The Psychology of Parenting Without a Routine: aka Why the Summer Holidays are Hard
There's a particular kind of dread that settles in around mid-July. The last day of school approaches and with it, six weeks of unstructured time that needs to be somehow filled, managed, survived. For many parents, the summer holidays arrive with the best of intentions and a quietly mounting sense of pressure: to keep children entertained, to be fully present, to make it memorable, to hold everything together while also, somehow, continuing to function as an adult with responsibilities.
And then the first week passes and someone is bored, someone is grumpy, there are too many screens and not enough outdoors and you've said "in a minute" fourteen times today and it's only 10 am.
The guilt that follows; the sense that you're not doing this well enough, is almost universal among parents. What's less often discussed is why the summer holidays are psychologically hard in ways that go beyond logistics. Understanding the mechanism, it turns out, changes how to navigate it.
What routine actually does for children and for parents
Routine is not simply a practical convenience. For children, the predictable structure of a school day provides something psychologically significant: it satisfies what self-determination theory researchers Ryan and Deci identify as the three core needs that underpin human wellbeing and motivation; autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Within the structure of a school day, these needs are largely met by design. Children know what comes next (competence and a sense of control), they belong to a peer group (relatedness), and within the structure they have enough freedom to exercise choice (autonomy). Remove that structure, and all three needs suddenly require active management. They don't disappear, they still need satisfying. But the scaffold that was quietly doing that work is gone.
For parents, the picture is equally complex. Adults also depend on routine as a regulatory tool. The predictability of a weekly structure provides what psychologists call temporal scaffolding; a framework that reduces the cognitive load of decision-making, creates clear transitions between roles (parent, professional, individual), and provides a rhythm that the nervous system can orient itself around. When that scaffolding collapses over summer, what replaces it is open time, which sounds restful but often isn't, particularly for parents juggling work, childcare, and the pressure to make the holidays feel worthwhile.
The pressure to perform, and where it comes from
There is a specific kind of anxiety that attaches itself to the summer holidays for many parents, and it's worth naming clearly: the pressure to be the entertainment director. To fill the days with experiences that are enriching, screen-free, socially stimulating, and, crucially, visible evidence of good parenting.
This pressure has intensified over recent decades alongside what sociologists call the rise of intensive parenting; a cultural model that positions the active, involved parent as primarily responsible for optimising their child's development at every stage. In this model, boredom is a problem to be solved. Unstructured time is time that isn't being used well. And a child's happiness, in any given moment, reflects directly on the parent managing that moment.
The research doesn't support this framing, but the cultural pressure that produces it is real, and it generates a specific form of parental anxiety that is worth recognising rather than dismissing. If you find yourself scrolling for holiday activity ideas at 10pm feeling vaguely inadequate, you are not alone, and you are not failing. You are responding, entirely predictably, to a cultural message that is both pervasive and, in important ways, wrong.
The pressure to fill every hour of the summer is not coming from your children's actual needs. It is coming from a cultural story about what good parenting looks like; and that story is not well-supported by what the research tells us children actually need.
Boredom is not the enemy
One of the most counterintuitive ~ and genuinely well-evidenced ~ findings in developmental psychology is that boredom is good for children. Not incidentally, not occasionally, but as a regular and important feature of childhood.
When the brain is not engaged with an external task or stimulus, it does not simply go quiet. It shifts into what neuroscientists call the default mode network; a set of brain regions associated with daydreaming, self-reflection, imaginative thinking, and the processing of social and emotional information. In children, the default mode network is particularly active and particularly important. Research suggests it plays a central role in the development of creativity, narrative thinking, emotional regulation, and the capacity for empathy.
Boredom, in other words, is the entry point to this network. The restless, uncomfortable feeling of having nothing to do is the brain's signal that it is ready to generate its own engagement, and what it generates in that space is often richer, more self-directed, and more developmentally valuable than the next activity you could plan.
