Are you giving your kids a 90s summer?
As the school holidays begin, parents tend to behave in one of two ways. The first is to pray, not to God or the universe, but to time itself, begging it for some leniency, a bit of give. Please time, this year please stretch and fold around our external pressures and internal needs. You will recognise these parents by their blank white eyes and empty pockets, and skin that ripples then turns grey across the long month of August.
The second type of parent (I say parent, I’m being coy, of course, we’re talking about mothers here) runs at the summer as if she’s in a sanitary-pad commercial or attacking a bear. She has plans, schedules, craft materials, hope. The holidays for her are an opportunity for self-discovery and existential relaxation, for resetting the mind and reclaiming the soul, even during fractured workdays and snippy emails from one’s boss, and meetings held on Zoom in rainy playgrounds, which she assures herself she will one day look back upon and merrily laugh like hahaha.
It’s the second type of parent that, if social media and parenting websites are to believe, is preparing to give their children “a 90s summer”. A Canadian writer explains: “I was inspired to give my son a taste of the kind of summers I had as a kid growing up in the 90s… riding bikes, sidewalk chalk, making daisy chains and friendship bracelets, running through the sprinkler and existing on a diet of watermelon.” Sunlit videos online share similar plans and aesthetics: den-building, mud, ice-cream dripping on to tiny thumbs.
It’s a nice idea, isn’t it, partly as a response to the relentless activities many modern families attempt to cram their children’s days with, filling them up expertly as if a box from the salad bar (base of grains, pressed down firmly, layered with carrot, leaves, make a well in the middle for your protein, hold the lid down with your thumb at the till), and partly because, in theory, anybody can do it. But even as I prepare to face down six weeks of a summer with no defined shape and only scattered nods towards childcare, I am sorely aware of the many dangers of succumbing to nostalgia.
My first thought, as I contemplated the idea of setting my children free in a 90s summer was that surely I’d be arrested. By the time my own 90s summers arrived, when I was a similar age to my daughter today, I had been walking to school by myself for years. If she did similar, popped out on her bike perhaps, to the park to make daisy chains alone, social services would be alerted. And much as I love the idea of banning all devices in favour of the children playing a game where, for eg, they see how many flies they can catch in their mouth, the crucial difference between 90s kids and those of today is that today’s kids know the internet exists.
Putting screens away for an hour does not turn back time. These children know the sweet caress of a warm iPad, the untold luxury of any programme you want to watch any time you want to watch it. The lure of a screen, though, was always there. In the 90s, we watched Neighbours at 5.35pm, Cheers and Roseanne on Friday evenings, Round the Twist on, I believe Thursday afternoons – the telly controlled us, we did not control the telly. In the holidays, most of our 90s summers were spent watching TV or fighting about watching TV. Rather than improving ourselves with wild outdoorsy fun, we frittered the days away bickering and yearning and moaning and waiting. Happy slapping was a thing.
I have blocked out, I think, most of the tantrums I wasted on my mother over those long 90s summers, but she was there, all the time, calmly preparing our pasta, our banana-flavoured medicines as I rallied valiantly against youth. In the 90s, 43% of mothers with young children worked – by 2022 that figure had climbed to 75%. Which, of course, is fantastic in almost every way, but also means that these six-week holidays inevitably require more organisation, absence, guilt and favours than they did 30 years ago. The appeal of giving your child a 90s summer is grounded in the embrace of benign neglect, but for parents who are on the clock from nine to five, that summer quickly looks simply like, well, normal old-fashioned neglect – the kind that gets your job lost and custody revoked.
As well as the removal of screens and enthusiasm for bike rides, this summer trend invites parents to lean into their children’s boredom, inviting an inevitable standoff in dry parks as September approaches. I can still remember the grating itch of childhood boredom, a cross between a hangover and a hunger; a void that builds inside you until you must scream, faint or explode, crawling on bloody knees through the dank fury of your own thoughts. Revisiting that livid boredom of a 90s summer, I tried to work out what it was reminding me of in adulthood, and then I realised: you can achieve the exact same feeling navigating parenting advice. Retro!
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman