How did you spend the weeks of your summer vacation growing up?

32 comments

1. Playing video games and watching Nickelodeon

2. Playing with other kids in the neighborhood. This was the 60s.

3. I still have 2 more summer vacations but I mostly just relaxed during mine. I’d sit around, play on my DS, go to the park, play with my friends, watch TV, normal things like that. I pretty much treated it like a super extended weekend. A few years ago I asked to go to summer camp so I could experience it before all my summers were over, I had a decent time. Wouldn’t go back but I don’t regret going at all.

4. Watching TV, playing video games, walking around the neighborhood, and countless hours of maladaptive daydreaming.

5. Playing video games and going on scout trips.

6. Summer camps and then accelerated education programs. My parents didn’t believe in idle time. On the positive side, I graduated high school at 17 with an AA degree.

7. When I was a kid, mostly playing with my friends and watching TV. My whole extended family rented a house at the beach for a couple weeks and I’d play with my cousins.

   When I was in high school, as soon as I could drive, I’d be hanging out with my buddies all day. We’d drive around, get into whatever trouble we could, or just kick it from morning til night.

8. Video games, TV, R/C Racing, summer park rec program, riding bikes, exploring the woods, hanging out in my parents bedroom because it had an air conditioner.

9. Chores first, playing video games, and playing basketball during the week. Camping, hiking, and beach trips on the weekends.

10. Mostly on a dirt farm in the desert.

11. We usually drove to and spent a week in Surfside, South Carolina (Myrtle Beach). We all loved it. Interspersed in there would be trips to Europe to visit family or a Caribbean cruise.

    At home we’d be outside almost all day every day. Playing war, exploring, building tree houses. Lots of sports too.

12. I would fly to PA and spend summers with my grandparents, and the rest of my family. It was awesome! Some of my most cherished memories of childhood.

13. Hoo boy time to get nerdaaay

    One summer in middle school, my parents paid for a tutor to teach me and my friend how to program. The year was 1996, and the program was QBasic on DOS. Macros, formulas, and dialogue boxes in Excel 4.0 on Windows 3.1 also made an appearance.

    Another summer was spent overseas in my country of origin. That was hot and boring as fuck.

    Most summers after I turned 13, had a job. Mostly paid cash—babysitting, helping at an office doing clerical work, that kind of thing. As soon I was actually legal to work, I got a real job and became a taxpayer (and, in some cases, a dues-paying union member). Grocery stores, sandwich shops, nepo-baby interning, real interning.

14. Video games, chatting on AOL messenger and ICQ, taping songs from the radio, watching The Price is Right, watching Sportscenter, going to the pool, jerking off, yard work.

15. My parents loved to travel. We did a lot of side trips, camped, tenting, hiking. Spent regularly two weeks with grandparents.

16. Ranching, racing motorcycles, and water skiing

17. Playing outside, biking around the roads in my township, hiking through the woods around my home, hanging out at my friend’s down the hill from me, or playing video games.

18. This was in the 80s and early 90s. Sleeping in, playing with the kids in the neighborhood, riding bikes all over, and doing whatever we wanted until the street lights went on and that was the sign to go home. There was no parental supervision most of the time. Parents were at work and the older kids kind of kept an eye on the younger ones.

19. One week church camp, one week scout camp, usually one to two weeks on a family camping trip. A few other weekend camping trips with the Scouts. Reading books, riding bikes, swimming at the pool the rest of the time.

20. I haven’t been supervised since I was five in 1990. After that I was on my own. My parents worked. I knew how to turn on cartoons and that was enough for them.

21. Summer camp. I’m also from a generation when SAHMs were more common.

22. I was in Boy Scouts, so probably camping. Or camping with my family. When you live in the PNW you camp a lot during the summer.

23. My mother was a housewife. She gave us breakfast, then locked us outside with our bikes and the garden hose to drink. We played baseball for hours, board games on picnic tables, rode bikes for miles, explored, fished some, etc. Lunch was PBJs handed through the screen door. If we got hot we went to the library, which had AC. 1960s.

24. Ultra religious sleepaway camp, did whatever i could that wasn’t actually illegal to get kicked out and they would not send me home.

25. Hiding from the sun. I always felt so horrible in the summer.

26. Basketball, soccer, football, bikes, scooters, and video games with siblings/ neighbors. We’d also get to spend a few weeks at grandparents place on a lake where we’d swim, fish, play with the bb gun/ sling shots, shoot fireworks, boat around the lake, play football, and just explore the woods. Also sometimes played yard games like corn-hole or whatnot.

27. Running around the neighborhood with friends, working a couple random jobs, or going to summer camp.

    This was the early 90s.

28. My mom worked part-time and usually worked early in the morning or late at night, so we were supervised most of the time. If she had to run errands or go to work, we’d just stay home alone. We lived in a safe area and we were close with all of our neighbors, so it wasn’t a big deal.

29. Read, went biking, played out in the yard, played with other kids in the neighborhood. Sometimes we would go to the pool. My mom worked from home and only part-time, so we were adequately supervised (although she was pretty hands-off and figured we could manage on our own without much attention once we were school age, but she was there if we needed her). This was in the 80s. Once I was in high school I always had summer jobs.

30. Sometimes my mom would ship me off to Ohio for the summer to be with my aunt and cousins and go to summer camp up there. And my cousins had all the video game systems that I didn’t have.

31. Raised in the 90s and first decade of the 21st century. Sometimes my parents would coordinate with other relatives and we would all rent a big beach home in the North Carolina Outer Banks. But that was typically only for a week or two. The rest of the summer, I would play video games or go play outside with my friends. My parents didn’t really micro-manage my summer activities. I wonder what kids do these days.

32. My school had a day camp that parents could pay for. Just did dumb activities from 8 to 3pm, and then my parents paid extra for the aftercare program where they could pick me up at 5:30ish. So basically I was on the same schedule as I was during the school year