Mom Guilt Has a Peak Season, and It's Summer

I used to love summer. Warm sunshine on my face, a good book in my hand, the salt air wind in my face.

Then I had kids.

I should start by saying we live in a beach town, and summer is still superior to pretty much every other season, with the exception of the lead-up to Christmas (for obvious reasons I won't get into here). But working mom guilt in the summer is the pits.

My kids are either watching TV or in camp — half-day, because we don't have the kind of money it takes to send three kids to all-day, all-summer camp. So most days end around 1:30 p.m., and the rest of it is just me, pulled in eighteen directions, doing none of it at 100 percent.

And then Instagram helpfully reminds me that I only get 18 summers with my kids, so I should be crafting them a screen-free, sprinkler-in-the-backyard, "90s analog summer" instead of handing them an iPad so I can finish a work email. Cool. Thanks. Very relaxing content, very normal amount of pressure to put on a random Tuesday afternoon in July.

A 2026 Afterschool Alliance survey found that more than half of families who want their kid in a structured summer program can't get one, and cost is the reason. Meanwhile, the algorithm is busy convincing us that the real failure isn't the childcare gap; it's that we didn't turn off the TV and make homemade popsicles.

My kids won't remember the camp we couldn't afford. They'll (hopefully) just remember that I was there, laptop and all.