How Summer Camp Became Such a Hot Mess for Parents

On the first day of 2023, a Washington-area parent—let’s call her Sally—woke up to an alarming message in her group chat of local moms: “Happy New Year, all! Now that it’s January, what are you all thinking for summer camps this year?” Sally, whose oldest child is 4, was bewildered. Was Jan. 1 really the time to start thinking about summer camp? Was she already running late? Did she even have a thought about summer camp this year?

For parents like those in Sally’s group chat, summer planning starts in winter, and the logistics can rival a military operation. In early May, one state worker in Portland, Oregon, who preferred to remain nameless, pulled up a spreadsheet to tell me about her kid’s summer: seven camps to cover the nine weeks for which they need child care. Not only was this program painful to map out, she tells me—laboriously chosen for cost, location, what she thought her child would enjoy—it was expensive. At $300 to $400 per week, the summer will cost her about $3,000.