School's out for summer
Parenting during the summer holidays and the debate over taking kids out of school for holidays.
Yesterday was the last day of school for my five year old son. I dropped him off that morning along with a couple of his favourite toys, which he was excited to get to take with him for his final day in Reception. My excitement was muted, though: today marks the beginning of our first encounter with the six-week school holidays. What are we going to do with a kid at home all day for the next month and a half?
We also just booked our annual family holiday for this October, hoping for a bit of sunshine in the cold and rainy arse-end of the year to cheer us up. It costs an astronomical sum of money to fly four of us to Portugal for a week, and this is while we still don’t have to pay for one of the kids.
This is topical because every other family is in the same boat if they want to leave the country this year – the age-old debate about taking kids out of school in order to save money on holidays is rearing its head once again.
At its core this is a debate about privilege: I’m unhappy about the cost of our holiday abroad, but we can afford it, and we’re extremely lucky to be able to take our kids to nice places. When you see the cost of flights and hotels literally double when the school holidays kick in, it’s impossible not to feel a sense of outrage. Even more so when you collect your kid from school and discover that they’ve seemingly spent the day gluing pasta shapes onto cardboard to illustrate the lifecycle of a butterfly. “That fusilli has just cost me £1500”, you find yourself thinking.
But the parents who insist that taking kids out of school for a holiday mean they’re “treating their children” and “giving them a good life” are making this decision in the context of a financial saving: it’s hardly an objective choice. It’s also one that doesn’t scale: yes, taking your kid out of school for a week is unlikely to harm their educational attainment. But if everybody did it – what then? It’s like littering, I think. One crisp bag discarded in the street won’t bring about the downfall of society. And yet…
Hey, teacher: leave those kids alone
Teaching is a profession under attack: politicians use the curriculum as an ideological weapon, and parents are increasingly opinionated about how (and what) their kids are taught, and seem to have decided they know better. Trying to convince parents to spend significantly higher amounts on holidays (or just not go) is a tough sell for someone who just wants to get the chance to do their job and support your kid. Weighing that out against a direct financial benefit is a hard scale to balance.
We’ll get through the summer holidays somehow by juggling work, childcare and out-of-school clubs, and by this time next year I’m sure it’ll become routine for us, just like everything else in parenting. The holidays will continue to be predictably expensive – but what’s the alternative? Propose that families somehow get a discount on flights and hotels outside of term-time? Those without kids would lose their shit: I have an acquaintance who genuinely believes that parent-and-child parking spaces in supermarkets are unfair and discriminatory towards non-parents.
I sincerely hope that when I’m sitting poolside with a cold beer, watching the kids squirting other parents with water pistols and pretending not to notice, that I don’t find myself calculating how much each second of the experience is costing me. Though I’d prefer to be making that calculation instead of trying to fathom what part of their education we missed out on, and whether it’ll make any difference to anything.
Mini-feels this week
Scene Point Blank turns 20
The music webzine I founded when I was 16 years old is celebrating its 20th anniversary. It’s been humbling and slightly terrifying to reflect recently on what’s changed in the world of both music and the internet since we started: no YouTube, Spotify, Facebook or Taylor Swift when we began.
It started out as a fun side-project when I was a bored teenager but ended up allowing me to meet and interview my heroes, learn about web development which ended up leading me to my career today, and hear some of the best music I’d otherwise never have discovered. Maybe I should say yes to random project ideas more often.