Summer’s almost here, and you can already feel it happening. The water balloons are stacked up in the Target endcaps, the sunscreen is on sale three-for-one, and every millennial and Gen X parent you know is suddenly talking about giving their kids a real summer. A ’90s summer. An iPhone-free, go-outside-until-the-streetlights-come-on, build-a-fort-and-track-mud-everywhere kind of summer.

It’s a beautiful idea. Here’s what nobody’s saying out loud, though: if you want your kid to have a ’90s summer, you’re going to have to be a ’90s summer mom. And that’s a lot more work than just hiding the iPad in a kitchen drawer.

The ’90s were simpler in one specific way. Before social media existed, parents minded their own business. Nobody filmed their kid’s tantrum and spent the next two weeks reading 800 comments from strangers calling them a bad mom. Nobody scrolled “real mom” accounts at midnight and felt like a complete failure before breakfast. The pressure wasn’t there, and that absence of pressure meant moms operated with a confidence and a looseness that’s genuinely hard to recreate now.

But here’s what ’90s moms were actually doing. Dropping kids off at sleepovers after a real phone conversation with the other parents. Taking kids to the library and letting them wander the stacks for an hour with no agenda. Trusting a group of teenagers to walk around the mall for an hour with $20 and come back in one piece. Saying yes. Constantly, cheerfully, exhaustingly yes.

That’s the part we tend to forget when we get nostalgic.

Parenting writers at Scary Mommy put it well recently, describing the ’90s mom who “put her own comfort aside so we could have fun” and had to “go meet parents she barely knew and socialize with them” so her kid could go to Six Flags for the day with friends. That’s the real contract hiding inside the nostalgia. Your comfort, traded for their freedom.

That trade looks like driving to the park at 7 a.m. so they can ride bikes before the heat gets brutal. It looks like going to the grocery store and letting your kids pick out the ingredients for a cookie recipe they found in an actual cookbook, not a YouTube video. It looks like letting the dining room table disappear under craft supplies for six hours. It looks like letting them dig holes in the backyard because they’re convinced there are dinosaur bones under the azaleas.

Messy. Loud. Inconvenient. That’s the ’90s summer you’re remembering.

The good news is this doesn’t require perfection or a schedule or a summer enrichment program that costs $400 a week. It requires presence and a willingness to say yes to the weird requests.

If you want a place to start, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that families create a personalized media plan rather than just banning screens cold turkey. That means you don’t have to go full 1993 on day one. Screen-free hours, not screen-free weeks, is a reasonable on-ramp for families who’ve never tried it.

The National Recreation and Park Association tracks public park programming across the country, and most suburban park districts run free or low-cost summer activities that are genuinely built for the kind of unstructured, show-up-and-play model your childhood ran on. Check your local district’s summer calendar before you spend a dime on organized programming.

But the core of it doesn’t cost anything at all. It costs your afternoon. It costs your patience when the living room becomes a fort made of every blanket you own and three dining room chairs. It costs the grocery trip that takes 45 minutes longer because your seven-year-old is reading every cereal box in the aisle.

You don’t have to manufacture the perfect summer. You just have to get out of the way and say yes a lot more than feels comfortable. Your kids will handle the rest the same way kids always have, which is to say loudly, messily, and with more imagination than you gave them credit for.