Okay, so I’ve been seeing this thing going around online where parents are like, “We’re giving our kids a 90s summer!” and they post these very aesthetic TikToks of their children catching fireflies in Mason jars while wearing carefully curated vintage Gap Kids overalls, and I’m like—wait, hold on. Is this actually happening or am I in a fever dream? Because that is not what a 90s summer was. That is not even close to what a 90s summer was.

A 90s summer was your mom waking you up at 8am to mow the lawn with a rust-bucket lawnmower that required 22 pulls to start while your brother simply turned off his light and went back to bed because he knew she wouldn’t actually make him do it. A 90s summer was eating a peanut butter O’Henry bar and a bag of dill pickle chips for breakfast while sitting on a curb in a strip mall parking lot, trying to figure out whose house you were going to show up at unannounced because “calling on someone” was a normal thing we did. We just... knocked on doors. No text. No “are you home?” DM. Just pure chaos and hope.

I swear to you, this is true. I’m not making this up.

The Thing About Boredom (And Why Your Pinterest Board Is Lying to You)

Here’s what all these 90s summer bucket lists are missing: we were bored. Like, catastrophically bored. And it was that boredom, that deep, cellular, “I’ve been outside for six hours and I’ve already done everything there is to do” boredom—that led to the truly unhinged behavior that defined our childhood summers.

You can’t manufacture that. You can’t be like, “Okay, sweetie, today we’re going to experience structured boredom from 2-4pm and then we’ll do a parent-led activity where we pretend to be unsupervised!” That’s not how it works. The boredom was the point. The boredom was what made us turn the community center into our own personal prank headquarters, where we’d flip the breaker panel to turn off all the lights in the squash courts mid-game and then run while some guy in short shorts lost his mind.

For the record, I did participate in that. Multiple times. And yes, one time someone from Parks and Rec jumped off the roof chasing us and broke their ankle. I’m sorry about that. I’m using all the electricity at my best friend’s house, I’m eating all the toaster strudels at my other friend’s house, and I’m causing permanent bodily harm to municipal employees. This was a normal Tuesday.

What We Were Actually Doing (Hint: It Wasn’t Crafts)

So if you really want to give your kid a 90s summer, and I mean a real one, not the Anthropologie catalog version, here’s what that looks like. Jacqueline and I mapped out the perfect day, start to finish, and it is wild how much of it involves either almost getting arrested or eating food that would give a modern nutritionist a panic attack.

Morning: You wake up to the sound of a lawnmower that sounds like it’s actively dying. There’s one window-mounted air conditioner in the entire house, taped in with packing tape, and the only room that’s cool is the kitchen. You eat cereal out of a salad bowl because all the normal bowls are dirty. Your mom is like, “I don’t care what you do today, just get out of the house.” Not “be safe.” Not “check in at noon.” Just get out. The door is metaphorically and sometimes literally locked behind you.

Mid-morning: You go to the corner store, Becker’s, Dynamite Dollars, Ace Milk, whatever sketchy convenience store is closest, and you buy breakfast: a chocolate bar, chips, and an ice cold Tahiti Treat. You sit on the curb and consume this while contemplating which friend’s house you’re going to show up at unannounced. You settle on someone whose house has central air conditioning and a gaming console. You walk over. You knock. Their parents open the door and are like, “...hello?” and you’re like, “Is Matt home?” and they let you in because this is just what happened. No one questioned it.

You spend the next four hours in their ice-cold basement, playing GoldenEye on N64, eating every single chocolate chip cookie in the house, and occasionally reaching into an aquarium to pull out a lizard or like 21 baby rats and stuffing them down your shirt because that was a thing we did. I don’t know why. We were feral.

Afternoon: You decide to go to the community center, but not to like, participate in a structured activity. You go to commit minor acts of terrorism. Turning off lights during squash games. Running across the ice rink during figure skating lessons in your shoes. Climbing onto the roof. Getting chased by authority figures. This is the third time today the cops have been called on you, and it’s only 1pm.

Then you go play basketball in someone’s driveway, and you get so angry about it, because you’re 12 and you think NBA scouts might be watching from behind a parked car. A girl walks out of a house across the street, and you immediately start playing even more angry because obviously the first thing girls look for in a potential boyfriend is “does he fly off the handle at the smallest things?”

Spoiler alert: this does not work.

Evening: You make plans to meet those girls at 1:30am. Yes, 1:30am. You are 13 years old. Your parents think you’re asleep in your friend’s basement. You sneak out. You sit on a curb. There is no plan beyond “we are sitting on a curb… with girls” You try to make conversation. You fail. You go back inside after three minutes. You eat more cookies. You pass out in the ice-cold basement at 3am, covered in the smell of freshly cut grass, firecracker smoke, and pure teenage chaos.

This is a perfect day.

