Sad about reaction to summer residential trip but is it a sign of the times?

What age is yr 5/6?

We’re in France. DS did his first 5 day / 4 night residential in the last year of nursery, so 4/ 5 years old. In his first 2 years at primary school (they start at 6, but he’s very late in the year) he did same length of trip, but ski trips this time.

No phones obvs. We had a few photos emailed to us each day, plus a postcard that arrived the week after he was home 😂

I guess it’s cultural. He told me that everyone cried at the first one, but they just had to get on with it. French kids often spend weeks in the summer holidays with grand parents from a very young age, as the parents have to work, so they are very used to it and culturally it’s very normal. I think there were three nursery classes, so maybe 60 kids, plus 3 teachers and 3 parents. Only 2 kids didn’t go - both because the centre couldn’t guarantee the food would comply with the religious beliefs.

I really hate these threads which mostly contain the privileged bragging about how much freedom their kids have and how much better they are.

Some kids live in far less safe places than others, some have parents with a lot less money- flights abroad every year are out of the question for many children with their family let alone as an expensive add on.

The “risks” have always existed and are arguably far better managed now than at any other time. They aren’t a good enough reason to stop kids doing normal life stuff such as school trips!

From a parents perspective, there is a lot more awareness of the risks of unsafe adults/sexual predators being attracted to roles such as scout leader, sports coaching etc. This may possibly be playing some part in adding to parental anxieties.
Before I'm jumped on, yes of course I'm aware that there are many thousands of wonderful adults in these roles, and my own child was a beaver/cub, and also went in the school residential in year 6 (14 now). But, the risks exist.

My DD turned 23 this week, (brilliant age, she now knows how much she doesn't know!). She sat in the garden with me and thanked me for trusting her and letting her have graduated freedom most of her peers didn't get. She first went to a residential aged four with her French primary school; flew as an unaccompanied minor between UK and France every Easter between 6 and 14 (45 min flight); and was allowed to use local buses and trains as long as she stayed in contact as a teen. She is confident and careful, - and still alive - as well as grateful.

ETA and isn't afrid of crossing the road

There is just far to many cars on the roads now,hardly any green space left to let kids be kids,I used to be able to play kerby for hours,go on adventures as we called them,all the mums knew each other,times change.

thanks for your reply. So interesting how different things can be. There was a thread about women’s experience of male assault throughout life about a week ago and many were like me an had experienced a lot and some said they had not. I really wonder why there’s such a disparity between people’s experience. Just luck I suppose?

I also had all those hair crimping and make up fun having times too. It was just smattered with these bizarre episodes.. I was allowed out at 12 to the shops and by 14 was out late. 15 was off completely really. Very little control from parents they just expected me to tell them where they were and behave. The one person I knew (of hundreds who would go out and congregate in the evenings at weekends) who had a curfew was a total stand out. Although they just engaged in non-parental approved behaviours before 9pm then went home.

I don’t agree that all children should go and enjoy sleepovers - some just don’t. I have two children. One will happily go for a sleepover at grandparents and loves it and the other has tried multiple times and always ends up wanting to come home before bed. They’re still only young and for now, I’m happy for them to want to be at home in their own bed with us in the house if that’s what they want.

Not necessarily so and those just over definitely wouldn’t. Many families will be finding things quite tight atm and would rather put the money towards a family holiday now.

I didn’t have a particularly free-range childhood, but I went on residentials from an early age. I did a week-long PGL trip when I was 7, which helped get me used to being away from home and not getting so homesick. I think children now have had less opportunity to stay away from home due to covid. Some parents were definitely worried about their children going on the residentials when my two were at primary school, but everyone went in the end.

They probably can’t afford it. Residentials are so expensive.

Yes, this x1000

the lack of resilience now is alarming societal ill.

my grandfather born 1902 in Bristol left home at 14 and sailed the world on merchant ships. Eventually came home 40 years later having married and fathered my dad in America. Had an excellent career with Ford.

Nowadays people wont let their little wimps go to the corner shop at 14. Sad.

I was reading this thread and thinking that Covid probably had a lot to do with it and the impact it would have on children.

My niece is 16 and has never really stayed away from home. My sister doesn’t even let her babysit my nephew (13) for an hour while she goes out!

Why does a 13 yo boy need a 'babysitter' anyway?

You can experience all these things without having to stay the night. For the record I never had a problem with them sleeping over - they just didn’t want to.

