The ’90s nostalgia that brought back cargo pants and flip phones is also fueling a parenting trend among Millennials called ’90s kid summers.
The idea is to recreate the core childhood memories of a typical summer in the 1990s, such as running through sprinklers, drinking from the garden hose and chasing after the ice cream truck.
“That’s where you just open up the backyard, give them a garden house, let them go to town,” Kristin Gallant, the parenting expert behind Big Little Feelings, said in an Instagram video. “Independent play, creativity, ride bikes and do that from sunrise until sunset.”
Research shows that unstructured playtime helps build healthy bodies, increases energy and reduces tension and anxiety, according to the American Psychological Association.
But it’s not always possible to give children the perfect ’90s summer in 2025, and parents shouldn’t stress out about it, said Claire Vallotton, professor of human development and family studies at Michigan State University.
The desire for a ’90s kid summer is likely a reaction to a parenting culture that tries to overschedule kids with summer activities to optimize child development, she said.
“They are overscheduled and using technology too much,” she said, and not spending time in nature like many of their parents did. “It’s a reaction that makes a lot of sense but trying to solve it all in one summer isn’t going to work for either the children or parents.”
Many parents who work full-time depend on structured childcare and can’t be available for their children throughout the summer to bandage a scraped knee, she said.
It’s also important to find peers for children to play with outside and many families don’t live in safe neighborhoods where other children live nearby. An Instagram user made a similar point in a comment on Gallant’s video.
“Give me a ’90s economy and ’90s real estate prices and I’ll see what I can do,” the user said.
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But even if there was a parent at home and the family lived in a safe and social neighborhood, Vallotton said the ’90s kid summer may not make sense. If children aren’t given unstructured freedom throughout the school year, they won’t know what to do with it during the summer.
“You can’t just have this over-scheduled, technology-saturated life for nine months of the year and then switch into this absolute freedom,” she said. “We haven’t prepared our children for that… It’s going to make the children potentially more anxious.”
Although a complete switch is ill-advised, Vallotton said there are ways for parents to ease their children into a ’90s kid summer by slowly limiting screen time, promoting more outdoor activities and fostering opportunities for peer play with minimal supervision.
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But that may not work for every family and parents shouldn’t feel pressured by a social media trend, she said.
“Social media is a tool for social comparison and self-judgment,” Vallotton said. “I would challenge parents to take a ’90s summer for themselves and pause social media use.”
Adrianna Rodriguez can be reached at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Parents want to bring back the ’90s kid summer. What does that mean?
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