No, Kids... I Don’t Get A Summer Vacation

Every year, around the second week of summer break, my son starts acting like I've personally failed him. Not in a dramatic way. OK, actually, in a very dramatic way. He'll wander into whatever room I'm in, sigh heavily enough to suggest he's survived several wars, and announce, "I'm bored."

Now, let's be clear. This child owns:

• multiple gaming systems
• approximately 700 LEGOs
• sports equipment
• art supplies
• board games
• books
• a bike
• a scooter
• enough abandoned hobbies to qualify for their own storage unit

And yet somehow, according to him, there is absolutely nothing to do.

As an ADHD parent raising an ADHD child, I used to think boredom meant I wasn't doing enough. Maybe we needed more activities. More camps. More outings. More educational opportunities. More summer bucket lists. More Pinterest. Then I remembered I also have ADHD tendencies and have never successfully completed a Pinterest project in my life. So that wasn't going to happen.

The truth is, summer is weird for ADHD kids. For months, their days are structured down to the minute: Wake up; school; transitions; lunch; recess; teachers; schedules.

Then one random Tuesday in June we basically say, "Good luck out there, buddy." And suddenly they're expected to manage endless free time with executive functioning skills they don't actually possess yet. What could possibly go wrong?

In our house, the answer is: everything. Within days, the screen negotiations begin. The boredom complaints start. The sibling arguments increase.

And my son somehow develops the ability to appear beside me every seven minutes asking for snacks, despite having eaten recently enough to still have crumbs on his face.

A few summers ago, after one particularly exhausting morning of hearing "I'm bored," I took the boys to a creek near our house. Not because I was trying to create magical childhood memories. Because it was free. Those are very different motivations. I packed water bottles, snacks, and the last remaining fragments of my patience and headed out. And then something weird happened. My son disappeared. Not literally. This isn't that kind of article. But mentally. He became completely absorbed in creek kid activities. Searching for frogs. Collecting rocks. Throwing sticks. Building dams. Looking for fish. Arguing passionately about whether a crawdad was technically a lobster. Hours passed. Hours.

Do you understand what kind of miracle that is for a child who normally can't decide between three activities without needing a snack break and an existential crisis? That's when I realized something. My son wasn't asking me for entertainment. His brain was asking for stimulation. Movement. Novelty. Sensory input. Something real. Something that wasn't another YouTube video trying to compete for his attention.

Since then, I've become a huge fan of what I call "lazy mom adventures." Not lazy in the neglectful sense. Lazy in the "I'm not spending $400 a week on summer camps" sense. Our favorites? Creek days. Scavenger hunts. Library trips. Bike rides. Nature walks that I intentionally never call "nature walks" because my son immediately loses interest if it sounds educational.

We call them missions. Everything is a mission. Find the weirdest bug. Locate the smoothest rock. Search for evidence of raccoons. Discover something shaped like a heart. Suddenly he's Indiana Jones.

The other thing I've learned is that boredom itself isn't always the problem. Sometimes I think ADHD parents panic because we've seen what boredom can turn into. Chaos. Screens. Arguments. Questionable decisions.

But occasionally, if I wait long enough, something interesting happens. My son gets creative. A fort appears. A game gets invented. A cardboard box becomes an engineering project. A stick collection mysteriously takes over my porch. The boredom eventually passes. Not because I solved it. Because he did.

Now, don't get me wrong. My son still tells me he's bored approximately 47 times a day during summer. That hasn't changed. But I've stopped treating it like an emergency. Sometimes what he actually means is: "My brain needs something interesting." And honestly? Some days mine does too.

Danielle Kelly is the host of the ADHD parenting podcast Chaos & Caffeine, which reaches thousands of families each month and was recently named one of the Best Kids With ADHD Podcasts of 2026 by PodRanker.