A few weeks before Christmas, Amanda Mullen was up late at night with the family calendars, trying to plan her school-aged kids' summer activities -- more than six months away.
Dawn Morgan sets alarms an hour in advance of when camp registration begins in the winter.
Every year, as February inches closer, Ben Westhoff feels his blood pressure start to rise.
"I know camp applications are coming up," the father of two said.
Parents of school-aged children across the country are familiar with the anxiety and stress that come with finding summer childcare -- and it's only getting worse.
Parents are dealing with summer camps that are short-staffed, along with rising prices and waitlists as soon as registration opens. It's an indictment of America's broken child care infrastructure, which is vital to keeping people working.
Mullen said her daughter has participated in a Girl Scouts camp every year since kindergarten. This past month, Mullen logged in to sign her up just a few hours after the registration began. Now, she's on a waitlist.
"It's really hard to find a full-day program," she said. She tries to keep track of the different registration times for each of the four or five different camps her children attend over the summer. She has to juggle pickup and drop-off times for the various locations and relies on her parents, who live locally, to help out during the weeks when camps aren't available.
Even though she sets a series of alarms for each registration -- 15 minutes before, then 5 minutes before -- things can slip through the cracks.
"It's pretty cutthroat," she said. For now, her son is signed up for an astronaut camp about 45 minutes away from where they live.
"We just have to figure out a way to get him there," she said.
Westhoff, who has two elementary school-aged children, said the stakes are high for working parents: If kids don't get into camp, you can't work that week.
Plus, many camp offerings only run from 9 a.m. to noon.
"Who only wants their kids in camp for three hours a day?" he asked.
The process of signing up is a byzantine hodgepodge of paperwork and outdated websites. Westhoff has to gather medical records and other information from doctors for the five different sets of forms required by the various camps his children will be attending.
One of the forms has an extensive section for parents to describe their kids' personality traits, fears and activities, as well as their hopes and dreams for the camp experience.
"It feels like a Myers-Briggs test," Westhoff said. "Who is going to fill this all out?"
He doesn't understand why there can't be a universal camp form, like colleges use for applicants.
Part of the problem is that America expects families with full-time working parents to figure out child care with little support or resources. The need for affordable, full-day summer care options has been a persistent problem for years.
Morgan, who works as a paralegal, says she coordinates with another parent so they can share summer carpool duties. The camp they are trying to get their children into gives preference to local residents, so Morgan has to wait a week before she can even attempt to sign up.
"If I can't get in, (my friend) has to cancel, and we have to find something somewhere else," she said. They need the transportation help from one another.
"It's a pure struggle," she said. "Most parents work nowadays, and no one understands that."
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 81.2% of employed mothers with children ages 6 to 17 worked full-time in 2021, compared with 77.2% of mothers with children under age 6. Among employed fathers, 95.7% of those with older children and 95.3% of those with younger children worked full-time.
Plus, there's the guilt of having to send children to a camp all summer that they may not want to attend simply because of logistics, timing, location and cost.
"This isn't a new problem," Morgan said. "It's been going on for years. No one seems to care to help or fix anything."