I suppose that it is just a sign of aging, but lately I have been thinking about some of the changes in our culture that have taken place in my lifetime. When I was growing up, most of the families in our town were single=income families. Mothers stayed at home with children and fathers had jobs that provided sufficient income for the family. Our family was a little different because our mother kept the accounts and did other work in the family business, but her hours were carefully arranged so that she was at home and available whenever we were at home. In the summer that meant that she got up very early to do the bookwork.

Compared to today’s children, our summers were gloriously unstructured. When school got out, we quickly shifted into days of exploring the riverbank, a little fishing, a lot of playing in the water, building tree houses and inventing our own games. I can remember going to the library at least once a week and checking out the maximum number of books that they would loan on a child’s library card. I’d read all of the books and then be back at the library for more.

There were a few structured summer activities in our town. We have Vacation Bible School at our church each summer. It was one week long and I think we usually had a half-day program. It was based on a school model with graded classes. We had opening exercises and then went to our classes. There was a recess and a snack break in the schedule. I don’t remember too much else about it, except that the teachers were all parents of kids in the program. Our mother helped every year.

Some years I played little league baseball. I don’t really remember how often we practiced or how many games we had, but it certainly wasn’t as intense as the youth sporting programs that are common these days. We had a few practices with a couple of coaches. We’d ride our bikes to the practices. Our parents came to the games. It certainly didn’t take up too many hours from our week.

When I got older there were a few summer jobs. I delivered newspapers year round, but that was completed by 7 a.m., so the whole day was available for other activities. For several years, I mowed lawns to earn pocket money. I swept a feed warehouse once a week for a few coins.

What I remember is having free time – lots of free time.

So when I observe children today, what I notice is that they don’t have much free time. They are signed up for lessons and group activities and sports and library programs and dozens of other activities. I know children who attend as many Vacation Bible School programs as their parents can schedule. One little boy was signed up for six different VBS programs one summer. He knew all of the songs, and had experienced the repeat of the same curriculum several times. His parents didn’t have any loyalty to a particular congregation or denomination and he didn’t see much difference between the different churches.

All of the structure, of course, is a reflection of a major shift in the culture. Parents have less time to spend with their children. Although our time was unstructured when I was a child, it was not unsupervised. We didn’t just have the eyes of our mother looking out for us. The eyes of all of the mothers in town were trained to look for trouble. Today, most homes require two incomes and both parents are working full time. That means that a family must have a carefully designed plan of activities to make sure that the children are fully supervised. Families have complex schedules of who is providing rides to which activities. It is common for one parent to drop of a child and another to pick that child up. There are a few families who coordinate their efforts and provide some ride sharing with other families, but when we run programs at the church, the dominant pattern is that each child is picked up by a parent, grandparent or other family member.

The parents look tired. They’ve been running from event to event and activity to activity and somewhere in the midst of all of that running around they are trying to keep a job, manage a home, and take care of their own recreational needs as well.

It is easy to become nostalgic and to say that people need to go back, but that isn’t the way a society works. The system of families needing more income is self-perpetuating. More income means more money to purchase more things and more things create a demand for more money. Our lifestyle when I was a child was pretty modest compared to the lives of most contemporary families. Today’s families have larger homes, more cars, more appliances, more recreational equipment and all of that requires more money. So they work harder and have less time to use all of the things that they are purchasing.

I don’t expect things to change very quickly. There is a movement among educators and parents to advocate for more unstructured time for children. There have been some good studies that demonstrate that natural learning requires less structure and more free time. It isn’t just creative learning that flourishes in unstructured time. Mathematics, music, biology, reading and many other fields of traditional instruction can also take place in unstructured environments. In fact many children learn more quickly and retain what they have learned better when their learning is unstructured. Perhaps, as we learn more of this dynamic there will be more unstructured time for children.

My guess is that it will be carefully planned and scheduled. Unlike the summers of my youth, children will have specific times for “unstructured learning” in “controlled environments.” Time doesn’t go backwards and each generation forges its own way.

Still, there is something very attractive about the unstructured summers of my youth. I wonder if I could find a job where I would only work 9 months each year.

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