The Incredible Things You Can Do Instead of Paying For American Summer Camp
The nitty-gritty behind my family’s 2025 Costa Rica summer plan
Thanks for your interest in how my family will pull off our 2025 American summer camp opt-out! This post will explain how I planned our five-week trip to Costa Rica for our family of five and the costs of keeping our three kids moderately engaged all summer without signing up for traditional American day camp.
Because this post contains some hard financial numbers about my family’s spending and our personal childcare arrangements, I’m choosing to put it behind a paywall. Also, I spent many, many, many hours planning this adventure, on which I drew from extensive personal and professional research skills. Thanks for supporting my work as a journalist with your paying membership!
To start, I’ll offer a big caveat: I am aware of and grateful for my financial privilege of having resources to spend on childcare, summer camp, and travel. This whole endeavor is only possible because my husband and I have computer-based jobs and the flexibility to work from anywhere for a month.
I framed our overall summer budget around average summer camp costs in our area, a budget higher than many American families can afford. Those families especially lose out the most under our expensive, competitive, broken summer care system. I hope it’s crystal clear that I understand this plan is by no means a solution accessible to everyone. I am sharing it, however, to encourage people to think outside of the box about what summer with kids could look like.
Our public school calendar has 10.5 weeks of summer this year, so I sketched out the associated costs of our typical pattern of 9 weeks of summer camp and one week of summer vacation. Using this as an outline, I created a budget to think about “summer costs” as one pool of money I could get creative with rather than “camp costs” and “vacation costs.”