Why Some Kids Struggle in Summer and Others Thrive: Structure, Freedom, and Growing Up
Every June, I hear some version of the same two stories.
One family tells me summer is the best thing that happens to their kid all year. The pressure lifts, the anxiety drops, and they finally get to see who their child is when nobody's grading them. Another family tells me the opposite: the structure disappears and everything else goes with it. Sleep falls apart. Screen time becomes a daily battle. Siblings who tolerated each other during the school year are suddenly at each other's throats by 10 a.m.
Both of these are real. Often, both are true for the same child at different points in the summer, or even the same day.
Summer gets talked about like it's automatically the easy season — a reward for surviving the school year, a stretch of pure relief. For a lot of kids, it is. But for a lot of others, summer is its own kind of hard, just a quieter, less visible kind. And as kids get older, what summer asks of them changes too, which means the way it's hard changes right along with it.
I don't think the answer is to villainize the school year or treat summer as something to just get through. I think it's worth understanding, honestly, what's actually going on for your particular kid — and what changes as they grow.
Structure Is Doing More Work Than It Gets Credit For
School is exhausting for a lot of kids, sometimes in ways that are hard to watch. But it also does something quietly useful: it organizes the day for them. Wake up at a certain time, go here, do this, eat then, come home then. A huge amount of executive functioning (the planning, sequencing, and self-monitoring that goes into a day) is handled by the schedule itself, not by the child.
When that structure disappears, kids who lean on it more than most (this shows up a lot with ADHD, anxiety, and some autistic profiles) can genuinely struggle, even in a summer that looks fun and low-stakes from the outside. Fewer external cues to shift between activities. More time spent deciding what to do next, which is its own kind of mental load. More open space for worry to move into, especially for anxious kids, because uncertainty tends to get louder when there's nothing else filling the room.
This is not a character issue. It's not that your child "can't handle unstructured time" in some deficient way. It's that structure was quietly doing a job, and now it isn't, and someone has to pick that job back up. Sometimes that someone ends up being you.
And Then There's the Kid Who Comes Alive in Summer
At the same time, I talk to just as many families whose kid genuinely thrives in summer — and for reasons that matter clinically, not just anecdotally.
Some kids are worn down by a structure that never quite fit them. A rigid schedule, a pace that's too slow or too fast, a classroom environment that asks them to sit still and be quiet in ways that cost them enormous effort. For these kids, summer isn't just fun. It's relief from a demand that's been mismatched to how they're actually wired. Freedom to move at their own pace, follow their own interests, and regulate their own energy can look like an entirely different child by July.
Neither version of summer is more "correct" than the other. What matters is figuring out which one is true for your kid, because the support each of them needs looks different. A child who's struggling with the loss of structure usually benefits from more scaffolding, not less. A child who's finally getting to breathe usually benefits from you protecting that freedom, not accidentally recreating school-year pressure at home.
Why This Gets More Complicated as Kids Get Older
Summer isn't the same challenge every year. As kids move through elementary, middle, and high school, what summer asks of them keeps changing, and so does what "struggling" looks like.
A seven-year-old's summer challenge is mostly about regulation. Filling long unstructured hours, managing boredom, staying on some kind of sleep and activity rhythm. A parent is still doing most of the executive functioning in the background.
By middle school, more of that shifts onto the kid. There's more independence, more unsupervised time, more social complexity happening away from adult eyes, and often a first real taste of responsibility. A summer reading list, a camp they have to advocate for themselves at, friendships that are more fragile and more online than they used to be. Kids who were fine with unstructured time at seven can start to struggle with it at twelve, not because something went wrong, but because the demands on independent planning and self-management just got heavier.
By high school, summer often comes loaded with actual stakes. A job, a driver's permit, a course they're supposed to be getting ahead on, a college list that's starting to feel real. For a teenager who already struggles with executive functioning or anxiety, an unstructured summer isn't neutral anymore — it can be the first real test of whether they can manage their own time, their own commitments, and their own choices without someone else holding the structure for them.
None of this means summer gets worse as kids age. It means it gets more complex, and a strategy that worked when your child was eight may quietly stop working at thirteen or sixteen, not because your child regressed, but because what's being asked of them changed.
What Actually Helps
A few things tend to make a real difference, regardless of age. None of this requires a color-coded schedule, a parent who's home all day, or money for camps and extra enrichment. Most families I work with are doing this while working full-time, splitting attention between multiple kids, or managing it mostly alone. Doing your best with what you actually have is enough. The goal isn't a perfect system. It's one or two things your child can count on.
