There’s a palpable sense of relief in Europe – doused with lashings of guilt. The school holidays are over.
Every year, families struggle with prolonged summer childcare, from Britain’s six-week stretch and France’s eight, to three months for Irish secondary schools and up to 14 weeks in parts of Italy and Spain.
Coping skills are additionally taxed with the general rise in summer temperatures, so this annual oasis of freedom can feel more like a marathon “are we there yet?” torture. Even children are reportedly complaining, after prolonged parental encouragement, aka nagging, that they’ve had enough.
As in New Zealand, school timetables here are long-established and institutional inertia – not least in schools themselves – militates against change.
Holiday periods generally evolved from long-outdated agricultural requirements. Everyone, however little, was needed back on the land to pitch in for peak yield season.
Also, it made no sense to confine children to classrooms during the year’s most settled weather, and there were always mothers, aunties, grandmothers or older siblings to supervise once the chores were done.
Now such childcare capacity is atypical, and parents flounder to find solutions. For working parents, statutory holidays go nowhere near covering even Europe’s shortest summer school recesses.
Italy’s Lombardy region has reported a 40% jump in mental health appointments this summer, as families seek counselling for holiday-related stress. Exhausted parents last year petitioned the Italian government to halve the break, to no avail.
Just to tighten the screws on parental angst, studies suggest long holidays are bad for children. American researchers tracked the exam results of nearly 18 million children over five summers and found that over the break, they lost almost 40% of the learning gains they’d made during term time – some up to 90%, the American Educational Research Journal reported in 2020.
Who could have imagined that holidays were such a potent inequality hand grenade?
Those who favour long holidays argue travel is proportionately more affordable than ever before, with budget package tours typically providing childcare options. But that takes working parents only so far.
There are holiday camps and all-day activity programmes. But where once, as in Allan Sherman’s song Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, it was the miserable young internee lamenting his summer camp detention, now it’s likely to be his sentencing authorities ruing the banishment. Muddahs and faddahs often have to stump up thousands of euros for just a couple of weeks of away-care.
Then again, a shorter holiday period would doubtless exacerbate the teacher shortage. Most EU countries begin each first term with unfilled posts, citing high levels of burn-out. Unesco has reported it’s mostly due to people leaving the profession.
Anyway, with temperatures in the high 30s for weeks on end, sending children and teachers back to school earlier could be seen as cruelty – which raises yet another impediment to change: lack of air conditioning.
Never a consideration in past decades, aircon is now a longed-for facility in homes and workplaces, but governments shy from policies that might make it more affordable because of carbon net-zero commitments.
France, where temperatures frequently nudged 40 this summer, exemplifies the dilemma. Some Parisian workers were sent home when authorities deemed heat waves dangerous, bringing populist opposition demands for aircon subsidies. But many buildings are unsuited to supporting an efficient cooling system, so the energy consumption would be massive – as would the cost of building upgrades.
Even so, countervailing advice from l’Agence Parisienne du Climat to “put a wet sheet in front of your windows or your fan” did little to cool tempers.
Can it be long before muddahs and faddahs are booking themselves into summer camp as well, for respite?
