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There is a moment that probably lives in the muscle memory of every educator in our generation.

It's a summer evening, and you're out past dinner. Not because anyone gave you permission, but because no one had said "come home" yet. You're playing flashlight tag at the park, riding bikes in loose circles around the neighborhood, or chasing fireflies until a porch light finally flickers on as the signal.

Nobody was worried. Nobody was watching. And you were fine, actually, you were more than fine. You were building something.

The deterioration of childhood experience is eroding the independence, creativity, grit, and resilience that play builds better than anything we can design in a classroom.

That is the summer our kids have largely lost. And I think we have to recognize the toll it is taking on our students, and, as a result, on our staff and our schools.

What happened between our childhoods and now? 

So much, but to name a few: social media has convinced people that online connection is real connection, screen time has become a constant battle between parents and children who are likely addicted to the dopamine that games, shows, and apps are deliberately engineered to produce, and the pace of life has accelerated in ways that leave little room for stillness. That's just to start.

Can we actually get back to an 80s summer? Honestly, I don't know. But I'm committed to trying.

Wait, is this even the superintendent’s responsibility? I think it absolutely is, and here’s why. 

The deterioration of childhood experience is eroding the independence, creativity, grit, and resilience that play builds better than anything we can design in a classroom. It has produced hypervigilant parents accustomed to knowing about and overseeing every activity, which creates pressure on students to perform and places unrealistic demands on teachers and schools to communicate. It has also removed children from daily community life, so that kids become a nuisance rather than a sign of the future. That makes it harder to build trust among the public that we depend on for funding, board members willing to serve, and partnerships that give students real-world experiences.

This is our problem. But it’s not just our problem. 

We Have 180 Days. The Other 185 Belong to the Community.

Superintendents are widely seen as experts in child development. That gives us an important voice and an obligation to use it.

Schools get roughly 180 days a year, six to seven hours a day. That's a fraction of a childhood. The rest of the time, our communities are raising our children.

I believe communities can do that beautifully when they feel permission and encouragement to step back in. Superintendents are widely seen as experts in child development. That gives us an important voice and an obligation to use it.

In my community, we've been working with partner organizations and active parents through our Community Wellness Task Force to reclaim childhood.

The goal isn't to hand parents a checklist of screen time settings, although we are doing that; it's to shift the culture around what childhood is supposed to look like.

We want the community to see that a kid riding a bike without an adult trailing behind isn't unsupervised; they are seeing that independence is developing in real time. A basketball game that spills into the street and forces you to slow down is a sign of a healthy neighborhood, not an inconvenience. Flashlight tag at the park at dusk is exactly what dusk is for.

We're asking residents, not just parents, to lean into this. To give kids the signal that the neighborhood is theirs, too.

What We're Actually Doing: Screen-Free Summer Initiative

We spend enormous energy on academic frameworks, strategic plans, and building portraits of the learners we hope to develop. But a child cannot become a creative, confident, productive adult without unstructured time, physical freedom, genuine boredom, and real-world problem-solving. None of that happens on a screen. It can absolutely happen on a bike, at a park, on a summer afternoon with nowhere specific to be.

Jonathan Haidt's research makes this difficult to ignore: the sharp rise in adolescent anxiety and depression tracks almost exactly with the disappearance of unsupervised outdoor play. We have been watching this unfold in our own buildings for years. We know what we're seeing.

...the sharp rise in adolescent anxiety and depression tracks almost exactly with the disappearance of unsupervised outdoor play.

The question is whether we're willing to name it and then lead the response.

This summer, our Community Wellness Task Force is launching a Screen-Free Summer resource. This is a living document that families across our communities can access, use, and share. It includes a family tech reset guide, local event listings, recommended organizations, and a growing calendar of screen-free activities. We are not the only district in Illinois doing this; it’s important work that schools across our state are seeing is needed.

This model is replicable, and the conversation is one every district can lead; all you have to do is start.

Starting with community partners, local libraries, park districts, and law enforcement are a good place to begin. Start with a blog post or a family email. Start with a board presentation that says plainly: 180 days of excellent instruction cannot overcome 185 days of unlimited screen time, and we have a role to play in changing that.

The research supports it, and your community is waiting for someone to take the lead. You are exactly the right person to lead it because, as school leaders, we know it’s always worth doing what our kids need, and they need a childhood and an old-fashioned 80’s summer.

A Note on Leading This Conversation

For the past two summers, I've led book clubs with parents and residents focused on this topic. A few things I've learned:

• Don't make this a conversation about bad parenting or bad technology.
  Screens are tools with real value, and they're not going anywhere. But they require limits that don’t just protect children from inappropriate content or unwanted contact, but also protect their attention spans, their creativity, and the dopamine regulation that shapes impulse control.
  
  

• Lean on experts
  We used books like The Anxious Generation and The Gift of Failure to convey the realities of how prolonged, unmonitored screen time affects developing brains and what children need from adults to succeed, letting the research do the heavy lifting and focusing on facilitating conversation.
  
  

• Bring in your law enforcement and community partners.
  There is real anxiety about safety when parents are confronted with the idea of giving their children more freedom and playtime. Our Safety Director has built relationships with county-wide teams who are visible on our campuses, so students and parents can form real connections with the officers who patrol their neighborhoods. That presence matters both for safety and for community trust.
  
  

• Don't shy away from hard truths.
  Screens are not safe without boundaries whether inside the home or outside it. Educators have also overused screens in our classrooms at times. It’s okay to admit we need school boundaries just as badly as we need home boundaries. 

At the end of the day, what we're ultimately trying to protect is something hard to name and easy to lose…Childhood itself.

We talk constantly about the whole child. We build portraits of a learner. We write strategic plans anchored in purpose, belonging, and excellence. But all of that depends on our children, how healthy they are, how open they are to learning and experiencing, how child-like they are. 

Some of my best childhood memories were built in the fifteen minutes before dinner, on a street with too many kids and not enough daylight left.

That was enough. It was exactly enough.

Let's give our kids that summer back.