Editorial: How can we help Kiwi working parents cope with school holidays?

January is a challenging month for New Zealand's working parents with children. Photo / 123rf

Opinion

EDITORIAL

January is a great month. Sunshine-filled days, warm weather (sometimes, in some places), and the enthusiasm of a whole year ahead to fulfil those resolutions we all made a few days ago.

It can also be a tough month if you are a working parent in New Zealand. Children are out of school for the whole month, the magic of Christmas behind them, the boredom beginning to set in.

For many parents, the January juggle is very real. No annual leave accruement can compete with the length of school holidays and parents do incredible Cirque du Soleil-level acrobatics to cope, both in terms of time and financial resources.

The challenges are harder when you throw in the cost of childcare (a full day in a school holiday programme can set you back up to $70) or if the parents don’t have people such as grandparents nearby to help ease the burden.

What is the solution? Do we cut school holidays? Do we expand leave entitlements? Do we meet in the middle somehow?

Dr Ellen Ford, author and founder of the #WorkSchoolHours movement, spoke about this issue to RNZ last month, calling it a major problem for families.

“The hours of work, roughly 40 hours a week, 9-to-5, 48-ish weeks of the year... all that was cemented more than a century ago with the Henry Ford car manufacturing era. That was amazing social progress in its time but it assumed every household had one worker and one caregiver of the children,” she said.

“That’s just not our society today and it hasn’t been for many decades. It blows my mind that we’ve gone to the moon, we’ve invented the internet, we’ve got AI but the construct of work genuinely hasn’t changed in the last century, it’s an enormous mismatch.”

This mismatch, as Ford points out, means that, for a lot of households, it is not cost-effective for both parents to work — as the cost of childcare would all but eclipse one of their incomes, particularly over the school holidays.

Even for parents who work from home or can have their children with them while they work, the long school holidays often mean children have to spend a lot more time on screens, as parents need to focus on work.

Through her #WorkSchoolHours movement, Ford is trying to encourage workplaces to focus more on output, allowing working parents the necessary flexibility to juggle the school holidays.

In many cases, she says, the answer lies in just having a bit of flexibility, and an employer who understands the demands of the modern-day working parent. “I do work a bit during the school holidays, maybe in the evening when the kids have gone to bed... flexibility is the biggest key to allowing people to deal with the things they have on beyond work. In many cases, that’s the massive juggle of kids and work.”

She said this flexibility can be extended beyond the realm of office jobs and mentioned working with a dairy farmer who coordinated milking schedules with the school bus times. Ford also pointed out that offering flexibility as part of a remuneration package does wonders for staff retention.

While there is no magic bullet to fix this mismatch, there are steps that can be taken to minimise the negative impact it has on working parents.

In the meantime, let’s all spare a thought for parents of young children working today. It’s not easy to make it all work — and we applaud you for all you’re doing.