Do children benefit from holidays with grandparents?

WE LIVED in Spain for 27 years and from the age of six until she was 15 our granddaughter used to come on her own for all her summer holiday. In those days, the late Eighties, children were allowed to travel unaccompanied. It was a magical time for us all: she had our individual attention and we had the love of a happy, inquisitive child. She gained so much confidence. She was joined eventually by her brother, who was eight years younger. He also grew more confident once his grandma taught him to swim and he realised he wasn’t always in his sister’s shadow. One of my abiding memories is of the children and my husband lying in a hammock on a balmy night under the stars, all singing On Ilkley Moor Baht ’At, my husband being a Yorkshireman. So many precious days and so many precious memories.

MARGARET MORRIS, Leyland, Lancs. LEsLEY PEARsE obviously loves giving her grandchildren seaside holidays (Mail). But why doesn’t she teach them to respect living creatures, rather than regard them as disposable playthings? ‘Delving into rock pools to catch little fish or crabs . . . or fish with their nets . . .’ Mrs Pearse likes to think that when she did such things as a child ‘we didn’t realise what a lot we were learning about nature’. I don’t think she learned much that was good. Now her grandchildren are ‘becoming fascinated by sea creatures’ they could learn so much more, in so many ways. Instead of wrenching creatures from their habitats, probably fatally, they could be encouraged just to watch as the rock pool creatures urgently go about their lives in the brief interval between tides. Watch an anemone hunting, a hermit crab changing into a bigger shell, instead of grabbing them and leaving them to suffer overnight in a bucket. she ‘hopes the crabs they catch will live long enough in a bucket to take back the next day to be released’, but many will not, and those that do will be impaired by injury, shock and lack of food and oxygen. What do the children learn from this? CAROLA MORTON, Hereford.