The Summer Slide is Bullshit

Brains need more than one thing to develop.

My kid had a tough year in math class, so we sucked it up and got them a neurodivergent-friendly tutor. It was expensive. We paid $300 per month for one session a week for most of the school year - the company locked us into a six-month contract, which I had to make sure didn’t get re-upped since I didn’t want to spend the summer paying them $300 a month for my kid to not do math.

I couldn’t cancel online - I had to set up a call with a lovely lady who spent fifteen minutes trying to upsell me on continuing over the summer. This was just her job, and she was working from a script provided by the company. However, the summer slide fearmongering was just stupid.

I know there are lots of data about how kids “lose” learning over the summer. This has only gotten more hysterical since Covid and the perception that kids “lost” a year of learning/development/existence. It’s bullshit.

Kids don’t stop developing.

Unless your kid is seriously neglected, food insecure, or abused, they will continue to develop during the summer months, whether going to camp, playing video games, biking around the neighborhood, or sleeping until noon. Brains need downtime to develop. Brains are not computers, and even computers overheat. During quarantine, my kid learned how to play a bunch of games with friends collaboratively, games that developed communication, strategy, and pattern recognition. They improved their reading by playing games that had major text components. They learned about the world around them and continued growing into their identity.

These same things happen during the summer, but happily now with more outdoors and face-to-face interaction. That said, just as I spent hours on the phone with my friends when I was 13, my kid will Facetime for hours with friends while watching videos or playing games, or doing art. ALL OF THIS IS DEVELOPMENT.

Development isn’t just what you can track with a poorly designed multiple-choice test. (Those tests are heavily biased towards neurotypical, affluent, white kids.) Development is kids’ brains specializing through neural pruning, their bodies integrating the effects of puberty, their growing awareness of the world in which they live, and their strengthening bonds with their peers.

Development happens whether or not you want it to, and you can mostly only fuck it up. We have this dated, disproven idea that kids must be programmed, molded, and shaped into people. As parents and educators, particularly of adolescents, it’s our job to give them the tools they need, support them, and mostly stay out of the way—not try to control everything they watch, eat, read, and do.

Next week my kid is going to run around in the woods with a bunch of other kids pretending to be demigods. Then they’re going to sleep for a week. It’s all good.

So if my kid needs to review a few math concepts in the fall, I’ll support them with whatever they need. But I’m not micromanaging their summer out of fear that everything they learned will magically fall out of their head. They’re too busy learning new skills, new ways of relating and discovering new interests and talents. Let them be.