I think about this a lot, so I’m just going to say it.
Most of what we plan for our kids’ summers won’t make it into their long-term memory.
The pool days will blur into one pool day. The vacation will compress into three or four specific images and a feeling. The camp t-shirts will end up in a donation pile. The themed weeks at the rec center — sports week, water week, science week — will dissolve into a vague impression that summer was busy.
This isn’t a sad thing. It’s just how memory works. The brain doesn’t store summers in calendar order. It stores them in moments. And it picks the moments according to rules that don’t have much to do with how much we paid or how carefully we planned.
Which means the question I find myself asking now, twice as a mom and a full decade running a studio full of other people’s kids, is:
What’s the version of summer that gets in?
What the brain actually keeps
If you ask any adult about a summer from their childhood, you don’t get an itinerary. You get fragments.
The smell of someone’s basement. The exact spot on a lake. The name of a kid they only knew for a week. The first time they did the thing they were scared of. The song that was playing.
Memory researchers have a name for this — they call them flashbulb memories, or sometimes peak moments. The technical version is that the brain encodes most strongly when something has emotional intensity, novelty, and a sense of being part of a group doing something together. That’s the trio. Feeling, newness, belonging.
The summers we remember are not the ones with the most activities packed into them. They’re the ones with the most moments that hit those three notes at the same time.
And here’s the part I want to sit with for a minute. Almost nothing in the average kid’s summer hits all three.
Pool days hit belonging, sometimes feeling, almost never novelty by week four. Generic day camps hit belonging in a watered-down way, occasionally novelty, rarely deep feeling. Screen time hits none. Even a family trip, which seems like it should hit all three, mostly compresses in memory because so much of it is logistics — packing, driving, eating, sleeping — and the actual peak moments inside it are smaller than we think.
The moments that survive into adulthood are unusual. Specific. Often surprisingly small. And they almost always involve doing something with other people that felt slightly outside the normal current of life.
What music does that almost nothing else does
This is the part I have to be careful about, because I run a music studio and I could very easily sound like I’m overselling. So let me just describe what I’ve watched.
I have watched kids walk into a room on a Monday morning of camp not really knowing anyone, holding their instruments awkwardly, sitting as far from the drums as they can physically get.
I have watched those same kids on a Friday afternoon look up from their instrument and lock eyes with the bass player on the cue to come in. I have watched them laugh because someone dropped a beat. I have watched a ten-year-old in the back of the room playing a guitar part to a song they couldn’t have played five days earlier, and then look at me with an expression I cannot quite describe — somewhere between I did that and I am here.
That look is the thing.
That’s the memory that goes in. Not the lesson plan. Not the scales they ran through on Tuesday. The moment when a song they didn’t write, with kids they barely knew, became a thing that existed because they were in the room.
Music hits all three notes at once. The feeling is obvious. The novelty is built in — you’re playing something that didn’t exist before you started. And the belonging is the deepest version of belonging there is for a kid: this song doesn’t work without me.
Twenty years later, that’s the kind of moment that comes back. Not as a story. As a feeling. As the thing in the chest that makes a grown adult pick up a guitar at thirty after a hard week and remember that they used to be a person who played music.
What I tell parents who ask me about summer
I get this question every spring, in different versions. Should I sign her up for music camp? Should I keep him in lessons over the summer? Is it worth it? Will she even remember this?
I think the worth-it question is the wrong frame. Most things are not worth it on a cost-per-day basis. Pool memberships aren’t worth it. Vacations aren’t worth it. Half the gear we buy our kids isn’t worth it. We don’t sign them up for those things because of math.
The better question, the one I find clarifying, is this:
Which week of this summer am I most likely to find in their head twenty years from now?
Sometimes it’s the trip. Often it’s not. Often it’s the unexpected week. The one where they did something they hadn’t done before, with people who weren’t part of the school-year story, in a way that gave them a small surprise about who they were.
Those weeks don’t always announce themselves on the calendar. But when you spot one — when something hits feeling and novelty and belonging at the same time — that’s the one to protect. That’s the one to make room for.
The smaller version of this idea
I’m aware this is a big claim for a summer plan. I’m not trying to oversell a single week. Plenty of kids have rich, full lives without ever doing anything specifically memorable in a given summer, and that’s fine. Not every week needs to leave a mark.
But I keep thinking about this because I have two kids of my own now, and I have watched a full decade of other people’s kids cycle through our studio, and the pattern is too consistent to ignore. The kids who play music with other kids — really play, not just take group classes — get something they don’t get from anything else. And they remember it.
It doesn’t have to be camp. It can be a garage band a kid puts together with friends. A worship team. A school ensemble that actually plays together instead of just rehearsing. A summer where they go to a friend’s house and the friend plays drums and they bring their guitar.
The point isn’t the venue. The point is the room. Other kids in it. An instrument each. A song that wasn’t a song before they got there.
That’s the thing the brain keeps.
One quiet note at the end
This summer we’re running JAM Camp at Music Junkie Studios — two sessions, June 22–26 and July 6–10, capped intentionally small. It’s a room with other kids in it, an instrument each, and a song that wasn’t a song on Monday. That’s the entire premise.
Details here if you want them. And if you don’t, I hope you find your kid the room some other way this summer. The version of summer that gets in — the one they’ll still have when they’re thirty — almost always involves one.