PITTSBURGH (TNS) — As an adult, I’ve somewhat soured on summer. I love the summer rituals, like cookouts and Kennywood, but by mid-July I start looking forward to the bracing breezes of October.

For kids, though, summer is the season for testing your limits, for exploring everything from your backyard to your neighborhood to wild expanses. Summer is when the days keep going and time no longer seems to matter. Summer is exuberance. Summer is freedom.

But something has changed the way kids experience summer. Smartphones, and the constant availability of the digital world more generally, were supposed to be facilitators of freedom. More than any other time, summer exposes that world as shackles that stifle ambition and adventure, enhance anxiety and generally hold back young people from reaching their potential — by keeping them from coming to learn about and to love the real world they inhabit.

SUMMERS BEFORE SCREENS

“You can’t give your child a summer before screens,” writes the National Review commentator Michael Brendan Dougherty. “The normal kind of summer you had, with long languid stretches of boredom that had to be filled by your imagination, is no longer the default. … Feeling like you are protecting the mental health and bodily development of a child makes you seem half-Amish. … What was normality a very short time ago is now a conscious protest of the present.”

He’s right. There are some technologies whose adoption is so comprehensive, and whose effects are so broad, that it’s impossible to avoid them without opting out of civilization itself.

Even if a family maintains the strictest imaginable smartphone and screen-time rules, they still exist within a culture that has effectively abolished boredom and replaced it with perpetual distraction. All the momentum — and all the money — is pushing people, especially children, toward the digital, the abstract, the mediated, and away from the physical, the embodied, the experiential.

Alleviating boredom through creativity is a learned skill, one that exercises the mind and body in a unique way and lays the foundation for everything from professionalism to invention — and one most people have to be forced to develop. It has been made very, very difficult by the constant beckon of the screen, and of the people who want to use that screen to sell you something.

But even if a “summer before screens” is impossible, that doesn’t mean that the virtues of summer are beyond reach for children. It just takes a relentless and unashamed bias, on the part of parents, in favor of the real world.

FALLING IN LOVE

As I got my teeth cleaned this week, the hygienist and I talked about the news, and several times she said of some piece of information mediated by the internet, “I don’t know if this is real or not.” And often I didn’t, either.

Now with AI, we can’t even trust our eyes and ears to tell us whether something presented on our screens even happened in the real world. The relationship between the physical and the digital worlds has grown unreliable.

There is no perfect cure for those exposed to this confused and inhuman state of affairs, but there is a still effective, if admittedly imperfect inoculation: familiarity with, and love of, the real world. Only by knowing and adoring the majesty of embodied reality will we all — especially the rising generations — be able to resist its facsimile, and to recognize digital hallucinations for what they are.

And summer is the best time for children to get to know the real world, because they have the most freedom to explore and discover it — and hopefully come to realize that nothing they see on their screens can live up to the world they can touch.

TIME FOR CHOOSING

A “summer before screens” may not be possible, but a “summer beyond screens” absolutely is.

Go on a hike with your kids, and bring a paper map, which makes it feel much more like the adventure it’s meant to be, while teaching them how to navigate. Whatever academic or practical interest they have, take them somewhere special to learn about it experientially — a living-history museum, a construction site, a farm, an animal shelter, an art studio, a battlefield.

Let kids (of appropriate ages) get out of sight — exploring their neighborhood, going to the park or the pool, hitting up a pizza joint — without a means to reach you, so they have to rely on their own wits to get around. There’s no better way for them to learn streets and landmarks than knowing they’ll be lost without them.

Anyway, it’s hardly more dangerous on the streets, where most people want to help, than on the internet, where merchants of everything from smut to extremism are aggressively hocking their wares.

Lay out books to be found around the house. Even in the age of the smartphone, no curious child can resist a DK Eyewitness book. Or an atlas. Or “The Hobbit” or “The Boxcar Children” or ” Little House on the Prairie.” These are all journeys of discovery in the real world, just as surely as outdoor adventures. Read the books to them.

If given a fair choice, I believe in my bones, most children would live in the real world rather than the screen world. It’s up to parents to offer them that choice, knowing full well that nearly every other social and cultural force is working against them.

But the benefits for their happiness, and for their preparation for an adulthood where the real world will always matter, are more than worth the effort.

© 2025 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Visit www.post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.