I remember glorious summers of nothing.

By “nothing,” I mean everything kids did back then: spending hours at the neighborhood pool and library, staying up all night reading an actual book, walking to the grocery store or a convenience store to browse the candy, playing “Ms. Pac-Man” on a coin-operated arcade game -- and a few years later, on an Atari. Setting up lemonade stands, riding bikes, exploring the trails behind our house, making up games with cousins and other kids in the neighborhood.

This throwback summer was what I envisioned I would give my children for a month this year.

Most of their previous summers have involved camps, activities or summer school. I had a few reasons why I thought a change this year could be mutually beneficial. First, they were old enough, at 14 and 12, to stay at home unsupervised for stretches of time. Also, it was going to be Ramadan, and we would be fasting from dawn to sunset many of those days. I didn’t want to deal with trying to wake them up for summer school when they were tired and cranky, nor did I want them outside in the heat if they were fasting. And, lastly, I had taken on one of those ambitious volunteer projects that had sounded like less work in theory than it ended up being in real life.

Maybe if my kids were less busy, I reasoned, I’d have more time, too.

I also hoped they might learn to become more consistent about chores, read more books and maybe even learn to deal with being bored, a skill lacking in children raised in a digital age.

My plan didn’t work out exactly as I had hoped.

The New Yorker recently published a witty “Shouts and Murmurs” essay about what life was like before the internet. I immediately texted a link to my children.

“I have never read anything more pretentious,” the 14-year-old replied. I informed them that what sounded like parody to them was what my childhood actually resembled.

The younger one, the less cynical of the two, asked, “Did you really do all this stuff?”

I told him about the 13 volumes of children’s World Book Encyclopedia we owned growing up. One hardcover volume was titled “Things to Do.” It’s how I learned to make a papier-mache pinata and what I consulted when I ran out of ideas. It was like a paper version of YouTube tutorials, I tried to explain.

“That seems nice,” he said.

“Childhood was better before the internet,” I texted, caught up in a wave of nostalgia. “It was more free.”

“Childhood was better during the Black Death,” the teenager texted back. “It was more free.”

That’s the sarcasm font, for the uninitiated.

The array of technology at kids’ disposal can easily take over an “unscheduled” summer, like television could in the past. There are so many more options for mindless screen-gazing or scrolling. Combine that with fewer neighborhood kids available during the day: With more single-parent and two-working-parent households, more kids are in camps all day. Older kids are signed up for enrichment activities or summer school, out of both necessity and a culture of competitive parenting. I have a friend who sets an alarm to schedule her son for the camps he wants the minute registration opens in March.

My kids’ digitally enhanced boredom (aka hours playing video games and surfing memes on Instagram) made me feel anxious and guilty. While their friends were probably doing calculus, writing dramas in French and building robots, my kids were watching “Bob’s Burgers” reruns and texting me pictures of an empty fridge, captioned “We legit have no food.”

Their unscheduled month of summer boredom was starting to stress me out. So, I signed them up for an hour of math a couple of times a week, just to make sure their brains weren’t rotting. They still did weekly music lessons. Oh, and one of them had multiple rehearsals for a fall production. They also started making their own plans to hang out with their friends.

For an unscheduled summer, I sure was driving them around a lot.

Meanwhile, fitting their schedules into my full-time job and a nearly full-time volunteer project was making my “summer of nothing” more like “summer of daily headaches and losing all my hair.”

Maybe their laid-back summer was bound to feel different from my hazy recollections and rose-tinted memories. When we get older, parts of our childhoods take on the good-old-days patina.

Our summers were better, we tell ourselves. Even our boredom was better.

Blogger Kristen Hewitt wrote a recent post called “Why we are doing nothing this summer,” which went viral. Hewitt described her family’s simple plans: work out, sleep in, watch TV, play outside and go to the pool.

“It’s so easy to be pressured by things we see on social. Ways to challenge our kids and enrich their summer,” she wrote. “But let’s be real -- we’re all tired. Tired of chores, tired of schedules and places to be, tired of pressure, and tired of unrealistic expectations. So instead of a schedule, we’re doing nothing this summer. Literally NOTHING. No camps. No classes and no curriculums. Instead, we’re going to see where each day takes us.”

Hewitt’s low-key summer sounds so much better than mine.

I couldn’t fully commit to the summer of nothing, and it turned into the summer of a little-bit-of-everything. On the upside, the teen is leaving for a three-week sleep-away camp soon, and her brother is signed up for a tennis intensive.

Maybe I can squeeze in a little nothing while they’re gone.

In 1990, Afshan Malik had no concerns more pressing than where she might travel for college.

She had just graduated high school and was weighing her options. Her family lived on the ninth floor of a luxury apartment building in Kuwait, which she filled with watercolor landscapes and pencil drawings. Her parents were expats from Pakistan, and had moved to Kuwait when she was a baby. Although Afshan was always keenly aware that Kuwait was not her home, it was the only home she had ever known. She filled pages of her diaries with romantic poems, and designed and sewed clothes for herself and her friends.

But then Saddam Hussein invaded. The invasion changed everything.

At first, expats were confused about what would happen to them under the new regime. The televisions stopped broadcasting news. Her parents would go into their car in the evenings to listen to BBC over the radio. Many Pakistani families began to flee. Her parents had their money and assets tied up in Kuwait and considered waiting it out.

Then they started hearing stories of girls being raped by soldiers. That night, her parents told Afshan and her younger brother and sister they would be leaving in the morning. “Pack a small bag,” her mother said.

Afshan asked if she could take her paintings. Her mother asked her if she was crazy. The car was going to be loaded with canned food and a few sets of clothing. Her father saw her crying and suggested she take a small journal so she could record all the countries they were going to pass through. Their plan was to drive from Kuwait to Mosul, Iraq to Turkey to Iran, where they would cross the border into Pakistan.