@Ecotype I remember having sleepovers really fondly - they were an opportunity to find out how other people and other families lived! Admittedly the families I had sleepovers with were all pretty conventional and similar to my own parents (ie. no hot tubs, machetes or pools), but isn’t it good for children to learn about different foods, routines, ways of doing things, even if they’re only small things like trying soda stream, eating something new, or playing with a kind of pet you don’t have at home? I think it’s good for kids to see a bit of how other people live in a controlled way. One of my friends’ mums made all her food from things she grew herself — I was amazed to have loganberries for the first time that she’d grown in her garden and being given a bit of home-grown honeycomb to chew on. Another family had a dad who was a biological scientist and had a big library of fascinating books about tropical diseases (with pictures in colour!), and they kept a tortoise, which I’d never seen a live one of before. Another family was more religious than mine, which fascinated me because they were Catholic, and I learned about Mass and first communion and so on. They did a lot of church charity work for causes in Africa, and introduced me to African music and food.

I found being able to stay over with different families and experience different aspect of the world really enriching to my life even at a young age — I was really curious about the world and I really liked eating different foods and doing different things to my family, from being introduced to Ice Magic and computer games (neither of which we were allowed at home!) to going to church, or being taken fell-walking, or just generally seeing how people with different families lived. I think children who don’t experience that in a controlled way at a relatively young age do miss out a bit, though obviously it’s not always practical or feasible, and obviously you need to know and trust the people who your child is staying over with. But not to allow it at all because of parental fears or anxieties seems really sad for children’s experience of the world.

My 8 year old has had sleepovers with grandparents and aunts/uncles so he can have those fun experiences with his cousins, and I feel he'd be fine on a residential trip with teachers. I do not allow him to go anywhere without adult supervision yet and I don't think that's sad at all.

All of my DC have been on the residentials, I’ve always found it stressful letting them go but I have tried not to show this to them and encouraged the trips as I knew they would benefit so much.

DC2 has SEN and dyspraxia and I was worried about him most of all, but I am glad as it developed his independence. I did a lot to prepare him for the trip, made him practice packing his bag etc. He did a practice sleepover at a friend’s house first.

Anyway he came back with half his clothes missing, everything in his bag muddy, and his soap and flannel untouched but that didn’t matter! I was very proud of him.

As a parent it’s your job to prepare your child for independence.

I have definitely noticed a difference in the parents behaviour between DC1 and DC3 - a lot more fretting and stressing, over-thinking everything and over-controlling e.g. tracking the DCs journey home from a secondary school trip and giving all the other parents a minute by minute update 🙄

I was born in the 70s and we did residentials so it’s not just a new thing. I still remember the sight of the headteacher in his pyjamas telling us all to be quiet and go to sleep!
I can’t quite remember if I enjoyed it or not - I think parts I did enjoy, but not others. However it’s about learning to think for yourself without your parents around.

wow there was no talk like this when my daughter went for her yr6 residential in November!

My kids were never bothered about sleepovers until they reached the age of parties and were more than happy to stay over. They all went happily to university at 18 in another country as we lived abroad. Why are you so bothered about other people’s life choices? It really isn’t any of your business.

Except that road traffic accidents and deaths have absolutely plummeted in the last few decades: drivers drive at much lower speeds in residential areas, drunk driving is hugely less prevalent, fewer kids play out, and modern cars are better equipped to stop suddenly. All the data shows that the roads are massively safer for kids these days — just look at the numbers of road traffic accidents then compared to now!

I grew up in the 80s and my parents were ridiculously strict. I never had a sleepover, never went away with school, wasn’t even allowed to go to the park across the street on my own until I was about 13. I know why now - my mum had her own childhood experiences which made her extremely anxious. But I grew up lacking social skills and nervous of my own shadow, I didn’t go to university until I was in my thirties, and I had some disastrous relationships.

I understand why it happens but it sets children up to fail.

i feel like I live in an alternate universe sometimes. Did you never experience any of these types of things? Genuinely curious.

@Devonshiregal your post makes me feel like I’m in an alternate universe! No, at the sleepovers I went on between the ages of about 10 and 14 we played board games, crimped our hair, recorded ourselves pretending to be DJs on a radio programme, read books, put on glitter makeup, made fairy cakes or watched films or TV. There were no machetes, hot tubs (unheard of in my 1980s Northern city), or drunk adults. But my parents knew the parents of my friends well from school or church, and they were obviously pretty confident that the worst we’d experience would be sitting through the dead horse scene in The Neverending Story…

By 14 I was getting paid to babysit other children - looking after toddlers and small kids and putting them to bed, or spending half term looking after people’s children and taking them to activities on the bus. At 15 I took my young siblings on a six-hour journey down to London and across the Tube to stay with relatives for a week to give my mum, who was suffering from chronic illness at the time, a bit of a break. I don’t think I would have been able to handle so much responsibility at that age if I hadn’t had some gradual independence leading up to that.

My niece is 16 and has never really stayed away from home. My sister doesn’t even let her babysit my nephew (13) for an hour while she goes out! It’s noticeable that she is much more immature than I would expect a 16 year old to be.