The best part of summer, as I recall, was not my parents engaging with me: it was no one engaging with me, so that my mind could wander, where my imagination would live, and I would find inspiration in science fiction books, which would lead to discussions with friends about possibilities.

As the musician Sting has said,

“I was actually allowed to dream a-lot as a child. I worked with my father as a milkman, and he would get me up at 5, and in the morning when all of my school friends were in bed, and we’d drive around the streets and deliver milk, and he wouldn’t say very much to me apart from two pints here and three pints there — we didn’t talk — and so I was allowed in this very creative time in the day, as light was coming up, to dream, and I drempt, and drempt and drempt about futures that I might possibly have, fantasize I suppose, so I was in the creative mode from the very beginning just by being left alone.”

Kids don’t need adults playing with them.

And why did the author wake his kids up at 5am for no good reason other than he wanted to start playing with them? — not very good training for getting a full night’s sleep each night and waking up naturally. It is important to establish a natural rhythm for sleep, so that one does not get into the habit of skimping on sleep and then catching up on the weekend. If you establish a sleep rhythm, you will wake up after getting enough, rather than sleeping til noon.

And yes, 2.5 months, even though many people are trying to do away with that — trying to do away with the time that makes childhood so precious and special, to turn it into the dystopia that the work world is.