Kaiser Permanente pediatrician shares how to avoid the ‘summer slide’

Summer slide refers to the loss of academic gains that a student makes during the school year when they transition into summer, when there is much less of a schedule and they’re not really doing active learning.

By Martin Espinoza

Dr. Adrienne Silver wears many hats at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, most of them related to the health and well being of children. Silver, a Kaiser pediatrician of 24 years, runs the outpatient pediatric arm of both Kaiser’s family medicine residency program, as well as the provider’s medical student programs. She also is director of Kaiser’s medical education programs in Santa Rosa.

As a pediatrician and an educator, Silver is particularly interested in the concept of “summer slide,” the learning loss students can experience during the summer break. Silver says some studies have shown that students can lose between 30% to 40% of gains made during the previous school year.

That can translate into a month or two of learning, she said. In a recent interview with The Press Democrat, Silver discussed how summer slide impacts children and what parents can do to counter its effects. This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: What is summer slide and why does it happen?

A: Summer slide refers to the loss of academic gains that a student makes during the school year when they transition into summer, when there is much less of a schedule and they’re not really doing active learning.

When kids are in school, it’s a very structured environment they’re getting. They’re waking up generally at the same time every morning. They know what’s happening during the day, they’ve got P.E. built into their school day.

Summer time is a time when a lot of that goes out the window and kids are either not getting enough sleep or their sleep becomes super erratic, which then leads to not having great sleep throughout the summer. For a lot of kids, especially the younger age, not having that structure can often lead to a lot of behavioral issues.

Q: We’re half way through the summer. Is it too late to mitigate the impact of summer slide?

A: It’s never to late to engage your kids in the activities that counter summer slide.

Q: Are there areas of academics that are impacted more than others, say math vs. reading, or both?

A: Both math and reading are the ones where kids tend to really lose the most, mostly because acquiring those skills requires a lot of practice and repetition. Those are really the two areas where we see the biggest discrepancies in loss in learning from previous years.

Q: What specific issues do today’s kids have to deal with over the summer?

A: Summer unfortunately has become a time of free screen-time and parents are at work many times and not able to regulate their kids. So not only are kids not doing academics, but they’re potentially doing tons of screen time that could also be detrimental to their brain development and to their overall health.

Q: Detrimental to overall health?

A: We know that extra screen time means more sitting around which means a higher incidence of obesity. There are a lot of different factors that come into play when we lose that structure of the school day.

That really impacts kids whose families don’t have the resources to necessarily send kids to camp, where both parents are working so they can’t monitor what the kids are doing.

Q: Is there a positive role that technology can play?

A: Yes. Not all technology is bad. There definitely are some academic programs that kids can do that are fun. There are math games that they can play. There are programs online that encourage literacy.

But yes, the point is it’s really morphed from all that outside time and running around and playing with your friends and riding bikes and swimming … to now where kids are just spending much more time indoors, sitting. It’s definitely a challenge for parents.

Q: I understand that some groups or communities are more impacted by summer slide than others.

A: It really depends on socio-economic factors. There are a lot of houses where one parent is home and has the ability to drive their kids to places and do activities with their kids and structure things a bit more.

Summer camps are costly and that can also be an impediment to lower income, socio-economic classes that can’t afford that or whose parents are working from dusk to dawn. They’re really in a tough spot in terms of what to do with their kids in the summertime.

I remember early in my career always being so jealous of my friends who were teachers because they got the whole summer with their kids.

Q: What are some things parents can do to mitigate summer slide?

A: There are definitely camps in town that are not super costly. We have recreation centers where often offer summer enrichment activities. There are tech camps, sport camps, all sorts of different camps that would be applicable to kids that are generally eight or older, generally the cutoff age.

For kids younger than eight, you can definitely work with your child on continuing to read during the summer and having contests around reading.

Lots of libraries have prizes that are super motivating to young kids for who reads the most. There are workbooks online that you can access that are free … math workbooks, reading workbooks that you can download for free and parents can go over with their kids or caregivers can go over.

The other thing that is really fun is visiting the farmer’s market or going to the grocery store and intellectually stimulating their kids to count the number of apples that you see or do some simple math about, for example, the percentages of apples that are of a certain clor.

You could definitely walk around and work with your kids on reading labels and start to understand things about nutrition.

For your middle school kids, reading super important and this is really the age where you can set contests in the family for who reads the most books over the summer and include the parents in those activities. Scavenger hunts are a fun one for both elementary and middle school kids.

Q: What are your recommendations around sleep?

A: The sleep piece is the same for all the ages. Parents should really try to make sure that kids are getting enough sleep, that they’re trying to stay on schedule. That will really mess with their your circadian rhythm when their sleep is all over the place.

Q: How do you get over the idea that summer is a time for recreation, a break from school and all that structured learning.

A: The good news is you don’t need more than 15 or 20 minutes. You really don’t. It’s really just about stimulating your brain. We’d like it to be more than 15 or 20 minutes, but we’re really not talking about a ton of time that’s required to do this.

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