Bridging the Summer Care Gap

When the school year ends and summer begins, families across America struggle to do something that may sound deceptively simple: figure out a plan for summer child care. With more parents working full time, and more single parents working double time, balancing the demands of work and life in the summer has become nearly impossible.

This search for summer child care often begins months before kids even finish the school year, and the limited available spots fill early. Families seeking help to finance a summer care plan must fill out piles of paperwork for scholarships, patching together every possible resource they can find. Even then, many families still run the risk of not finding quality care that provides enriching opportunities for their children. On top of that, the current system barely serves the needs of the traditional nuclear family that it centers, so you can imagine the barriers it creates for low-income, geographically isolated, and single-parent families.

To better understand how families search for, piece together, and afford summer child care, I recently spoke with Amanda Lenhart, the deputy director of the Better Life Lab and a parent of four kids, about her research on the Summer Care Gap report and her personal experience with the challenges of summer child care. A lightly condensed and edited transcript of our conversation is below.

You wrote on the Better Life Lab channel on Slate that your family began the search for summer child care during the winter. That must have been something, scrolling through brochures of sunny camp programs while it was snowing outside. What inspired you to turn your experience of struggling to piece together summer child care into a study on the summer scramble?

Well, I was probably most inspired by a piece by Kj Dell’Antonia in the New York Times. Two years ago she wrote about families that can’t afford summer, and I read it before I was really responsible for anybody’s camp. She makes some really great points in that article, especially when she interviews low-income women who really struggle with these issues. Through a grant Google Surveys gave us, we had the opportunity to ask a few short questions on the Google Surveys platform, so we took the opportunity to put together some concrete numbers on the topic. It’s something that people are talking and thinking a lot about but don’t necessarily have a lot of good data to contextualize.

What were some of the findings in the report, and did they reflect your personal experiences or the themes that came up in Kj Dell’Antonia’s article?

Absolutely. They reflected my experience and the experiences of so many of the women and men I’ve talked to who are trying to figure out what to do with their children over the summer. Care is expensive and hard to find. And there are lots of different ways to do it, lots of ways you can pay for it. So many camps arrange their time frames as though parents are infinitely flexible and have six or seven other adults who can go and pick their children up and take care of them during the day.  

The data we collected confirmed a lot of my experiences. But it also confirmed that it’s hard to find camps that are affordable, that have interesting things your children want to do, and that are also close to your home. In addition, you have to find the ones that have aftercare that isn’t terribly expensive. Those types of camps are the ones that everybody—every family in which all available parents work—wants. The spots go very quickly. It’s especially challenging for families to find camps at the end of the summer, when much of the summer care workforce—students and teachers—head back to their main educational responsibilities, meaning there are fewer camps and less aftercare.

For many families—and for families of color in particular—the search for affordable and consistent child care is a constant challenge, with more parents working full time without a stay-at-home partner. What about the summer time makes it even more difficult?

Summer is a challenge because you lack the consistency and structure of the school year. Parents can find care setups that go the duration of the school year and they can budget for that. They can create a work and life schedule that fits that. Care is still hard to find, especially for younger children and infants, but there are many systems and institutions in place.

The summer blows that up.

For summer, you have to go out and find new options and new opportunities when something changes in your circumstance—like your child ages out of a previous camp or your child’s interests change. There’s a lot of additional work that goes into making each summer work.

And it’s particularly acute for low-income families, which often have to do additional paperwork and be especially advanced in their planning because a lot of the scholarships and the inexpensive subsidized camps open up for registration very early in the winter and then immediately fill up. To do all that you have to have a lot of extra time and you have to know that you need to do all of this in advance. These things are really hard for all families but are particularly difficult for families that may be working multiple jobs, might not have English as their first language, or might be new to the country. Families that need these camps the most often struggle with additional hurdles while trying to get access to those kinds of camps and care.

Speaking of people who experience even more difficulty in the summer scramble for care, one thing that struck me was that the women who participated in the survey were more likely to report difficulty finding and affording care than the men who participated. Could you share any insight into why that appears to be the case?

There are a couple of reasons we considered when we saw that in the data. One is that there are more women who are single heads of household. For those women, there’s only one income to pay for care for their children, so camp is harder to afford. The harder it is to afford, the harder it is to find as well. There are simply fewer affordable camps, so you're looking harder for a smaller pool in which more people are competing for the same places.

Similarly, we have documented through time-use studies that women, even in reasonably equitable two-parent households, are the ones who tend to manage the logistics of their children’s lives. As a result, women are the ones who actually know that camps are expensive and have spent a lot of time looking for the camps, so they tend to understand and have done the legwork to go through all the options. In some ways, mothers may just simply have a better sense of the fact that camps are expensive and that finding them and putting together an entire summer of care is really challenging.

Was there anything else in the data that surprised or shocked you?

There are some interesting findings about the ultimate failure of having expensive and scarce summer care for kids: the percentage of families with kids who stay home alone. We don't know how old the kids are in our study. We know that they’re somewhere between four and 14. So it very well may be that this is mostly the 11- to 14-year-olds, but there’s a substantial number of American kids whose parents can't afford to care for them over the summer, who don’t have robust family support, and who, consequently, spend a lot of time by themselves.

So we’ve got some data and insight into what the problem might be. We know families patch together services and have difficulty finding and affording summer care. What can we do to alleviate this problem?

You know, that’s a really good question. Policies that give parents more flexibility in their work schedules would help. Upping the default amount of vacation we give to workers in America would also be a positive step; we have among the lowest amount of mandated vacation offered in the world. And, even when we have it, we don’t take it. Even simply having more time off work that parents could deploy in the summer would allow them to spend more time with their kids and be better able to manage some of these care issues.

Another solution would be to make more of an investment in affordable care for children over the summer. We, as a society, do spend a lot of time, money, and effort during the school year trying to create options and opportunities for families. But we could also try to make summer care more available, more accessible, and more engaging for kids.

Alternatively, we could extend the school year so that parents have a shorter time period for which they need care. The flip-side of a school-year extension—beyond student protests—is less time for schools to have summer construction and less time for teachers to do other kinds of activities, like preparing for the new school year. So there are challenges surrounding longer summer breaks and the deployment of institutional educational resources to cover some of the summer care.

Nevertheless, I think that American society has basically decided that care for young children is something that’s really, for the most part, the responsibility of parents and families to manage on their own, without support from institutions or the government. We could do with a bit of change to that dynamic and begin offering families more support to help them both work and care for their children, in the summer and during the school year.