What Happened to Capture the Flag?

I also thought back to a conversation I had had with my oldest sister during my last visit when we walked in the snow and talked about why adults had kids in the first place if they didn’t spend a lot of time with them. As a reaction to her frustration towards parents who overscheduled their kids, she had made a preemptive move to rally other parents to boycott early summer camp sign-up, which arrived as a packet in their mailbox in the winter. Since some of her mommy friends had obliged, she proposed they boycott summer camp altogether. “I told them that we should spend the summer with our kids, we could rotate having the group, and then we could each get a day or two all to ourselves.”

When I called my sister to see how her summer camp boycott had fared she said, “I just saw a group of camp kids and I felt so proud having my kids in the car, knowing they would be spending the summer with me.” She told me that when she had asked mothers why they were sending their kids to camp, she usually got the same response. “Most parents told me that they think their kids need a break from them, but then by the end of the conversation, they turned it around and said that they were the ones who actually needed a break from their kids.” It saddened both of us that these parents needed a break when their kids had been in school all year with after school schedules that could put many CEOs to shame.

Back at the Smail family summer camp, my sister knew that she was one of the fortunate moms. She didn’t have to work a full-time job, and had invested her time into her community with many activities involving her kids. “Yeah, my kids are a handful and it’s challenging at times, but I feel it’s my responsibility to parent them as much as I can.”

I asked her if she had anything extraordinary planned during the few months off from school. My niece and nephews had asked to go to their favorite museums in downtown Chicago and use the water taxi that went from Navy Pier around the lake to the museum and other attractions along Lake Michigan. “It’s also okay for my kids to be bored sometimes.” I agreed, because life was filled with states of boredom, and we had to learn how to navigate being with that feeling.