Emma Brockes has taken aim at the parenting trend known as 18 summers in, arguing that it pushes families to treat school holidays like a project. Writing from New York, she says the idea turns summer into a race to make every day memorable.
She describes the trend’s slogan as “you only get 18 summers with your kid” and says it is spread through social media posts carrying the 18 summers hashtag. The same ecosystem has spawned diaries, binders and other products built around documenting time with children, while Instagram reels reach for phrases such as “ultimate family formula” and “three steps to deepen your relationship with your child.”
New York and “making memories”
Brockes says parents in New York can become intent on “making memories” for their children, and she treats that phrase as part of the problem. In her telling, it formalizes ordinary life and nudges parents into treating summer like an extended school assignment rather than a stretch of unstructured days.
The article also pulls in other modern parenting labels — helicopter, snowplow and Fafo — to show how quickly parenting language turns into a system of rules. 18 summers fits that pattern because it asks parents to count down the holidays left before children leave home, then manage those weeks as if every hour had to earn its place.
That logic runs into a blunt contradiction in the piece: the trend tells parents to cherish limited summers, but children in “these economic times” often keep holidaying with parents until they are roughly 35. The gap between the slogan and that reality is where the criticism lands. A family can be told to compress childhood into 18 summers, yet the practical relationship between parent and grown child rarely ends on that timetable.
Parenting pressure and summer holidays
Brockes’s point is less about rejecting family time than about resisting the pressure to stage it. Long, unstructured holidays do not need to be converted into a “making memories” exercise, and the trend’s appeal lies partly in its commercial wrapper: once ordinary days are recast as a mission, diaries and binders become part of the script.
That leaves the reader with a straightforward question about influence. The piece shows how 18 summers works as a social media language and a product category, but it also leaves open how far it has moved beyond reels, hashtags and neat slogans into actual day-to-day parenting. For now, the article’s warning is simple: not every summer has to be optimized to count.
