We’re exhausting all our options to cope with kids on holiday

Instead of giving kids a summer break, working parents are forced to farm them out for the holidays, writes Sarah Caden

TWO weeks into the primary school holidays and the kids are exhausted. Weary and wiped, not a bit restored by their time off school.

The end of the school year in June always sees wilting children limping in, worn out by it all. “They need the break,” parents say to each other at the gates and then school ends and off they all go on the merry-go-round of summer camps.

By now, a fortnight later, they’re still exhausted. In most households, unless there is one parent working in the home or the family has gone away on holiday, there has been little or no let-up.

Where school ends, the summer camps take up, occupying our children with activity, exercise, fun and games. If your child is into sailing or soccer or tennis or art, there’s something out there for them to dip into over the nine weeks of holidays.

Increasingly, though, our children aren’t dipping in to these activities, but immersing themselves in camps for the entire summer.

Maybe they’re in a different camp every week, but if mum and dad are working and there isn’t a childminder, then that’s what they’re doing for the summer.

They’re camp-surfing. Always busy. Always on the go. Still taking a packed lunch, still getting up and out every morning. Still exhausted.

This is not an exercise in blaming the parents. My own children have a jigsaw of camps laid out for them over the summer because both of their parents are working. They’ve had great experiences in summer camps and look forward to them, but there is an extent to which they’re going if they like it or not. Parents need to work; kids need to be occupied. You’re going to camp. Throughout May and June, while I was trying to put together the jigsaw of the summer, I came across more than one camp that started at 8am. That’s a half hour earlier than our school gates open.

Other camps went on until 4pm — about two hours later than most primary schools finish — and plenty offer after-hour care for children of parents who just can’t get out of the office until later.

Which begs the question of who, at this stage, do a lot of the camps really cater to? Is it the children, or it is really the parents?

In truth, in a lot of cases, is the proliferation of camps now more about servicing our two-working-parent society than it is by the desire to teach children new sports and give them a fun time in their free time from school?

That sounds like parent-bashing. It’s not.

Given that most of us are working, we have to do something with the kids during the nine weeks of school holidays. And, ideally, we’d like it to be something that doesn’t make them miserable and that keeps them active.

I met one working mother during the last few weeks of school who had been let down by a childminder for the summer.

She was in a summercamp meltdown and as I opened my mouth to suggest a few, she reassured me that she already had a spreadsheet on the go.

That was what was keeping her from losing her mind, because work wasn’t going away and neither were her kids, so it all needed to be planned with military precision.

Through the rose-tinted glasses with which we view the past, we can say, with some truth, that it wasn’t always thus.

In the past, it is the case that summers were not filled with organised activities for schoolchildren and that there were long periods where we were required to be resourceful or be bored.

That wasn’t because previous generations of children were better at being resourceful or bored — even if we like spinning it that way to our kids — it was just that fewer families had two parents going out to work. Which is not an argument for keeping women in the home, but it is an argument against the present social set-up that makes it financially crucial for both parents to work.

We moan about today’s children and their inability to be bored and idle, but it’s hardly their fault.

It’s not really the parents’ fault either. If we’re up and out of the house, whether it’s school holidays or not, then they have to be, too. Their feet don’t hit the ground and there’s barely a second to be bored.

And, for working parents, there is a special sort of guilt attached to that.

We’ve all been faced with the situation whereby a camp, and perhaps its specific sport or raison d’etre doesn’t suit our child — but it suits us, so they’re going. Because it’s close to home, because the hours are good, because the price isn’t exorbitant. Because we really don’t have any choice.

All of this plays into that feeling, which is hard to fight off, that the school summer holidays are sent to test parents. The children are in the way of what really matters, which is that everyone keeps the head down and keeps working.

You feel guilty for feeling that way; you feel guilty for not having any time to give them; you feel guilty for not letting them have the lazy, hazy summers you imagine you had yourself.

Even if they’re having a ball at camp, you feel bad. Because the camps in themselves aren’t bad at all, and aren’t the kids lucky to have them? But there is that building, gnawing guilt in flat-out working parents that we had our kids merely to farm out their care yearround.

Not only that, but in our need to keep them occupied, we are instilling in them that which drives us as adults. We are convincing them, as the modern age has convinced or even conned us, that to be frantically busy is to be a good person.

They’ll go back to school competing with each other as to who crammed the most and longest camps in to the holidays. And they’ll start into September entirely exhausted.

‘They’re camp-surfing. Always busy. Always on the go. Still taking a packed lunch, still getting up and out every single morning. Still exhausted’