Thursday morning and I’m in gridlocked traffic, teeth gritted en route to my 10-year-old son Felix’s football camp. We arrive late and when I’m finally back at my desk, having missed my Zoom meeting, there are only five hours before I need to make the return trip across the East Midlands to collect him.
I would then leave him to YouTube while I catch up on work – I have long since passed the point of implementing screen limits – but my daughter needs picking up from her drama club 30 minutes later, and I don’t have the kind of brain that can flit between work, childcare and taxi ferrying duties.
Instead, I stay at my computer until 11pm, before getting up at dawn to sort packed lunches for another day’s insanity, wondering how, after what feels like an eternity on this relentless treadmill already, there can still be four weeks left.
Welcome to the working parent’s summer “holiday”, where every hour is a desperate attempt to keep children and bosses happy, every decision an attempt to appease, every emotion tinged with guilt and exhaustion.
If your children are young, you’ll have bankrupted yourself booking summer camps which usually run from 9am until 3pm so don’t cover your working day. If they’re teens, they’ll be spending more hours on screens than you know is good for them.
If they’re tweens like mine – I also have a daughter, Rosie, 12 – too young to be independent and too old to want to be looked after, you’ll be torn between the two in a state of hapless limbo.
Of course, anyone with a job and kids is used to juggling, but seven weeks straight without the solace of school is too much. Put simply, these overlong holidays are no longer fit for purpose.
The current school structure dates back to the 19th century, when, depending on who you believe, children were either required at home to help their parents pick crops on farms or urban families wanted to decamp to the countryside to escape hot weather. Either way, working motherhood was virtually unheard of.
Now that 50 per cent of families have two parents working full time, 10 per cent are lone parents and 1 per cent of the population works in agriculture, the prospect of keeping children off school so long is impossibly outdated.
It also disproportionally impacts low-income families. I am lucky to be able to work from home and have a dual-income marriage. Were I a single parent without the wherewithal to pay for summer clubs and expected in an office, I would be at breaking point. “The summer holidays place a huge demand on parents, who often don’t have the luxury of taking weeks off or accommodating the burden of additional childcare and summer camp costs,” agrees Natalie Costa, an education specialist who coaches parents and children. “Children need downtime to decompress, but we need to consider a fresh approach to the changes of our world.”
This year, I decided to entrust my son to amuse himself at home for most of the holidays, instead of spending around £200 a week dragging him to local summer camps.
Big mistake. Experts tell us boredom is good for children’s creativity. But their advice doesn’t take into account the omnipresent lure of screens, the safety concerns of letting them roam outside unsupervised or the distraction of being asked for another snack every half hour.
After week one Felix felt “isolated”. By week two he was surgically attached to his Nintendo. In an attempt to mitigate my guilt at not giving him anything to do, meanwhile, I’d booked him into a summer camp he was interested in – a football club 20 miles away.
Making the hour’s round trip while ferrying my daughter to her theatre club in another direction, at roughly the same hours, has resulted in uncooked dinners, several swearing incidents and a child stranded in the rain.
Most of my mum friends are similarly shattered, swapping war stories over snatched WhatsApps about counties crossed to find acceptable clubs, work calls made with the TV on in the background and all-nighters pulled to make up for missed daytime working hours. None of us tell our bosses we’re struggling. We don’t want to appear weak.
The expectation we make these holidays a magical time, as per that “you only have 18 summers with your child” meme that goes viral on social media every June doesn’t help.
Holiday companies increase their prices prohibitively high. Even a single day out can cost hundreds, and as much as children might moan about school, there’s plenty of evidence long summer holidays don’t benefit them either. “For struggling families, children may not have access to activities that stimulate them to learn and develop new skills,” says Costa. “Children thrive on structure and routine and without it there can be a negative impact.”
Research published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health in 2017 found learning loss can occur and the early weeks of the autumn term “are negatively affected by learning loss as children first have to catch up to accommodate lost knowledge and skills”.
Studies have found children are more likely to gain weight in the summer holidays without school sport, while according to the Trussell Trust, food bank use spikes every summer when low-income families whose children rely on school meals struggle to meet the extra food costs.
So what’s the solution? In fact, the Department of Education only specifies that in England school should be open 190 days a year. Term dates are largely determined by local authorities.
“Four terms with around two week holidays in between is more aligned with the modern world,” says Costa. Yet when Barnsley Council became the first in the country to cut the summer holidays by just a week in 2016 to minimise “learning loss”, the decision was met with anger by headteachers, who said it would be more difficult to recruit and cause confusion for parents with children at other schools.
I wish they’d go further, like Shrewsbury Prepatoria, the first school to cancel term times altogether in 2019, with parents instead taking their children out for up to six weeks a year at times of their choosing. Of course, children need a break. But parents should be cut some slack too.
