School holidays no picnic for parents
Oh, the school holidays - great. While some parents consider it a wonderful opportunity to spend time with their children, an equal number are dreading the added pressure on their schedules as they juggle work and the endeavour of providing an action-packed holiday that lives up to their children's expectations.
More often than not, the reaction to the concept of school holidays is negative - childcare dramas, pocket-money inflation, increased burglary risk, loitering teens in shopping malls. The only advantage many seem to think of spontaneously is fewer cars on the road when driving to work.
While it is envisaged that rural children home for the holidays play with animals or run through farmland for two weeks, the suburban reality is a little different. These days, most parents work at least part-time, which begs the question of what happens to the children over the holidays.
In bygone times, children spent most of their holidays mucking around and exploring the neighbourhood on bikes, wandering up to the dairy for 10c worth of mixed lollies. They were granted ultimate freedom but with the security of knowing that someone, probably Mum, was at home, ready to feed and water.
School holidays were long, languid days of suburban adventure studded with the odd special outing to some exciting place like "town." These days children are not allowed to stray too far from home, if at all, without parental supervision. It's simply a breach of the family security guidelines. So, many children go stir-crazy, grounded in the compound of their own home.
For the few non-working parents, it's easy to swing into action and give their children a holiday of a lifetime. But for working parents school holidays are about farming children out to holiday programmes or obliging relatives and negotiating complicated reciprocal babysitting arrangements with other parents.
Attitudes to what children should do in the holidays have changed radically. While life should slow down in the holidays, the pace seems to build up along with the overdraft.
For starters, parents have become chief entertainment officers. Driven by guilt or simply by the contemporary habit of over-indulging their children, they are hell-bent on arranging many and varied activities to keep children occupied.
Are children now incapable of entertaining themselves during down times? Through the term the norm seems to be a bulging mini-Filofax of after-school, extracurricular activities. Take away that routine and it takes a while for the poor wee mites to work out how to sort leisure out for themselves, despite an abundance of toys and paraphernalia.
Then there are videos. Mothers have a love-hate relationship with these. While they'd much prefer their children to run around outside in the fresh air or read books, children, unfortunately , still seem to have an overriding preference for sitting zombie-like in front of a video. They can do it for hours.
While parents usually make feeble attempts to limit the viewing of videos, toward the end of the holiday the chief entertainment officer simply runs out of ideas and embraces the inevitable video-fest for several hours of peace and quiet.
There are very few times in my life that I wish I'd chosen teaching as a profession. But the long stretches of holidays are certainly one of them. I used to think the holidays were adequate compensation for being underpaid but now even teachers, allegedly, use the holiday time to do their "professional development work."
Although politically incorrect to discuss, the school holidays raise a negative aspect of women joining the workforce in droves. Mums want to work - need to work - and enjoy working but many still haven't reached a stage where they don't feel that they or their children are compromised at all during the holidays.
Said one working mum I spoke to the other day: "The school term doesn't sort of float by. It's more that the school holidays come rushing toward you, like the ground in a freefall parachute jump."
<i>Dialogue:</i> Sandy Burgham
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