Anonymous wrote:OP, you are doing a great job. Go look at the swimming sub forum and the post entitled “summer swim brings out the crazy”, and you will feel A ok that your kids are not participating.

Sweet Fancy Moses. 😱

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How old are all your kids? I thought summer swim team for was older kids. Like 11 and up. Are 7 and 8 year olds doing swim team now?

Yes, we have kids as young as 6 on our team.

Take summer swim with a grain of salt. I looked into it for my oldest child, but once I saw that practice is in the morning (making attending morning camps/doing other activities impossible), I was out. I enjoy bringing my kids to the pool at lunchtime, but I don’t want to do the back-and-forth or have swim be the ONLY thing we do all summer. In short, my kids like swimming, but don’t love it, and a few afternoons at the pool each week is enough.

OP, you are doing a great job. Go look at the swimming sub forum and the post entitled “summer swim brings out the crazy”, and you will feel A ok that your kids are not participating.

Summers are the hardest for working parents. We are running all over for sports, and camps generally start later than school, plus it's very time-consuming to manage the summer camp and activity schedule.

Anonymous wrote:How old are all your kids? I thought summer swim team for was older kids. Like 11 and up. Are 7 and 8 year olds doing swim team now?

Yes, we have kids as young as 6 on our team.

How old are all your kids? I thought summer swim team for was older kids. Like 11 and up. Are 7 and 8 year olds doing swim team now?

Summer swim team seems like such a relic of the 70-90s at this point. Who can make that schedule work without a SAHP, or a very involved grandparent who is in good enough health and lives nearby enough to take the kids every morning? Back when we were kids (assuming most on here are older Millennials or mid range or younger Gen X) many families had a SAHM, lived near grandparents, or mom worked part time/evenings, or worked for the schools and had summers off. Now most families have two big careers and two relatively equal income earners. Our pool is desperate for kids to join the swim team every year and I can see the decrease in size of the team over time vs. the old team pictures from the 90s, even as pool membership has stayed pretty high.

Anonymous wrote:
EVERY mother is a working mother.

Absentee parents have to pay someone else to do the work of caring for the children.

Uh, did you miss the part where those moms were lounging around at the pool?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And they wonder why we're not having children anymore. It seems increasingly children are for the wealthy or the poor.

Good that I skipped middle class. I went from being on medicaid to not having to work for money. Happened so fast.

Oh are you the one who invested and made millions, usually you lurk in the money forum. What ICO do you have for us today ?

PP can always become a teacher. Lots and lots of vacancies and summers off!

Inevitably come June I dream about quitting my job and becoming a SAHM to give my kids the unstructured summer experiences I had. My kids are entering 1st and 4th in the fall, and they've never asked for that experience (and they genuinely love their camps) but it's still something I feel guilty and sad about! My rising 4th grader will be going to sleepaway camp for 2 weeks so I'm hoping she gets some of that classic summer feel. And by next summer she'll at least be able to have more solo downtime at home (can come home on her own instead of aftercare at camp, etc).

We know kids that hate summer swim. The pool is cold. It’s too many meets. It rains a lot. They don’t like early mornings. Etc. It’s not for everyone.

I’m sorry OP. Our kids have never been able to do summer swim for this reason - the practice is at 9am and we just can’t do it logistically with two working parents.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kids are alone at home all summer. They are 11 and 12. After they have showed me photographic evidence that they have done their chores, they can do what they want. They usually go to the pool but sometimes ride bikes or walk to the library. Not much different than my childhood. They each have one summer camp picked out for the same week at the same camp.

Does this mean they have smartphones to send you pics? To each his/her own but That is understandably a dealbreaker for many parents.

What's a deal breaker? Having a smart phone or doing chores? They don't have smart phones. They do share a tablet (it's actually mine). They get an an hour each or two hours total (if they are watching a movie) each day.

This is one of the reasons my kids go to (several weeks of) sleepaway camp. I love being a working parent almost all the time but the tension between kid summer schedule and work summer schedule sucks.