Mark Heine, Bright Futures for Youth | Other Voices — The Union
June 12, 2025
As kids start the long-awaited and much-deserved summer break, parents will likely come across stories about the so-called “summer slide,” when students experience a modest decline in academic skills learned during the school year, especially in English and math.
It’s an across-the-board issue, affecting every grade and a vast majority of students, regardless of ethnicity, gender or even income level. It’s as much a part of the break as backyard barbecues, baseball games and summer camps.
Some parents attempt to help their kids avoid the slide with a push for more learning over summer. But before going up against Mother Nature and Father Time to ensure that your child retains what they learned this past school year, let me share some advice.
Don’t worry about the summer slide. Embrace summer. The break is good for kids and likely helps their long-term learning.
Like hot summer days and the seemingly never-ending “I’m so bored” comments from kids on break, the summer slide has likely been around for many generations, certainly long before research started on the topic three decades ago. Yep, when you and I enthusiastically ran out of class to start every summer, we lost some knowledge learned during the just-completed school year.
But we also learned a lot over the summer. Just a bit differently than during the school year. So do our children a generation later.
The beat-the-heat break is important on so many levels, especially emotionally and intellectually. Kids’ brains need and deserve summer. School is stressful. Learning is tough. And the social aspect of school can be exhausting and often overwhelming.
So, summer should be fun. A lot of fun. Fun combined, hopefully, with some learning opportunities in new places and ways.
Just a few examples are attending summer camps, exploring nature and participating in sports. Each offers a different – and often new – way of learning.
Summer camps provide different learning experiences than school, from playing new games to trying new things, from art to music.
Summer camps are also good for making new friends, especially those who attend other schools or are from different backgrounds. (Bright Futures for Youth has numerous summer offerings – summer camps and enrichment clinics are free, and the GREAT Camp, a camp in partnership with the Grass Valley Police Department has a nominal cost. Other organizations in the community also offer summer activities.).
Nature hikes and hanging by the Yuba River are excellent free, hands-on lessons. You can identify and learn about flowers, plants, trees, animals and bugs with books or even with numerous smartphone apps.
Playing sports in the backyard, neighborhood or park encourages exercise, camaraderie, sportsmanship and often creativity as kids develop new games or modify existing ones (ask anyone who has ever played Wiffle ball).
These activities, and many others, are an important part of summer and help with the natural rhythm of learning and rebooting our often-overworked minds. They also help us connect, grow, learn and relax.
In some ways, summer helps build the foundation for long-term success at school.
We try new things – how to play a new sport, paint with watercolors, put a wiggly worm on a fishing line – and learn to be brave, focused, strong and even curious. We read books for fun, spend time with grandparents who have a lifetime of experiences, and often visit new places, from the local library or museum to national parks, cities or even far-away countries. Of course, lower-income or working families may not have as many – or even the same – experiences, but there are free and low-cost activities in our community.
The “summer slide” could as easily be called the “summer tide,” offering a wave of new learning opportunities. You can learn just about anywhere this summer.
So, relax. Stop worrying. What kids forgot from the previous school year will return in a few weeks during review this fall.
The summer slide is a short-term issue. Learning is a lifelong process and often requires recalling knowledge from weeks, months or even decades ago. Adults do it all the time. Our brain is like a file cabinet, filled with information just waiting to be accessed and found.
What’s an adverb? Remember long division? What are the state capitals?
Our brain sputters for a bit and then we recall how to carry over and Bismarck, Cheyenne, Concord and Pierre.
Rather than worrying about the summer slide, embrace summer and its many learning opportunities with your child. Day and weeklong camps, the local parks, the nearby river. Find some great books and lay them around the house to help jump-start reading.
Play board games, card games or even video games with your kid (some screen time is OK, just not too much).
Just enjoy summer. It’s a great learning experience.
Mark Heine is a school social worker and child/family psychotherapist for Nevada Joint Union School District and President of the Bright Futures for Youth Board of Directors. Heine, who moved to Nevada County in 2013, is married and has two children who enjoy every moment of summer.