Summer Vacations Are For The Rich

by Justin Rosario

I just sent my kids off for their second week of school so summer is starting to become a distant memory. We’re already looking forward to Halloween and apple picking and the Renaissance Faire and piles of leaves and Thanksgiving.

But just because summer is in the rear-view mirror doesn’t mean it’s been forgotten. This was a particularly busy summer for us and that was entirely due to the fact that we had a little more money than previous years. There’s a lot of fond memories, and a lot of privilege.

We went to Great Wolf Lodge for our first ever family vacation. We’ve been on trips before but always to see family. This was the first time we’ve ever gone just for ourselves to do whatever we wanted. It was the six of us, Deb, Claudia, Jordan, Anastasia, Lila and myself because we go almost everywhere together.

It wasn’t a long trip, just 3 days and 2 nights but it was wonderful. The kids all had a lot of fun, the grownups had some time to relax, drink a beer and chill while the kids played, and it all went more smoothly than I had any right to expect a family vacation to go. We were so excited about how much fun we had, we started talking about next year’s vacation almost as soon as we got back.

Summer camp

Great Wolf Lodge wasn’t the only thing the kids did over the summer. There was also summer camp. Or, in the case of Anastasia, camps, plural.

Jordan goes to a special summer program run by the city for kids with special needs. It’s an extension of his afterschool program and it’s the only one in the city that we know of. Some of the other summer programs and camps say they can accommodate autistic kids but none of them specialize in autism. That makes it a huge gamble. Sure, we could get a qualified counselor who really understands how to interact with Jordan and work with him to improve his social skills.

Or we could end up with an expensive babysitting service.

In the spirit of “Nah, we’re good,” we’ve been sending Jordan to the same summer program for the last 5 summers and it’s been very good for him.

Anastasia used to go to a single program for the summer. It wasn’t a great program but it was one we could afford. Then we sent her to a different one that cost a bit more and that was good for a few years. The problem was that it was more or less the same year after year so she got bored with it. Anastasia is not super picky or fussy but craves variety and new experiences.

Rather than send her to a single camp or program for the entire summer, we sent her to several for shorter intervals. She went to a sleepaway camp for a most of a week with Lila (her first time away from home), a couple of different all day programs throughout the city, and a couple of half-day STEM programs on top of that.

On the weekends, we took all three kids to country fairs and carnivals and festivals and museums and a water park and the movies and to see hot air balloons (but it was too windy. Boo.) and to cap it all off, the Virginia Scottish Games on Labor Day weekend.

We went cheap where we could as often as we could but it was not an inexpensive summer.

But since the alternative was letting all the kids sit on a couch and stare at Youtube all day, it was money well spent. We could have used that money to pay off one of Debbie’s school loans and probably the small emergency credit card but some things are more important.

I even took the girls to the book store several times to buy manga (Japanese comic books) so they would read during the summer break. They weren’t going to read chapter books over the summer but manga? Oh, they’ll read the hell out of that and reading is reading, even if it’s a comic.

Previous summers weren’t nearly as extravagant but we almost always keep the kids busy because we have the luxury of being able to afford it. Activities like these are known to have a positive effect on the development of children both socially and academically. That, and it’s our joy as parents to expose our children to as many new experiences as possible.

But what about the kids whose families can’t?

Back to school

Readers over a certain age will remember that back to school assignment: “What I Did On Summer Vacation.” Teachers used to dole it out like clockwork when I was a kid. More recently, there’s been a great deal of push back on that kind of assignment because it can be pretty goddamn traumatic for a kid to write about how their parent/sibling/pet died over the summer. But in less extreme cases, it’s humiliating for kids who couldn’t afford to do much of anything to write about either a fantasy summer or the real one in which they stayed home and watched a lot of TV.

And that’s assuming they even had a home.

