A cloudy Summer for parents in the US

Parents of millions of children in the US struggle each year to provide their children with varied experiences throughout the summer weeks, while accommodating their own work, family commutes, and the occasional family vacation. This coordination is a gargantuan task that comprises the inter-related and iterative activities of searching, planning, and reserving.

Searching

A 2016 report by the Boston-based nonprofit Give a Summer revealed that a major barrier to summer camp participation was tardiness in registration with would-be registrants often finding programs only after they are already fully booked. In a 2021 report, the Wallace Foundation found that 16% of parents in high-income and 23% in low-income families would have enrolled their child in a summer camp activity, had they known what was available. Ineffective googling may be partially to blame for this: it is easy to search in a way that results in unsuitable providers from other states listed at the top. A number of local providers known to us require more detailed Google searches to discover their presence on the web. But even after discovering providers, difficulties remain. Provider websites give poor to average customer experiences in how they facilitate search for their programs: searching for programs for specific interests, like science or sports, is typically tedious and time-consuming.

Planning

Depending on the parent's needs, consolidating search results across providers and building a “master calendar” may take several hours and repeated cycles - of search, plan, book, cancel, re-book, re-plan - to create a coordinated plan for the child and the family. Parents of more than one child have to work out a plan that may necessitate placing their children of different ages in different camps and programs with different schedules - and in every case reconciling these schedules, and the potential travel complexities they may require, with their own work schedules and the other children’s camp schedules!

Reserving

After constructing the optimal schedule there is a separate struggle to individually call or email each provider and book places for the child before they get filled up. Failed attempts at reserving a place will obviously require further searching and planning, and there is always a possibility that planning activities may require cancellation of previous reservations. Cancellations are at least as difficult as reservations: refunds, if granted, take time to confirm and may require follow-up phone calls.

It’s a part-time job! 

These difficulties have been bemoaned by parents who are our friends. They generally labeled the effort using terms like “What a pain!”, “It’s a nightmare!”, or “It’s a part-time job!”. Also generally apparent was their dogged determination to solve for it by getting way ahead of the problem - searching and booking began in December! As Parents.com synopsized an interview with a mother of two, who likened the challenge to solving one big puzzle, for many parents summer is a job that begins in winter and a problem that needs to be tackled with elaborate spreadsheets. We make the case that these complaints cry out for a convenient and centralized summer camp discovery, program planning, and electronic enrollment service. 

The Summersolt app for parents provides this service. Only Summersolt removes the burden of planning, searching, and reserving places at summer camp for your children.  Download it now from the Apple App Store.