Some structure, chosen rather than imposed. Kids who struggle with unstructured time usually don't need a school-year schedule. They need a loose rhythm they can predict. For parents of kids with ADHD this may look like keeping three things the same everyday. For example, everyday they have breakfast, one set outdoor or activity block, and one predictable evening routine, even if everything in between is unplanned. For autistic kids, a simple visual or written schedule (even just three or four boxes taped to the fridge) can do a lot of the work that a full calendar would otherwise have to do, because it tells them what's coming without requiring them to hold it in their head.
Room for the kids who need the opposite. If your child is one of the ones who finally exhales in summer, resist the urge to fill that space back up with enrichment and camps stacked end to end. This might look like "interest-led downtime” (i.e., hours spent deep in Legos, a coding project, or a book series that isn't assigned by anyone). That's not wasted time. For a lot of these kids, it's the most restorative thing they do all year, and it's free.
Gentle, non-negotiable anchors for the harder days. For kids dealing with anxiety or low mood, summer's lack of built-in accountability can let things slide further than anyone notices at first. This doesn't call for a full schedule. Parents managing this often lean on two or three small, fixed non-negotiables instead. For example, getting dressed by a certain time, one stretch of time outside, one meal eaten together. Small and consistent tends to work better than ambitious and abandoned by day three.
A slow, honest transition back. Whichever kind of summer your child is having, the shift back into the school year goes better with a runway. A strategy a lot of parents use successfully: start nudging bedtime and wake time by fifteen minutes every few days for the last couple weeks of summer, rather than all at once the night before. Naming what's changing out loud, and letting your child know it's normal to feel ready and not ready at the same time, matters as much as the schedule itself.
Doing this with what you actually have. Not every family has a second parent to trade off with, a job with flexible hours, or the budget for structured summer programming. If that's your situation, one consistent, low-cost touchpoint can be a great starting place. For example, a nightly text or phone check-in if you're working late, an older sibling or grandparent who provides the routine when you can't be there, the same after-dinner walk every night you're both home. Kids tend to do better with one thing they can reliably count on than with an elaborate plan that only works when everything else goes right.
Matching the support to the age, not just the child. AS your child gets older, it’s important to remember what helped them manage summer at nine may not be enough at fourteen. It's worth periodically asking not just "how is my child doing," but "does the amount of structure and independence I'm offering actually match what this year is asking of them."
When It's More Than a Rough Patch
Most of what shows up in summer is a normal response to a real change in structure, and it resolves on its own or with some of the adjustments above.
But sometimes summer makes visible something that's actually been there all along. A child who falls apart the moment external structure disappears, year after year, may be telling you something about how much executive functioning support they need that the school year has been quietly masking. A teenager who can't manage a summer job or independent responsibilities in a way that matches their intelligence and effort may be dealing with something more than a rough patch. Whether it’s attention difficulties, anxiety/depression, a learning difference, autism-related differences,or a twice exceptional profile where real strengths and real struggles are both present and both getting missed.
If this is a pattern you recognize year after year, rather than something specific to this particular summer, that's worth paying attention to. It's not about labeling your child. It's about understanding them clearly enough to actually help — this year, and the more complicated years still ahead of them.
We'd Love to Connect With You
If you're in the Tigard, Camas, or greater Portland-Vancouver area and you've noticed a pattern in how your child handles change, structure, or unstructured time that goes beyond a typical rough patch, we offer free consultations and would be glad to hear what you're seeing. Sometimes a conversation is the best place to start.
Dr. Liliya Webb is a licensed psychologist and founder of Webb Psychological Services, which specializes in comprehensive psychological and neurodevelopmental evaluations for children, adolescents, and young adults. She specializes in working with children and adolescents across a wide range of presentations, including those with co-occurring and complex profiles that don't fit neatly into a single category. She has a particular appreciation for the twice exceptional kids whose strengths and struggles are often equally invisible, and whose experiences can go misunderstood for far too long. She believes that every child deserves to be seen as a whole person, and that understanding the full picture of how a child's mind works is where real support begins.
Dr. Webb works with families across Tigard, Tualatin, Camas, Lake Oswego, Beaverton, West Linn, Wilsonville, and the greater Portland and Vancouver metro area, with offices in Tigard, OR and Camas, WA. If you'd like to connect, you can reach her team at hello@webbpsychological.com or schedule a free consultation to learn more.