“It’s great to have somewhere to go during the day, to be able to say okay, I’m going to be here from 8.30am until 3.30pm,” said Will, “instead of just ambling around town killing time until the hotel opens again. But that’s where the good times at school end; what am I going to write on my holiday essay? ‘Oh, this summer me and my family got kicked out of our flat after the landlord told us he needed to let his brother who had just come home from Australia stay in it, and that was us pretty much fucked’?”.

Some of you reading this are thinking, “Well, that’s not the norm, is it? It’s just another extreme example.” Most kids don’t live that way. And you would be right. Most kids don’t live this way.

You would, however, be wrong about this being an extreme example. “Extreme” suggests a tiny minority and that is not at all the case. There are roughly 2.5 million homeless children in the United States. Or 1 in every 30 kids. Richest nation in the world, right? These kids don’t get to go on vacation. An additional 11 million kids live in poverty on top of the 2.5 million homeless. So that’s roughly 1 in 5 kids who don’t have the money to go on summer vacations. Or go to summer camps. Or go to water parks. Or go to the movies. Or buy comic books once a week.

Some of these kids spend their summer vacation working. Or wondering where their next meal is coming from because they’re not in school with its free breakfast and lunch.

Keeping the cycle going

Later, when these same children do not thrive academically, we blame their parents, or worse, the children themselves. And then they grow up, struggle economically, have kids of their own, and the cycle continues with privileged (generally white) people sneering at their failure to be as productive as people who grew up with three meals a day and a warm bed every night.

Of course, we could easily eradicate poverty and homelessness. We are, we have been assured, the richest nation in the world. But we choose not to do that. The typical rationale is “Why should my tax dollars pay for their mistakes?”

It’s never clear, exactly, what mistakes a 5-year-old made to end up homeless and/or poor. Did they choose to be born to impoverished parents instead of wealthy ones? Did they choose not to pull themselves up by the bootstraps when they were three? How does that work, exactly?

We know, from study after study, that putting the homeless in homes is far cheaper for the taxpayer than leaving them on the streets. But this outrages certain people (OK, let’s say it: mostly white Republican voters) even more.

So again, we are making a choice. We are choosing to leave children homeless, hungry, anxious, unsafe, and miserable. Millions of them. We don’t have to do that. We want to do that. Why? Because for a significant number of Americans, spending money to improve the lives of strangers (especially non-white strangers) is the single worst thing imaginable.

When people clutch their pearls over the evils of “socialism,” what they’re actually raging about is helping people they don’t know and therefor do not care about. Not for nothing, the same mid-westerners

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who claim to hate socialism the most are the first in front of a camera screaming for the government to help them when a tornado levels their house or a river washes away their town.

They like socialism just fine when it’s for them. But when it comes to making the lives of other people’s children better? Sorry, can’t help ya, buddy. If we did, who would we sneer at?

Be aware of your privilege

None of this means you should feel guilty about a summer of fun with your family. I’m certainly not. We’re going to go to Disney one of these summers and there will not be an ounce of shame as I run around with mouse ears and a lightsaber. My family may die of embarrassment but that’s part of the fun.

You should, however, understand your privilege and what it affords both you and your children. You cannot possibly understand what others are being deprived of if you take for granted what you yourself have. Only then can you begin to address the systemic inequalities, economic, racial, gender, etc. in our country in any way that would make sense.

Right now, too many of us are allowing our sense of decency and morality to be crushed by false notions of “fairness.” We say it’s not “fair” that we have to work for what we have while the poor get “free stuff.” Of course, the second anyone moves to make the system more equitable by taking away unearned privileges from the same people who were, just a second ago, deeply concerned about how “fair” things are, you can hear the squealing of outrage from orbit. So really, it’s not “fairness” we’re interested in, but maintaining our position on the pecking order. That, you should feel guilty about.

I’m not saying everyone has a right to go to Disneyland, but at the very least, children should be able to spend their summers playing instead of being afraid they won’t have a bed to sleep in that night or an empty belly if they do. Always remember, it’s a choice we as a nation make to leave over 13 million children living with that kind of fear. We can be better. We just have to make a different choice.

(image via Getty Images)

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