Research by developmental psychologists including Teresa Belton has found that children who are regularly permitted to be bored develop stronger capacities for self-directed learning, imaginative play, and creative problem-solving. Children who move from one structured input to the next; screen to activity to screen, may be continuously stimulated without ever having the opportunity to develop their own inner resources. The discomfort of boredom, it turns out, is precisely the point.
How parental stress transmits and why your regulation matters more than your activities
Here is perhaps the most important thing the research tells us about parenting in the summer holidays: what affects your children most is not what you do with them, but how you are while you're with them.
Studies examining the relationship between parental stress and children's physiological stress responses have found that parenting stress is measurably associated with children's cortisol patterns; the hormonal marker of the body's stress response. Parents and children who spend sustained time together share not just activities but nervous system states. This is not metaphor. It is a biological process sometimes described as physiological co-regulation: the nervous system of a child, particularly a younger child, is genuinely calibrated by the nervous system of the adult who is caring for them.
The practical implication is significant. A parent who is anxious, dysregulated, and running on empty, perhaps because they have spent three weeks trying to be everything to everyone, will transmit that state to their children in ways that no amount of trips to the park or educational activities will fully offset. Whereas a parent who is calmer, more present, and has given themselves permission to do less, will offer their children something that is genuinely hard to replicate: a regulated nervous system to co-regulate against.
What children need most from their parents isn't a full itinerary. It's a nervous system that isn't running on fumes.
This connects directly to what we explore in our piece on the psychology of people pleasing - the way that prioritising everyone else's experience at the expense of your own is not selfless but self-depleting, and that the depletion itself has consequences for the people you're trying to care for.
What children actually need from the summer
If we strip away the cultural noise, what does the research suggest children actually need from six weeks without school?
They need time that is genuinely unstructured; not just gaps between activities, but stretches of open time in which they are responsible for generating their own engagement. This is uncomfortable for everyone at first, particularly for children accustomed to continuous stimulation. The initial "I'm bored" is not a problem to solve; it is the beginning of something.
They need connection; not activities that happen alongside a distracted parent, but moments of genuine presence. These don't need to be elaborate. Research consistently shows that what children report valuing most is not the holidays abroad or the days out, but the moments of relaxed, unhurried attention: being read to, playing a game, cooking together, being listened to without the conversation being redirected.
They need autonomy: choices that are genuinely theirs to make, within a container that feels safe. The school year is, by necessity, heavily structured and adult-directed. Summer offers the opportunity for children to practise self-direction, which is one of the most important skills they can develop and one that structured environments rarely have room to build.
And they need to see their parents resting. Not just performing rest while secretly managing everything, but actually recovering. Children learn how to be adults partly by watching the adults around them. A parent who can sit with a book, who can say "I need half an hour", who can model that their own needs are legitimate, that parent is teaching something that will serve their child long after the summer ends.
A note for parents who are finding it hard
If the summer holidays regularly bring up something heavier than tiredness; a sense of inadequacy, a difficulty being present, a feeling of being trapped or irritable or disconnected from your children, it is worth paying attention to that signal rather than pushing through it.
Parenting is one of the most emotionally demanding things a person can do, and it draws on whatever internal resources are available. If those resources are depleted; by stress, by unresolved experiences, by the cumulative weight of doing too much for too long, the summer holidays will expose that in ways the school term's structure can partially mask.
That's not a reflection of how much you love your children. It's information about what you need. And it's worth taking seriously; both for your own sake, and for theirs.
If any of this resonates, our piece on how to know if you need therapy is a useful starting point, as is our piece on high-functioning anxiety — because the exhaustion of chronic stress and the exhaustion of parenting often overlap in ways that deserve more than a week off.
You don’t have to wait until September to ask for support
If this summer has brought something up that feels worth exploring with a professional, we have a directory of experienced therapists working across south London; many of whom work with parents, with stress, and with the particular kind of depletion that comes from giving a great deal of yourself over a long period of time.