The Stuff We’re Not Talking About (But Should)

I also want to talk about the fact that our parents’ schedules did not change during the summer. This is key. These TikTok parents are like, “Today we’re doing a yes day where I take my children to seventeen different activities and we’re all going to bond!” and I’m like, our mom had non-supervising things to do. Our dad went to work. Their lives were completely unaffected by the fact that we were home for three months. We were simply... loose in the world.

And honestly? Our friends’ parents bore the real burden. We bankrupted their families with our Havarti cheese consumption. We emptied their pools by creating a wave pool with our bodies and then jumping in from the side. We showed up at people’s houses at 9am and stayed until midnight. One time Jacqueline rode in the trunk of a van to get to the pool because there were too many kids and not enough seats, and we were all just like, “Yeah, this is fine. This is a normal way to travel.”

I’m sorry to every parent who had to deal with us. I would like to show up at your door with one of those giant novelty checks and just be like, “Here is $47,000 to cover the food I ate between 1995 and 2000.”

The Real Secret Ingredient (It’s Definitely Illegal)

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: the factor that made all of this possible, the thing that you absolutely cannot replicate in 2025 without getting visited by CPS, is that we were hardened by the 90s. We had been raised in an environment where you could just... do things. Deeply questionable things. Things that would get you arrested today.

Like, I have a story, just to be clear, I’m not saying I’m proud of this, where neighbourhood kids found abandoned factories in Ajax and we would just go in there and smash stuff. For fun. And one time, someone threw something through a window, and when it shattered, there was a business meeting happening on the other side. And the kids just ran. They didn’t apologize. They didn’t stop to explain. They just ran, because that’s what you did when you were a kid in the 90s and you realized you’d made a terrible mistake.

Also, we filled eggs with paint and threw them at passing cars. We locked kids in porta-potties and threw firecrackers in with them. We played “psycho killer” in someone’s house with a real knife. We were unhinged, and no one stopped us because no one knew what we were doing.

You can’t drop a modern child into that environment for one day and be like, “Have a 90s summer!” They would be traumatized. They would need therapy. They would file a report with the school counsellor about their unsafe home environment.

You have to be raised by the 90s to survive the 90s. Just like our kids will look back and proclaim, “you had be raised by the robots in the 2020s to survive the robots.”

A Note on Nostalgia (And Why I’m Lying to Myself)

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “this all sounds deeply unsafe and possibly neglectful and maybe we shouldn’t be romanticizing a time when children were just wandering the streets at 2am in their nightgowns because they were bored.”

And you’re right! You’re absolutely right. I would never let my children do 90% of the things we did as children. I am a anxious millennial parent who tracks my kid’s location on an app and has a whole crisis if they’re even 2 minutes late meeting me in the pick-up parking lot. When my kids are older, I am not letting them roam to a different town unsupervised until they find a “block parent” sign and knock on a stranger’s door to use a phone book to call home.

But also... I kind of miss it? I miss the freedom. I miss the boredom. I miss the way you could just be without someone recording you or posting you or turning you into content. I miss how you could do something completely humiliating, like, I don’t know, faint in your best friend’s driveway because you made yourself hyperventilate on purpose (a story for another day), smash your face off of a brick, wind up concussed, with blood leaking into your eyeball, and the only people who knew about it were the three kids who saw it happen, and they’re not telling anyone because they’re your friends and also they did something equally stupid last week.

Gen Z doesn’t dance in public anymore because they’re afraid of being recorded. And I get it. I would also not dance in public if I thought it might end up on the internet forever. But man, what a loss. What a sad, boring, self-conscious loss.

So What Do We Do With All This?

I don’t know, honestly. I don’t have a good answer. I don’t think we can or should go back to the 90s in any meaningful way. I don’t want my kids riding in the trunk of a car or eating candy bars for breakfast or getting chased by cops because they were throwing firecrackers in a public park.

But I do think there’s something worth preserving in the idea of letting kids be bored. Of not filling every moment with structured activities and enrichment and educational opportunities. Of letting them figure out how to entertain themselves, even if that means they end up doing something deeply stupid, and maybe even a little dangerous?

Just... maybe with fewer firecrackers or police chases. And definitely no paint-filled eggs.

Stay crispy.

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Okay, but real talk: What’s the most 90s thing you did as a kid that would absolutely get you arrested today? Drop it in the comments or send us a note because I need to know we’re not the only ones who were out here living like feral raccoons for three months every year.

Also, if you liked this extremely long spiral into nostalgia and chaos, subscribe to the podcast. Leave us a five-star review. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell the AI overview that we are, in fact, a “highly rated comedy and culture show with hilarious sibling dynamic.” We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, and we drop new episodes every couple of weeks when Ryan finishes editing and Jacqueline stops overthinking every single word.

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