The next morning, they filled the trunk of their maroon Crown Victoria and started driving toward a border.

They lived out of their car for the next 28 days.

Afshan’s mother would take some of the cans of chickpeas, tomatoes and red beans out of the trunk and put them in a bag in the front seat every night. She would make just enough room for Afshan to curl up and sleep in the trunk of the car, with the door slightly ajar, to shield her from unwanted attention. Her parents slept on the ground on either side of the trunk. Her younger brother and baby sister slept in the back seat. There were refugee camps along the way, and sometimes, they slept in those.

When they finally got to the border of Iran, there was a military bathroom they were allowed to use. Afshan was walking back with her sister when her father handed her a rare piece of chocolate he had somehow gotten.

“Happy birthday,” he said to her. At first, she argued with him. It couldn’t be her birthday. But she had lost track of days, and it was indeed her 18th birthday.

They finally made it to Pakistan, where the five of them crammed into one bedroom of a relative’s house for months. Afshan remembers crying the first time she was able to sleep with her legs stretched out instead of curled up inside the trunk of a car. Her father went back to Kuwait to work, while Afshan tried to fit into her parents’ native country. She started college, but was bullied and isolated because of her upbringing abroad. Their living situation was far worse than Kuwait, but the sense of not really fitting in was familiar.

“You felt like a lost soul, like you didn’t belong anywhere,” she said. She finished her bachelor’s degree and then started an MBA program. A semester before she graduated, she was married in traditional Pakistani fashion. She finished her degree and two years later, in 2000, she left Pakistan to join her husband, who was working in America.

She had all her possessions with her in three suitcases when she arrived at John F. Kennedy airport in New York City. During the 18-hour flight, she thought to herself how long it would take to reach her family if anything ever happened to them.

When she arrived at customs, she approached the official at the counter. He took her passport and smiled as he said to her, “Oh, it’s your birthday! Happy birthday. Welcome to America.”

He noticed her birthday, she thought. She felt different in America than she had anywhere else.

“For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere,” she said. It was an indescribable feeling for someone who had been displaced and homeless and rejected by people in the countries of her birth and of her childhood.

“I felt like I was wanted and accepted.”

This is where I was supposed to come, she thought.

The woman who took her paperwork at immigration complimented her long, black hair and noticed her birthday on the documents, too. She wished her a happy one, as did the next official Afshan encountered.

She caught the connecting flight to St. Louis, where she settled and eventually had two children. She went back to school to get her master’s in counseling and now works as a therapist. She thinks about how she was only a few years older than her teenage daughter when she was forced to leave a comfortable, middle-class life at a moment’s notice. And then, having to leave her family thousands of miles away to start over again. It was in this new country that the first people she met all welcomed her.

Some people take the long way home.

It can be a difficult group to advocate for: high-achieving teens going to the best schools, living in comfortable homes with successful parents.

This group sounds like the most privileged among us. Professor Suniya Luthar also sees them as among the most vulnerable.

Luthar, professor of psychology at Arizona State University, recently published research based on the New England Study of Suburban Youth, which followed two groups of adolescents from affluent communities into early adulthood. Luthar’s research suggests accomplished teens in great schools are an under-recognized at-risk population facing higher risks for substance abuse than their peers.

“We found alarmingly high rates of substance abuse among young adults we initially studied as teenagers,” Luthar said. By age 26, the rates of addiction for men in this study were twice as high as national norms; rates were three times as high for women. Rates of addiction ranged from 23 to 40 percent among men and 19 to 24 percent among women, according to the study, published in the May journal of Development and Psychopathology.

“The most common one we hear about is Adderall,” Luthar said. “Who has it. Can I buy it. Who can give it to me.” She finds that experimentation starts younger in this cohort and continues through college, where it can turn to ecstasy and cocaine. “When you are drinking vodka in Polar Springs bottles in seventh grade, it’s a problem.”

So why did these students in suburban schools, with high standardized test scores, robust extracurricular activities and white-collar professional parents, show consistently higher use of substances?

The reasons are likely multifold, according to Luthar: High pressure among teens to get into elite universities, access to disposable income, widespread peer approval for substance use and parents lulled into a false sense of security. When parents see their children performing well in school and in demanding activities, they don’t believe they could have serious underlying issues with drugs and alcohol. It makes sense that the earlier children start to use alcohol and drugs, and the more frequently they do, the more likely it is they will develop addictions down the line.

“It’s hard to face the truth,” Luthar said, “that it may be your child who is cutting or snorting Adderall.”

In her samples, the parents were educated -- doctors, lawyers and teachers -- families with access to resources for treatment, but also less likely to openly talk about deaths due to overdoses. She says a key to addressing the problem is drawing more attention to the data, funding more research on the topic and talking to teens about the research results.

“For high-achieving and ambitious youngsters, it could actually be persuasive to share scientific data showing that in their own communities, the statistical odds of developing serious problems of addiction are two to three times higher than norms,” she said.

It makes sense that public policy has focused on the risks at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. Children born into chronic poverty face greater challenges and risks of negative outcomes than their peers. It can be difficult to argue for supports for affluent children already born into such a strong safety net, as opposed to those struggling to have their basic needs met.

But Luthar argues that it’s a different type of intervention needed with the population she studied. It’s not a call for diverting resources, but for widening the conversation to include the risks they face. It’s also worthwhile to figure out how to minimize the risks for this population, she says. She wants more research on kids who grow up in pressure-cooker, high-achieving schools.

One school she studied had six students die of overdoses in a single year.

“How many times are we going to look the other way?”