BOSTON -- So, summer is finally here. At least in the northern hemisphere, that is.

You want to feel better about the not-quite-summer-yet feel of things in New England?

In Buenos Aires, Argentina, where it is winter now, the weather is overcast and drizzly and the temperature will not get out of the 40’s.

Those 68-degrees and variable clouds on the Cape are feeling better already, aren’t they?

Today (June 20) is the Summer Solstice and the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. For most of us, it’s enough to smile to ourselves as we inwardly acknowledge that for a few blessed months it will indeed be light when we get out of work, and the generally slower pace of summer time is upon is.

Truthfully, do we ever get over the glee that comes of being sprung from school for summer vacation and what beckoned like five months of freedom?

Except summer vacation isn’t and never really was as long and expansive and neverending as it seemed when you were 10. When Alice Cooper sang, “School’s out forever!,” it really seemed that way. It was only ever eight weeks, tops. Less in many towns. And today? Forget it.

Not only may “freedom” merely be “just another word for nothing left to lose,” but many parents today act as if there is literally no time to lose once their child’s school year is over for the summer. Camps of all kinds, structured activities from the academic to artistic, and one-and-two-week intensive sports clinics -- not to mention the earlier and earlier fall starting dates of school systems everywhere -- have all combined to create the incredible shrinking summer vacation.

Only that lack of “free time” is increasingly a year-round phenomenon.

Some experts estimate that kids today have half as much free time as they did just 30 years ago.

As a kid (OK, even more than 30 years ago) summers to me meant working on a tree house project that went on for years and years like that never-finished church in Spain, staying out after supper to do whatever until the streetlights came on, and more than anything, hours and hours of pick-up baseball games at the neighborhood playground.

Today, the chances of seeing kids gather spontaneously for a pick-up of game of anything are about as good as spotting gas for a buck a gallon. Not happening anymore.

And many experts think kids are worse off for the lack of free play time.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., is co-author of a book whose very title seems to need a table of contents: “Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less.” (Actually, try memorizing that title, Einstein.)

But she makes a point in it that would be music to the ears of every over-scheduled and free-time deficient kid everywhere.

“There is a myth that doing nothing is wasting time,” Hirsh-Pasek says. “When it’s actually extremely productive and essential.”

Halleluiah. Praise the pick-up game and the puttering around the park.

Think about it: what do you remember more from your own long-ago summer vacations? That really great arts and crafts session where you made the gift for mom and dad made out of twine and tongue depressors ... or that day you spent hours damming up that little brook behind the library, then released the deluge that flooded and destroyed the tiny village you spent additional hours creating just to watch it be washed away?

OK, some of my own free-time pursuits may have tended toward the sociopathic, but you get the idea.

Let your kid skip the soccer clinic or the computer camp. Yeah, someone has to basically be around, but cobble that together between parents.

Summer’s here; let ‘em make some memories from something they discover, not that you have planned.

So what if they flood a village?