Long days with nothing to do is the whole point of summer. Turning it into a ‘making memories’ exercise is creepy and controlling
There are a great many things to dislike about modern parenting trends – take your pick from helicopter to snowplow to Fafo – but the least appealing, perhaps, is the temptation present in all of them to treat raising a child like an extended school project.
The latest addition is something called 18 summers, in which clingy parents count down the school holidays they have left with their children before they leave home, pre-grieving the end as they go. There is no quicker way to ruin something than by filtering it through an internet trend, but this one is particularly insidious: an invitation to inject weird notes of anxiety into what might otherwise be an unstudied thing.
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