We Should Stop Counting Down Summers

What the viral parenting trend gets wrong.

Not too long ago there was the viral refrain on reels stating that “you only get eighteen summers with your child.” Now the idea has evolved into something even more precise: “one summer with your baby, three with your toddler, ten with your child, four with your teenager.”

The videos are usually set to soft music and filled with picturesque moments: toddlers running through sprinklers, sandy feet dangling from beach chairs, sleepy babies in swimsuits, popsicle-stained smiles, golden-hour bike rides, and mothers looking wistfully into the distance as though they alone have discovered the passage of time.

If you're anything like me, somewhere between the music swelling and the countdown ticking away, you feel it: that little knot in your stomach.

Gulp.

Have I appreciated it enough? Am I being present enough? Have I already missed it?

And that, my friends, is just about when I put my phone down and reject and rebuke it all. Here’s why:

While I understand the impulse behind these reminders, l I find myself resisting them more and more. Yes, time is precious. Yes, in its own beautiful, magical way childhood is fleeting. But I find this trend cultivates anxiety and perfectionism, encourages grasping and striving, rather than a posture of gratitude, surrender, and opened hands. They encourage us to view our children's lives through the lens of diminishing inventory, counting down a finite number of opportunities, while subtly suggesting that each season must be fully savored, fully documented, and fully transformed into a "core memory" before it slips away.

What begins as an invitation to cherish the present can quickly become another burden (as if there aren’t enough of those already). It becomes one more way for parents, particularly mothers, to wonder whether they are doing enough. Another reason to feel that ordinary days somehow fall short — which is perhaps the greatest lie of all.

More and more, I am convinced that holiness—and much of what is truly extraordinary—lies hidden within the ordinary and mundane.

What are we robbing our children of when we perpetuate the fallacy that life is found primarily in the picturesque moments? When we teach, even unintentionally, that the days worth remembering are the vacations, the grand adventures, the perfectly curated experiences?

A child's life is not built on a handful of magical summers. It is built on thousands of ordinary moments: helping make dinner, riding in the grocery cart, listening to stories before bed, watching a parent fold laundry, lingering around the dinner table, running errands together on a rainy afternoon, catching bugs, watching a sunset, lying in the grass and find shapes in the clouds, blowing a dandelion and making a wish, learning the sounds of the birds, studying the language of the flowers.

The great deception of social media is not that it shows beautiful moments; it is that it persuades us those moments are the point.

Yet the Christian story has always suggested otherwise. God enters the world not in spectacle, but in obscurity. Most of Christ's earthly life was spent in hiddenness. Holiness is formed less often in mountaintop experiences than in faithfulness to the duties immediately before us.

Perhaps the danger of counting summers is not merely that it makes parents anxious. It is that it tempts us to overlook the quiet abundance of ordinary life, convincing us that meaning resides somewhere else—somewhere more memorable, more photogenic, more worthy of a reel.

But here’s the other, albeit uncomfortable and perhaps morbid, problem I find with this trend:

We are not promised eighteen summers with our children. We are not even promised tomorrow. Some families will have fewer.

And, uncomfortable though it may be to acknowledge, it is not always the child who goes first. Much of the rhetoric surrounding these reminders assumes that we will be present for every stage of our children's lives, faithfully counting down the years until they leave home. But none of us has been given that guarantee.

The truth is that we do not know whether we will have two summers, eighteen, or fifty. We do not know whether we will be the ones grieving a loss or the ones whose absence will be grieved. The future is mercifully hidden from us.

If these reminders are meant to impress upon us the fragility of life, then they are pointing toward something true. Yet, I wonder whether the proper response to life's uncertainty is not to count more carefully, but to hold more gratefully. To stop treating our lives as a ledger of summers remaining and instead receive each season as the gift that it is.

Why do we speak as though the relationship reaches its conclusion when a child becomes an 18? Some of my favorite memories with my parents and siblings have occurred in my 20s and 30s. The particular form of parenting changes, certainly, but change is not the same thing as loss.

When I was young and grieving a change I was anxious about, my dear Grandma Joan held my hand and told me, "Sweetheart, the only guaranteed thing in this life is change."

At the time, I hated the thought. I wanted to freeze the moment I was in and keep it forever. Yet the very change I feared ended up bearing fruit I could never have imagined.

Perhaps that is precisely what these viral reminders get wrong. They treat change primarily as something to mourn rather than something to receive. Every season contains losses, yes, but it also contains gifts that cannot arrive until the previous season has passed. Rather than counting how many summers I may have left, I would rather gratefully receive the one in front of me.

Indeed, “do not be anxious about tomorrow,” Christ commands us, “for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day” (Matthew 6:34). Jesus reminds us of the importance of being present, of not having anxiety about the future.

Tomorrow belongs only to God.

May we spend this summer, and every moment gifted to us, loving the people before us well, receiving each day as it comes, and trusting that our future — when placed in the hands of God — will be one of goodness and prosperity rather than scarcity.