Summer Is Still Where Children Are Formed 

School is winding down and with it ends one of the year’s most important experiments: the phone-free classroom.   Districts across the country  have pulled smartphones out of students’ hands during the school day, and  the early results  are encouraging— calmer rooms, steadier attention , and more conversation.   The classroom was the easy part. Summer break is the real test.   For nine months, schools supplied the structure. Now that all falls away and the phone, newly evicted from the classroom, is waiting at home—and a long, unstructured summer is exactly the vacuum it was designed to fill.  If children spend the school year free from their phones only to spend the summer glued to screens, we will not have solved the problem. We will merely have moved it.  The debate over screens is, in the end, a debate about who is shaping our children. Every hour of childhood forms them into something. The question is not whether they are being shaped, but by what: by algorithms, influencers, and endless scrolling, or by coaches, counselors, employers, mentors, teammates, friends, and the natural world.  Removing a source of poor formation is not the same as providing good formation.  For generations, summer was one of America’s great engines of growing up. Children went to camp, played ball, worked their first jobs, joined scout troops, showed up at houses of worship, volunteered, roamed their neighborhoods, and spent long days outdoors with friends. These were not just ways to pass the time. They built independence, responsibility, resilience, and confidence.  Many still do. But they now compete with devices engineered to capture a child’s attention and hold it without end.  Consider the child dropped at sleepaway camp, homesick on the second night and certain she will not last the week. Two weeks later, she is sunburned and reluctant to go home, having discovered she is more capable than she knew. No app taught her that. A cabin of bunkmates, a counselor who would not let her quit, and a cold lake at six in the morning did.  For many families, that shaping is explicitly religious. Jewish and church summer camps and religious youth programs have long turned the weeks away into bonds of faith and belonging that last for decades.  This is what is at stake—not merely physical activity or test scores, but the development of character. Camps, leagues, youth groups, and summer jobs all share something: they place young people where they must deal with other people, solve problems, navigate conflict, and accept responsibility. Success there depends not on curating an online identity but on showing up and contributing.  A teenager at a summer job learns what scrolling cannot teach. A young athlete learns that effort does not guarantee success and that setbacks are part of growth. Children left to play without constant adult refereeing learn to negotiate, compromise, and cooperate. These are not incidental experiences. They are formative ones.  Émile Durkheim  argued that people are shaped by the institutions and communities around them, and  Robert Putnam  has documented how social connection and civic participation keep those communities healthy. We are made through relationships and shared endeavor.  The same is true of childhood. We talk about education as if it happened only within classroom walls. Yet some of the most important learning happens elsewhere—around campfires, on ballfields, and in long conversations among friends—and teaches lessons no curriculum can replicate.  So the enthusiasm for phone-free schools should be seen as a beginning, not a conclusion. Schools can limit distraction and rebuild habits of attention. But schools alone cannot supply everything a child needs to grow. Families, communities, and civic institutions carry an equal share.  And here is what is easy to overlook: these institutions already exist. They are an inheritance, built and sustained by earlier generations for precisely this purpose. The task before parents is not to invent them but to use them: to make the call, sign the form, drive to the first practice, and entrust a child to the care of other adults.  This does not mean filling every hour. Overscheduling can defeat the very purpose. A child does not need a perfect summer; a child needs a chance to meet the real world—to make friends, build skills, face challenges, and discover interests beyond a screen.  The goal was never simply less screen time. It is the cultivation of the habits and experiences that let young people flourish.  A phone-free classroom is a good start. But the larger task is not merely distraction control. It is formation. And summer—at camp, on teams, at pools, in libraries, in churches and synagogues, in first jobs and long afternoons with friends—remains one of the best institutions of formation we have. We should use it. The post Summer Is Still Where Children Are Formed appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .