Why families are embracing the ‘slow summer’ movement

Imagine a summer where joy isn't squeezed into a packed itinerary but stretches slowly across long afternoons, home-cooked meals, and screen-free mornings. That’s the essence of the “slow summer”—a quiet rebellion against overscheduling and overstimulation. In place of bucket-list vacations and week-to-week activity calendars, more families are choosing intention. They’re staying home, saying no, and leaning into slowness as a seasonal ritual. And the shift is about more than just less stress—it’s about choosing presence over performance.

It’s also about what kind of family rhythm you want to remember when the photos are all stored away. The mood of the summer. The ease in your child’s face when there’s nothing they need to rush to. That’s the memory being built now.

Marriage and family therapist Audrey Schoen calls it a return to the summer of our childhoods: unhurried, unpolished, and emotionally rich. “Kids remember how it felt to be with you more than anything you did with them,” she says. Instead of curating elaborate memories, she encourages parents to cultivate mood and space: time to linger, to watch clouds, to grill dinner while the kids play lawn games.

By planning fewer big events, families regain margin for creativity. A plastic kiddie pool becomes an ocean. A fold-out table becomes the summer art studio. A hammock becomes a conversation corner.

Schoen recommends carving out unstructured time intentionally:

• Schedule days without obligations.
• Create daily anchors like shared meals or evening walks.
• Embrace water play, backyard messes, and long books with no end date.

Boredom isn’t failure—it’s a portal to creativity and connection. And in the long term, it’s what makes summer feel like a real break, not just a relocated rush.

For Marianne Fransius, CEO of Bébé Voyage, slow summer began as a reaction to overdoing it. Last December, her family visited Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia—an ambitious multi-country trip that left them depleted. “We changed places too often,” she reflects. “It was beautiful but exhausting.” This summer, her family is settling into their country home in France, trading sightseeing for swimming in the lake, berry-picking, and badminton tournaments. The only structure? One child in off-grid camp, the other maybe trying local day camp for a week or two.

The rest is delightfully unplanned. Grandparents may visit. Neighbors might stop by. But the mood is gentle, self-paced. A slow summer, in her words, isn’t about idleness—it’s about depth. About letting one lake become a whole world. About giving your child a place they remember not because they visited it—but because they belonged to it, if only for a season.

Chad McAuliff, a financial planner and father of seven, knows the joy of “doing less.” In fact, he plans for it. “We love having a flexible schedule and not letting our calendar control our days,” he says. His family spends most summer days at home—playing in the yard, sleeping in, eating breakfast outside. What counts as a big day? Maybe a waterfall jump or a book picnic under the trees.

Their approach is permission-based parenting:

• Say no to invitations that don’t serve your energy.
• Say yes to what feels nourishing—even if that’s doing “nothing.”
• Say maybe to spontaneity: a game of kickball, a batch of lemonade, a nap in the hammock.

For McAuliff, it’s not just cost-saving—it’s culture-setting. A slow summer, he believes, teaches kids to love time with each other more than any destination.

Monica Virga Alborno, an engineer and founder of Wanderwild Family Retreats, will still be hopping across time zones with her two young kids. But even her family’s travel is now shaped by a slow-summer mindset. She’s planning with spaciousness: building in unscheduled days, resisting packed itineraries, and saying no to well-meaning invitations that feel like too much.

Her goal isn’t to do nothing—it’s to do less, better. Hiking trails in Norway. Evening campouts in the backyard. Quiet curiosity instead of constant activity. “When my kids are grown and still want to spend time with me,” she says, “I’ll know this approach worked.” For her, slow summers aren’t a break from life—they’re the design for it.

Brittany Lewis, a PR professional and mom of two under four, is approaching summer with an unusual toolkit: fewer plans, a picnic basket, and no Instagram. She’s deleting her social media apps for the season and using a digital camera to document her family’s moments instead. “It feels less distracting,” she explains. “I want to be in the moment, not capturing it for others.”

Her toddler isn’t enrolled in camps or structured activities this summer. Instead, they’ll chase waves at the beach, visit farmers markets, and eat lunch straight from the picnic basket.

Her rule is simple:

• Leave weekends unscheduled.
• Prep meals for play—not mealtimes.
• Let nature (and toddlers) set the pace.

For Lewis, slow summer isn’t just good for the kids. It’s a reset for the adults, too.

A slow summer isn’t the absence of activity—it’s the creation of space. Space for mood to shift. Space for relationships to recalibrate. Space for childhood to unfold as it was always meant to: play-based, unpolished, and free. Home becomes the hub, not the stopover. Rituals form in the repetition—lemonade after nap, evening watering of the garden, music during kitchen cleanup. These rhythms are what families return to next year, and the year after that.

And when the school term returns, it’s these days that leave an imprint—not because they were grand, but because they gave everyone room to feel rested and reconnected.

Not every family can unplug completely. But many can shift the defaults. Start with these small systems:

• Anchor around meals: Make breakfast outside or dinner on the grill a daily pause.
• Design for play, not performance: Create backyard zones for water, reading, or imagination.
• Commit to screen breaks: Use a kitchen basket to store phones after 6pm.
• Preload calm: Keep a picnic basket packed, a box of crafts on standby, or a playlist ready for spontaneous dance breaks.
• Protect unscheduled time: Label blank days on the calendar. Don’t fill them.

Slow summer is not about achieving a new parenting goal. It’s about noticing—and building rituals that help everyone feel more alive.

Post-pandemic families aren’t just tired. They’re reckoning. With overcommitment. With the pressure to perform “fun.” With the stress of making every moment magical. What they’re reaching for instead is wholeness: seasons that flow, not sprint. Parenting that feels relational, not reactionary.

In many ways, slow summer is a rejection of the productivity mindset we carry into parenting. It’s a reminder that the magic of childhood lives in the mundane—when adults finally slow down enough to witness it. And as more families opt for local parks, backyard hose fun, and screen-free evenings, they’re quietly rewriting what “good” summer parenting looks like.

A slow summer won’t trend. It won’t show up neatly on Instagram. It won’t give you itineraries or metrics. But it will give you a deeper exhale. A memory of your child’s laugh echoing off the side of a garage. The smell of basil from a windowsill pot. The blur of wet towels drying on the fence.

Those aren’t small things. They’re the things that shape how we remember time. What you’re building isn’t just a summer. It’s the shape of a family that knows how to pause—and how to love time together, just as it is.