WASHINGTON – Summer is a chance for children and youth to continue developing, but for those living in disadvantaged communities, summertime experiences can lead to worse health, social, emotional, academic, and safety outcomes, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report lays out nine recommendations to address obstacles that disadvantaged children can face during the summer, including lack of access to quality programs, food insecurity, and exposure to unsafe and dangerous conditions, and to help all children develop positively and stay connected to resources.

Shaping Summertime Experiences: Opportunities to Promote Healthy Development and Well-Being for Children and Youth focuses on addressing these concerns:

• Access to summer programs. The report recommends identifying communities’ needs and improving access to appropriate summer programs. Summer programs can be designed to promote safety, physical and mental health, social and emotional development, and academic learning. Children who attend summer camp, for example, can interact with nature, get to know peers from different cultures, and reduce their use of electronics and social media. Youth involved in Cooperative Extension programs, such as 4-H, can develop leadership skills and connect to their community over the summer. However, disadvantaged children face numerous obstacles in accessing positive summer experiences. The report notes that summer programs must be targeted to participants’ needs, be linked to desired outcomes, be of sufficient duration, and promote strong attendance. Communities should target support to summer programs that use these effective practices.

• Food insecurity and nutrition. To reduce food insecurity, the report calls for improving access to summer food programs. Only 15 percent of the 20 million children who receive free or reduced-cost lunches during the school year consistently receive free summer lunches. The U.S. Department of Agriculture should work with state and local governments to increase access to the Summer Food Service Program and expand Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children.

• Adolescent employment. The report recommends increasing access to summer employment programs for adolescents. Summer employment is an important and positive summer experience for adolescents and is effective in reducing crime and improving academic outcomes; it is also in-demand among youth. In 2018, over 70,000 Chicago youth applied for 30,000 summer jobs offered to adolescents through the One Summer Chicago Initiative. Early work experience is widely believed to be an important tool for enhancing future employment prospects and earnings potential.

• Parents and families. Employers can support child and youth summer experiences by supporting parents and connecting families with summer programs. For example, employers can provide on-site or nearby child care or summer programs at no, low, or subsidized cost to employees. Some offer youth employment programs, or purchase or reserve spots in summer camps for employees’ children. Human resource policies supporting work-life balance for parents can also affect the summertime experience of employees’ children.

• Continuing school-year improvements. Federal and state government agencies should enable the continuation of effective school programs for physical activity, nutrition, obesity prevention, and other enrichment programs into the summer, particularly in underserved communities. School-based obesity interventions, for example, are able to improve fitness, metabolic status, and percentage of body fat during the school year, but for some children these improvements reverse over the summer, with participants returning to pre-intervention levels by the beginning of the next school year.

• Kids in government systems. Children and youth who are supervised by the government through juvenile detention, child welfare, or police custody are at particular risk for decreased access to effective summertime programs. The report notes that these settings should provide summer programs that are responsive to the development, health, and safety risks that affect children in these circumstances.

“While summer is a time of opportunity that adds to some children’s school experience, for others it can mean missed meals, more risk for harm, and a lack of chances to move forward in their academic and social development,” said Martín-José Sepúlveda, retired vice president, IBM Corp., and chair of the committee that authored the report. “Our recommendations are meant to give communities a path forward so all kids can have summers that help them grow and be ready to achieve once school resumes.”

Local governments should establish a quality-management system in order to find and provide positive summertime experiences for children, the report says. Governments should evaluate existing programs and services, assess community needs, identify gaps between current and needed programs, address prioritized needs, and develop and measure outcomes. The committee also recommended an emphasis on reaching underserved communities, including children who are American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, immigrant, migrant and refugee, homeless, system-involved, LGBTQ+, and those with special health care or developmental needs.

While the report’s recommendations focus on how communities can improve structured opportunities during summertime, unstructured time can also be an opportunity for cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development. The committee found an immense lack of comprehensive data on children’s summer experiences. Existing data systems do not adequately capture seasonal differences in children’s academic, health, social, emotional, and safety needs, or how children spend most of their unstructured summer time, making it difficult to fully understand their experiences. The report recommends both government and non-government organizations that collect data on children should disaggregate this data by month. Data collection should extend beyond the academic year, and should be shared across systems. Future research needs include longitudinal studies examining summertime experiences, structured and unstructured time, and effects on long-term developmental outcomes.

The study — undertaken by the Committee on the Summertime Experiences and Child and Adolescent Education, Health, and Safety — was sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Wallace Foundation. The National Academies are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

Resources:
Report Highlights
www.nas.edu/SummerOpportunities

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Megan Lowry, Media Relations Officer
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202-334-2138; e-mail news@nas.edu