A professional babysitter’s no-cost fixes for summer boredom and bedtime battles
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None of this is really about being a perfect parent. It's about the small stuff.
Chelsea Anderson babysits for a living, has an audience watching her invent games out of cardboard tubes, and will tell you within the first five minutes of talking to her that she doesn’t have kids of her own. She says it like a disclaimer, not a flex. “Don’t forget, I don’t have kids,” she told me. “I could come up with these ideas because I’m not in charge of any of the back of house decisions that take so much brainpower.”
That distinction turns out to be the whole reason she’s good at this. She’s the fun aunt with unlimited bandwidth, not the person who also has to figure out dinner, homework, and whether anyone still has clean socks. So when I asked her, point blank, what parents apologize to her for that they shouldn’t, she didn’t hesitate.
“Everything,” she said. “Literally everything.” Her actual answer was that parents need to lower the bar.
This advice is the kind I want every parent of a small kid to display on their fridge as a daily reminder.
Anderson partnered with Pirate’s Booty this summer on Captain Bob’s Summer Quest, a free downloadable guide of low effort activities. Full disclosure, my kids are 14 and 20 now and they still ask for bags of that stuff on grocery runs, so I was already a fan of this brand going in. But what Anderson said held up entirely on its own, with or without the snack tie in. Parents she works with are exhausted, over scheduled, and convinced a good summer requires a Pinterest board and a craft closet. It doesn’t.
The real trick is boredom, then access
Her most brilliant insight comes down to two things she notices in the households where kids entertain themselves well. First, unstructured time, real chunks of it, because a kid needs to be bored before they get an idea, and then they need time to actually chase the idea once they have it. Second, open access to stuff. Not a locked craft cabinet, not “ask me first.” An invention box a kid can walk up to and use without an adult greenlighting it.
Build an Invention Box
Ask her what’s actually in that box and she gets specific fast. A low temp hot glue gun for older kids, because apparently that tool can take a kid further creatively than anything else you’ll buy them. (Gluing junk to other junk is also the extent of my personal crafting abilities, so I’m personally a fan of this one.) For younger kids, quality tape (like painting or masking tape that’s easy to remove) and lids. Lids become wheels, robot faces, steering wheels, whatever the moment needs. And cardboard tubes, the free kind you already have, because kids love playing with scale and a big box beats a small one every time.
For a bored kid and zero prep time
When I asked what to do with a genuinely bored, no prep kid standing in front of you right now, she didn’t hand me a craft project. She said simply, “Add to the story.” Pretend you’re pirates hunting treasure and draw a map. Pretend you’re bears in a snowy forest. The specific activity matters less than whether the kid gets to be a co-creator instead of just watching you run the show.
Why a whole day of dinosaurs beats an hour of Barbies
Truth be told, I always really stunk at playing with my kids. Things like Barbies bored me even as a kid myself, and I never developed a knack for my son’s “wrestling guys” either. And because I’ve never shied from saying the quiet part out loud, I know I’m not the only parent who struggles to get involved here. So, I asked what type of play can actually pull parents in as much as the kids. Her answer explained a lot about why my own attempts always fizzled.
Playing with one toy is harder than it sounds, she said, because there’s an invisible box around what you’re allowed to do with it next. Barbies stay Barbies. Wrestling guys stay wrestling guys. Committing to an entire world does the opposite. Decide the whole day is a dinosaur day or a princess day, and suddenly every random thing that happens can get folded into it. Yes, and dinosaurs would do this. Yes, and princesses would handle it that way. It’s closer to improv than to a craft project, which turns out to be a much lower bar for a parent who isn’t naturally inventive.
It also solves the parts of the day nobody wants to fight about, dinner included. The theme doesn’t have to end the second a chore shows up, so eating dinner as pirates keeps the whole thing rolling instead of hitting a wall. And kids notice the effort. She said watching a parent actually commit to the bit, full dinosaur voice included, is often what turns something small into the memory that sticks.
Fix your bedtime battle
The tip I’m actually going to steal, for whoever’s still in the bedtime trenches, is this. Don’t end the story at bedtime. Anderson’s theory is that most bedtime routines signal the fun is officially over, which is exactly why kids fight them. If you’ve spent the day as pirates, stay pirates. Walk the plank into bed. Improvise a toilet paper eye patch. Brush your teeth like a pirate would. It’s a small reframe, and it works because it doesn’t ask a tired parent to invent anything new, just keep the bit going for ten more minutes.
The little things win
Her closing argument, unprompted, was that none of this is really about being a perfect parent. It’s about the small stuff. Catching lightning bugs. A pirate map you distressed with old tea bags until it looked ancient. She’s right that kids remember those over the elaborate stuff, and she’s right that most of us could stand to lower the bar considerably before we run out of summer.
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