What if this summer was the one they remember?
What if this summer was the one they remember?
The summer holidays are six weeks long. That used to feel like forever. For most families now, it feels like a logistics problem to manage: children old enough to notice the boredom, parents who cannot take six weeks off, and a screen sitting quietly in the corner that makes it all go away. The question worth asking, before July arrives, is whether that is the summer you want to give them.
Not from a place of guilt. From a place of genuine possibility. Because six weeks is a very long time to do something different with.
The game. The lawn. The afternoon.
The summer that lives in memory
Ask adults to describe a childhood summer they remember clearly, and the answer almost never involves a screen. It involves being outside. A specific game, a specific afternoon, a specific feeling of time stretching out with nothing urgent at the end of it. This is not nostalgia. It is a genuine pattern in how memory is formed.
A 2019 study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that children who spent more time in unstructured outdoor play showed stronger autobiographical memory formation and significantly better attentional focus in the following school term. The mechanism is not complicated: when children are fully present in physical play, without passive input from a screen, the brain encodes the experience differently. The afternoon becomes a memory, not just time that passed.
"The thing about a good garden game is that it creates a story. Every round, someone almost wins. Everyone can tell you what happened."
Jaques of London has been in the business of those afternoons since 1795. Not by accident. By design.
This is what absorbed looks like.
What children are actually doing this August
The average child in the UK spends around four hours per day on screens during summer holidays, compared with just over two hours during term time (Ofcom Children and Parents Media Use and Attitudes Report, 2023). The increase is not parental failure. It is just the path of least resistance when six weeks stretches ahead and there is nothing set up outside.
The friction is the whole thing. A screen requires no effort. A garden game, if it is packed away in the shed, requires finding it, carrying it out, reading the instructions, and convincing another child to play. Most children will choose the screen before they reach step two.
The answer is not to ban the screen. It is to reduce the friction of the alternative to zero. Which means one game, set up and ready, visible from the back door.
They stopped asking for the iPad about twenty minutes ago.
When they play, you breathe
There is something that happens after about twenty minutes of outdoor play that every parent recognises. The negotiating and the noise settles into something quieter. Children find their own rhythm. The game stops needing an adult to run it, and it just runs.
This is the moment parents describe when they talk about the best bits of being a parent. Not the organised activity, not the day trip with the itinerary. The unplanned afternoon when everyone just played, and nobody needed anything, and it was fine.
A good garden game creates that moment reliably. The rules are simple enough that a four-year-old can join in. The competition is real enough that a ten-year-old stays interested. The adult can either play or sit in a chair and read, depending on the day.
They work it out themselves. That is the point.
The games that build the summer
Three games cover almost every garden, age group, and occasion. All are available from our garden games collection in FSC-certified hardwood, independently tested to UKCA standards.
Garden Skittles is the best starting game for families with children aged 4 to 12. Games last five minutes, setup takes under a minute, and the competition between a four-year-old and an adult is genuinely close. The Jaques Garden Skittles set comes with nine hardwood pins and two balls, with a carry bag. From £30.
Garden Croquet suits gardens with a reasonable lawn and children aged 6 and up. Jaques invented the modern rules and equipment for croquet in 1851. A four-mallet set works for a family of four and creates games that last 45 to 90 minutes. From £45.
Garden Boules is the most adaptable set in the range. It works on grass, gravel, or patio, plays between two and eight people, and requires no lawn at all. The Jaques Boules sets are made from solid resin with a hardwood carry case. From £35.
The game is the excuse. The time together is the thing.
Set it up. Leave it out.
The single most effective thing you can do before summer begins is to put one game outside and leave it there. Not in the shed. Not in a bag by the back door. Outside, set up, ready.
Research from Play England (2012) found that children played outside 40 minutes longer per day on average when play equipment was visible and immediately accessible, compared with equipment stored away. Forty minutes. Every day. Across six weeks, that is the difference between a summer they vaguely remember and one they tell their own children about.
Jaques of London has been making the games for those afternoons for 230 years. Established in 1795. Still the same reason.