By now, you’ve probably seen the Wall Street Journal piece about the chaos of summer camp registration — frantic parents refreshing pages, systems crashing, spots gone in minutes. The frustration is valid. It shouldn’t be this hard.
But before we call this unprecedented, let me take you back. Not that far back. Just to a time when registration wasn’t online at all. When you had to show up.
Picture this: town rec programs — little league, ice skating, golf, hockey, swimming, town camp — each with its own signup window. Different days, different times, different locations — and different ages had to sign up on different days. And if you had more than one kid? Well, good luck.
You’d spend days mapping out which child could do what on which day, without overlapping, keeping in mind potential carpools and friends. You’d finally crack the code, show up to sign up Kid #1, walk away, only to realize that registering him knocked out the one time slot Kid #2 could do his thing. Whether you could undo it was another story, bringing you right back to square one. And no, you couldn’t do it from your couch in your pajamas, or on an airplane, at 11 p.m.
You had to be there. In person. With your birth certificates — plural, because every single program required them. And when signups officially started at 5 p.m., if you really wanted a spot in that popular program, you’d better have been there by 4. Work be damned — and work, by the way, was not remote.
Those lines, though. You made friends in those lines. Maybe a few enemies too.
And then there was preschool. My third child was in a school’s twos program, which gave us priority registration for the threes class the next year. Eight a.m. signup — on a Saturday, I believe. Except “priority” is a relative term when other parents arrived before the sun. Silly me rolled up on time at eight and found myself in the back of the line. He got in, for afternoons, not the preferred mornings. I was relieved anyway.
A few weeks later, the school not-so-gently suggested he’d be better served at the special education preschool. All that early morning chaos, and the universe had other plans entirely.
I’m not sharing this to be unsympathetic, or to tell today’s parents they have it easy. They don’t. The stress is real, no matter what era you’re registering in. What I am saying is that the underlying problem hasn’t changed: limited spots, packed schedules, kids who want to be with their friends, parents who are just trying to make it all work.
And yet we keep building systems — digital or otherwise — that seem designed to make things harder than they need to be.
This didn’t exist in my childhood. We went to camps and participated in activities, albeit far fewer than now. Things in general were less scheduled, less structured. I don’t recall my parents stressing about signups.
