according to a 2025 Lending Tree survey, almost two-thirds take on debt each year to pay for summer activities.

Coverage of the slow-summer trend frequently mistakes scheduling summer with the precision of a military campaign for the broader cultural trend of viewing summer break as a time for kids to engage in enriching experiences. “Is it OK for your kids to ‘rot’ all summer?” asked one 2025 New York Times piece, theorizing that summer “has become a parenting Rorschach test”: either a time for unstructured relaxation or “a three-month span for skill-building and résumé-padding.” But much more often, it’s simply a necessity — one that’s erased when lionizing the chill moms and the wild summers.

“I wish we could have a ‘slow summer,’ as so many influencers and online content creators talk about,” wrote Megan McNamee on Today.com. “I wish I could just let my kids sleep in, play outside, read and hang out with me. I wish we could travel or do activities together through the summer months. But I have to work. And that means I have to figure out child care.” Most parents lose sleep over the amount of piecemeal work required to cobble together a summer schedule; very few relish the planning and spreadsheets and carpool rota involved in keeping their kids safe and occupied. We have normalized a form of extractive seasonal capitalism and now act as though it’s accessible to anyone. So it’s not surprising that the calls to bring back the ’90s summer are falling on some hostile ears.

These calls are, one friend says, “my nemesis”: “I hate the framing of summer childcare as some kind of ideological choice instead of a necessity [for] someone to watch your kids while you’re at work. This isn’t about my parenting philosophy!” Most such content, she notes, is “created by freelance writers who don’t have to work a traditional job schedule [but] never say that, or influencers making money from their ‘Tips for a feral summer’ posts where the first tip is basically ‘Don’t have a job.’”

She also admits that it’s hard not to take the bait. “Writers who I like and admire write about these free-range summers as though they’re something achievable to anyone who just buys a brick for their phone. [And] it’s crept into real life. Some of my friends are like, ‘We’re doing a ‘90s summer!’ And I’m like, ‘What you’re doing is keeping your kid home because you can because you don’t have to work.”

Reports from professional mothers in other fields trying to make summer work with more demanding schedules, by contrast, are disheartening: As The 19th reported in a roundup of how mothers are making summer childcare work, and at what cost, “The summer months for school-aged kids are probably one of the best examples of America’s you-figure-it-out attitude toward most things related to caregiving.” We know it doesn’t have to be this way, because in many other countries it isn’t. And perhaps if childcare weren’t considered the exclusive province of mothers, it might not be.

One common thread in content about the joys of a low-stress summer is that fathers are nowhere to be found within it. Which is not to say they aren’t out there — they are — but, as with domestic labor more broadly, a disproportionate share falls to mothers even when they have full-time jobs. (In fact, research consistently finds that even when women are primary breadwinners, or just earn more than their husbands, they do significantly more housework.) Summer planning is an example of the cognitive labor, often called “the mental load,” that is tacit women’s work.

This is why r/workingmoms currently teems with women whose male partners see and hear evidence of their stress and frustration but, like The New York Times, apparently think it’s a choice. “My husband assumes that it’ll just . . . work out,” reads a post on r/workingmoms about their first summer with a pre-K only child. “His solution is basically ‘turn on the TV and have him play in the yard,’ which is obviously not a full-day plan for weeks on end.” This is part of what makes ’90s-summer idealization so pernicious, says Erika. “A dad working from home while a 5-year-old watches TV and plays unsupervised in the yard isn’t great, but he’d get points for effort. The best outcome for a mother who let that happen would be shame.” The worst, we already know, is a lot worse.

American parenthood is plagued with structural problems: A lack of affordable childcare, an increasingly rising standard for “good” parenting, and a cost of living that necessitates more than one income per family. A bigger plague is the widespread unwillingness to pass legislation at the federal level that would mitigate any or all of those. And the biggest plague, the one that never seems to go away, is deep-seated resentment for, often outright hostility to, mothers and the work of parenting. The lawmakers, faith leaders and institutions that have always treated women working outside the home as political statements and not economic prerequisites are starting to get what they want. They might not like the results — but they’ll definitely know who to blame.