Go Ahead And Rot—It’s Good for You

Ah, sweet summertime. Birdsong draws your eyelids in the morning. The midday hum of cicadas. Lights out to a cricket chaconne. Day and night, the air conditioner hums, dispensing sterile cool. Diaphanous sunlight gleans in patches through thin linen curtains. A thick, humid haze gauzing the blue sky. The community pool’s limpid surface, heaving with wriggling, kicking bodies, cries of games and fun fanning outwards. Splash plumes erupting, sprinkling the crowded caldera. Pop songs playing at a notched-up volume, only broken by the familiar jingle of the ice cream truck making its afternoon round.

And, who could forget, the calming voice of Maury Povich urging a hysterical, hot-teared mother to dry her eyes and hush her wailing after three successive men were genetically proven not to be the father of her child. Once the promiscuous quiff has been soothed silent by Maury’s gentle caress, then comes the summer delicacy: Oscar Meyer bologna and Kraft cheese singles betwixt two slices of the finest, factory-sliced Wonder Bread.

Naturally, the latter summertide ritual has expired by time, only briefly existing within America’s golden age between falls: of the Soviet Union and Twin Towers. But the other sun-tanned trappings still hold. Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, as Nat King Cole sang, still have an Edenic hold on youth’s carefree imagination.

But not if the striving madri get their way. According to the New York Times, parents are working themselves into a tizzy trying to sign their kids up for expensive day camps that cost the equivalent of a second mortgage. This furious rat race, which involves precision planning, ample disposable income, and a high-powered modem in order to fill out an online application within seconds of it going live, is a variant of the prep school scramble the well-to-do wrestle with.

America’s premier newspaper has stumbled onto a novel concept being put into practice within all geographies, including major metros, suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and rural areas alike. The idea is a clean break from the success sequence of preparing little Sally for Harvard by placing her in the most elite daycare at the tender age of three months. In fact, it’s the polar opposite of American dynamism. One might even characterize it as *disgusted quiver* European. Worse, it can be defined with a French phrase: laissez-faire.

The Times presents the concept as a question: “What if, some are daring to wonder, my kid does nothing?”

Nothing?! Every parent on God’s green earth would fall to their knees, crying hallelujah heavenward if their little hellions were physically capable of doing “nothing,” even for 30 seconds during waking hours. Kids are never nihil, unless you force-feed them Ritalin to zap their boundless curiosity. What the Times reporter means is that the kids aren’t calendared in for structured activities, with hard demarcations between swim practice, karate club, art class, and playdates.

Which means these summer-freed spuds may have to endure the horror of loping around the house as the sun cooks the yard into a dry beige. They may even encounter the monster we thought was vanquished by the advent of the infinite social media scroll: boredom!

In a bout of pseudo-clinicalism, the Times can’t help but term this horrid state of affairs: “Call it kid rotting, internet parlance for indulgent lounging, or “wild summer.”

Wild?! Throwing your hands up and forcing your child to make his or her own fun during the sweltering season sounds the opposite of unruly. In another age, namely the previous century, it was considered normal. Now, refraining from padding your progeny’s elementary school CV with extracurriculars like pee-wee golf club is seen as deficient parenting. God forbid little Johnny “rot” from not having every hour strictly scripted for his edification.

You’re not a Flanders’ free-range boho if you give your kid a three-month sabbatical from multiplication tables. Nor are you a bad parent. Pascal famously said the hardest thing for a man to do is sit his keister down and ruminate with his swirling thoughts. That applies doubly for anyone under the age of seven, when the urge to remain calm is about as high as the desire to chew soggy broccoli.

Deep, reflective thought can’t come about in a hyperactive environment. The “jumping from stimulus to stimulus,” as academic Elizabeth Corey describes it, distracts from mastering the functional ability of simply shutting the hell up.

(Did that phrase give you hair-raising flashbacks of your angry dad trying to tinker with the toilet while you begged for some triviality? Good. It means you learned a valuable lesson. Now go fetch a flashlight if you don’t want to whizz in the yard tonight.)

Give your tyke and yourself a breather and let the summer rotfest commence without worrying about college applications or career tracks. If all else fails, relinquish the rearing duty to the idiot box, if ony for a few hours. “No one remembers their best day of watching TV” is a false saw. I spent countless clock ticks lazing in front of the boob tube, the sun slowly arcing the sky, the world outside crawling on its axis, cowbirds frittering, cars sputtering, life on its steady path, without a regret.

As the Middle East once again combusts, and ancient faith rivalries ignite in martial conflagration, the prospect of World War III nears. Give the kids a slothful summer, before it’s their last. As the modern Bard warned his young son after a fibula fracture promised a wheelchair-bounded school break: “Don’t worry, boy, when you get a job like me, you’ll miss every summer.”