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As a millennium, I had my fair part of the summers of the 90s. I reduned my bicycle, I read, I spent a lot of time doing anything. My house friends like to tell the story of the moment they came to my house without prior notice and I was watching a wall (it was thought).
Now, as a father, I have been very interested in speech about whether it is possible for children to have a “summer of 90” in 2025. This year, some parents opt for less camps and activities in favor of more outdated or “broken children.”
On the one hand, it sounds good! I liked my summers as a child, and I would love to give my children more unstructured game time to help them develop their independence and self -sufficiency (and save money and time registering for the summer camp).
On the other hand, what exactly do they go with that unstructured time? Like most parents today, full -time work, and Althegh my work has some flexibility, I can not always be unexpected to supervise the potion, the search for monsters or any of the other disorderly leisure activities of my children. Nor can I let them use to defend themselves: the rules have changed to make the children out to play until the street lamps are more widespread than it used to be, although these changes began before the 90s. The increase in smartphones and tablets has also transformed the inactivity time forever; Like Kathryn Jezer-Morton asks in the cut, “Is it really possible to have a summer of the 90s when there are YouTube shorts?”
After talking with experts and children about phones and free time, I can tell you that the short answer to this question is no. But the long answer is more complicated and a little more reassuring. Yes, today’s children reach their devices a lot. But special as they age, they know how to leave them. And listening to them about their lives made me rethink how my summers of the 90s really looked and what I want for my children.
Children’s free time is different now
Parents do not imagine the differences between the 90s and today, Brinleight Murphy-Reuter, program administrator in the Digital Welfare Laboratory at the Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. On the one hand, children only have less inactivity time than they used to do: they are involved in more activities outside the school, since parents try to prepare them for an increasingly competitive university application process. They are also heavier than in decades, thanks to concerns about child kidnapping and other security problems that were the TEC in the 80s and continues today.
Free time also looks different. “If you return to the 80s or early 90s, the most precious artifact that children possessed was a bicycle,” Ruslan Slutsky, a professor of education at the University of Toledo who studies plays. Today, “the bicycle has been replaced by a cell phone.”
The average child receives a phone at the age of 10, said Murphy-Reuter. The use of tablets begins even before, with more than half of the children who obtain their own device at 4 years. If children are at home and are not involved in some type of structured activity, they are likely to “be in a digital device child,” Slutsky said.
It is not how it is thought that all millennials had idyllic summers and without a screen of my best memories of July that involve Rocko’s modern lifeFor example. But children’s screen time is qualitatively different now.
According to a medium sense report published in 2025, 35 percent of the visualization for children up to 8 years was full length television programs, while 32 percent were on platforms such as YouTube. The sixteen percent were short videos like Tiktoks, Instagram reels or YouTube shorts. Only 6 percent of children’s visualization was live television, which honestly seems high (I’m not sure my children have seen a live television broadcast).
It is not completely clear that YouTube is worse for children than past fashionable television, but it can certainly feel worse. As Jezer-Morton says, “Potted Kid in the 90s was Nintendo and MTV; today’s version has a pending engineering during the maximum time in the application that happened.”
It is undeniably true that in the 90s, sometimes you were left without things to see and be forced to go out or call a friend. Transmission means that for the generation of my children, there are Always More television.
And the ubiquity of phones in the lives of children and adults has hindered the application of screen time. “It’s hard to take away something from what they have become so dependent,” said Slutsky.
Older children can be remarkably intelligent about their screen time
The good news is that much of what children do on their devices are not really watching YouTube, it is games. Children in the common sense survey spent 60 percent of their screen time playing, and only 26 percent watching television or video applications.
Games can have many benefits for children, experts say. “Video games can support the construction and resistance of relationships” and “can help develop complex and critical thinking skills,” said Murphy-Reuter. Some research has found that educational media are more useful for children that is interactive, which makes an iPad better than a TV under certain circumstances, according to psychologist Jacqueline Nesi.
“The fact that it is on a screen does not mean that it is not yet to meet the same objectives as the unstructured game used to meet,” Murphy-Reuter told me. “I could be fulfilling in a new way.”
Meanwhile, children, especially older adolescents, are really able to leave their phones. Akshaya, 18, one of the hosts of the podcast Behind the screens“ He told me that he would pass his leg by spending his summer meeting with friends and playing pickleball. “I spend many of my days out outside,” he said.
His Cohost Tanisha, also 18 years old and a last year student, said she and her friends had a leg “trying to spend the longest Irl time as we can while we are still together this summer.” She, Tanisha and her other Cohost Joanne, also 18, have been enjoying unstructured summers for years, thought they had internships last summer, none of them has been in the camp since primary school.
Joanne cares that the ubiquity of short videos on his phone has affected his attention capacity. “I feel it is easy to simply children or leave, or stop paying when someone speaks,” he said.
At the same time, she and her cohostts have all the tasks steps to reduce the use of their own device. Tanisha eliminated the application season of the Instagram University. Akshaya put the inactivity time restrictions on his phone after noticing how often he was in him. “In my free time, if I ever feel that I am bloody, as if I had a leg on social networks for too long, it usually try to establish a specific time when I will leave my phone,” he said.
In general, 47 percent of children have used tools or applications to manage their own telephone use, Murphy-Routherer told me.
The feeling I got from talking to Tanisha, Joanne and Akshaya, and that I have interviews with adolescents and experts during the last year, is that adolescents can be quite sophisticated with phones. They know, as we do, that devices can make you feel disgusting and steal your day, and take measures to mitigate those effects, without getting rid of devices completely.
Children “are really in this digital space,” said Murphy-Reuter. And many of them are experts in navigating that space, sometimes more experts than adults who later entered it in life.
Everything said, Tanisha, Joanne and Akshaya are 18 years old, and talking to them made me realize that the “wild summer”, at least of the variety without supervision, can be easier to achieve for older children. I can’t imagine letting my 7 -year -old “rot” this summer. Yes, he would want to see too much Fall in gravityBut I would also want to talk to me and play with me, normal things for children who are not very compatible with adults who do the job.
Certainly, it is possible that children are more self -sufficient capable of dealing with a simulated game or outdoor mischief for long periods of time before they had devices. But I’m not sure how much more.
While I wrote this story, I realized that lazy, bicycle and walls of my youth, all toks in high school. Before that, I went to the camp.
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A quick programming note: I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, so you will have your news next week. You will get a summer edition of this bulletin on Thursday, July 17, so be attentive. And if there is something that species me to cover when I return, send me a line to Anna.north@vox.com!