Summer is often viewed as a break from school and a chance to relax. But as the leader of a pediatric health system, I see summer as a stress test for the systems that support children’s health.
When the structure of the school year falls away, we gain a clearer view of the factors that shape a child’s well-being: access to nutritious food, safe places to play, nurturing adults, learning opportunities, and stable family support. These conditions matter because medical care is only one component of health. Research consistently shows that the vast majority of health outcomes—around 85%—are shaped by the circumstances of daily life.
Over the summer, dependable school breakfast and lunch give way to whatever a family can piece together. Built-in recess and physical education give way to unstructured hours, often leaving children to look for community spaces to play. The network of trusted teachers, counselors, and coaches loosens, placing more importance on the other adults in their lives.
For some kids, summer brings camp, bike rides, pickup basketball, library books, fresh produce, and new friendships—a season of enrichment and emotional growth. For others, summer break is filled with increased screen time, junk food, isolation at home, unsupervised hours, and little reading or learning. These children can quietly slip backward, both physically and mentally.
These challenges are present year-round, but they become impossible to ignore when the protective scaffolding of a school system falls away. Most families do the best they can with the resources they have. As communities, we need to continually examine the systems that support our children and understand that they have long-term health impacts.
How Summer Break Changes Kids’ Eating, Physical Activity, and Screen Time Habits
For millions of children, school guarantees healthy breakfast and lunch every day. When the cafeteria closes for the summer, the loss of summer meals often means more hunger and less balanced nutrition. Even when cost is not a barrier, a child’s daily diet can drift easily toward processed junk food and sugary treats, particularly in environments where they are readily on offer and marketed heavily.
Movement follows a similar pattern. The school day builds in activity by design: recess, physical education, and the simple act of walking from class to class. Less structured summer days don’t have to mean less activity, but children and families often must work within the available options. Are there safe parks and public pools nearby? Does the local community center offer enriching summer activities and opportunities for playing and learning? We know for many kids today, sedentary screen time is the default.
Summer programs are not merely recreation or childcare. They are an important driver of physical and mental health.
How Summer Programs Support Healthy Child Development
Gaps in the school-year safety net are felt most acutely by children in under-resourced neighborhoods and by those already struggling emotionally.
This is precisely where high-quality summer programs can make an incredible impact. New settings and experiences strengthen social and emotional skills. Camp and other structured programs build independence, confidence, and identity. They provide hands-on, experiential learning that prepares children for higher education, careers, and life.
These are durable skills with lifelong returns. Yet only about 55% of children nationwide attend structured summer programming of any kind—and cost remains the most common reason children are left out of this enrichment.
Why More Children Need Access to Summer Programs
Summer does not create these challenges. It exposes them. That gives us, as community leaders and advocates, the chance to identify gaps and fill them.
Employers, schools, health systems, community organizations, and policymakers all have a role to play in ensuring that children remain connected year round to nutritious food, enriching experiences, trusted adults, and safe environments.
At Nemours Children’s, we feel a responsibility to help shape the conditions that influence children’s health outside our walls. That is why three years ago, the Ginsburg Institute at Nemours Children’s launched a camp scholarship program for our associates’ children. This year, it enabled 40 kids to access summer enrichment that would otherwise have been out of reach. We also extend that same support to hundreds more children across our communities, regardless of whether they are our patients.
This spring, we held our annual Nemours-wide Feeding Hope Week, which supported more than a dozen different local food banks through virtual food drives and volunteer opportunities. It helped our partners provide more than 40,000 meals to families at this critical time of year.
In isolation, these are small efforts. But combined with many others, they contribute to the foundational aspects of health that are built outside the walls of a clinic or hospital.
Why Children’s Health Requires Year-Round Support
Caring for children through the lens of Whole Child Health means looking at everything that shapes a child’s health, both inside and outside our walls. Health does not pause for summer break, and neither should the support we build around it.
There is real opportunity here to address the problem at multiple levels. Communities must invest in affordable programs so an enriching summer is within reach for more children. Employers should work to offer flexibility and connect parents with camp and childcare resources. And each of us, in our own families and neighborhoods, can make sure the children in our lives are well fed, moving, connected, and safe. It is vital that all of us shift our mindset to understand that summer support and enrichment isn’t a “nice to have,” nor do these things fall only into the category of “social programs.” They are long-term investments in each child’s health.
At Nemours Children’s, we understand that children’s health is built every day, not only in clinics and hospitals, but in homes, schools, camps, neighborhoods, and communities. Taken together, these things build Whole Child Health. If we want every child to thrive, we must devote as much attention to those environments as we do to medical care itself. Health does not take a summer vacation, and neither should our commitment to creating the conditions for children to thrive.
For more from Dr. Moss on how to create the healthiest generations of children, follow him at larrymossmd.com or on LinkedIn.
