Summer camp or more studying? The choice that shows what you really believe about education

Every June, the class group chat comes alive with summer plans. And every year, there are two camps — and I don't mean the kind with ropes courses.

There are parents who post about summer enrichment programmes, intensive English courses, maths acceleration, coding bootcamps, and Putonghua immersion weeks. There are parents who post about beach trips, sports camps, and the quiet radical act of doing nothing in particular. Sometimes the same parent does both, in some carefully calibrated ratio, and presents this as evidence of a balanced approach while internally maintaining a detailed schedule.

I have been both parents. I have been the parent who signed up for summer academics so intense that my daughter spent more hours studying in July than she did during term time. I have been the parent who swung to the opposite extreme and let her watch Netflix until noon. Both extremes produced outcomes I wasn't happy with.

Let me tell you about the intense summer first, because I think it deserves honest accounting.

My daughter was going into P4. She had, in P3, struggled with Chinese comprehension — not badly, but noticeably. I decided the summer was the opportunity to close the gap. I enrolled her in a three-week intensive Chinese programme, four hours a day, Monday to Friday. Academic intensive plus ABRSM piano preparation plus supplementary maths. On paper, she was doing something useful every weekday of the six-week holiday.

By week four, she was exhausted in a way that concerned me. Not the normal tiredness of a child who's been active — a flat, grey exhaustion that I recognise now as the look of a person who has used up their reserves and is running on empty. She developed a small nervous habit of picking at her nails. She started saying she didn't feel well on Sunday evenings.

Her Chinese comprehension, when school resumed in September, was marginally better. Her general mood and enthusiasm for school were noticeably worse. The trade was not worth it.

The following summer, I overcompensated. She had three weeks of largely unstructured time. She was bored by week two, which I told myself was fine because boredom was creative and developmental. But the boredom she experienced wasn't creative — it was just uncomfortable, and she wasn't old enough or equipped enough to move through it productively. She spent a lot of time doing low-engagement activities and came back to school in September without any particular renewed energy.

What I've come to understand is that the "summer camp or study" question is a false binary. The question isn't whether children should do structured activities in summer — it's what kind. The meaningful distinction isn't between fun and academics; it's between activities that restore and activities that drain.

A summer camp where your child is physically active, making friends, doing something with their hands, learning something through experience — this is not time off from development. It's a different kind of development that the school year rarely provides. A two-week drama camp, a sports programme, a week building things in a science class where nothing is graded — these are not frivolous. They are building different muscles.

Pure academic drilling in summer, on the other hand, often produces what mine produced: a child who arrives in September depleted rather than rested, who associates learning with exhaustion, who has had the long slow recovery that summer is supposed to provide replaced with more of the same relentless performance.

This summer, my daughter is doing two weeks of swimming intensive — she's working toward competition times and she wants this — and one week of a film-making camp a friend recommended. The rest is unscheduled with some light reading built in. My son is doing a Lego robotics week and otherwise has a loose summer.

I have made peace with the fact that there are children in Sha Tin spending their July in intensive academic programmes who may arrive in September with more drilled knowledge than my children. I am choosing to believe that my children will arrive in September having had an actual summer, which is its own kind of preparation for the year ahead.

This choice reveals something about what I believe education is for. On good days, I feel confident in it. On bad days — around the time someone posts their child's summer programme in the group chat — I feel the usual anxiety and remind myself why I made the decision I made.

The anxiety doesn't mean I'm wrong. It just means I live in Hong Kong.