How do you manage childcare for the holidays when you work full time?

[delilabell]

I'm looking at moving from a term time only job to an all year round job.
I have 2 children 11 and 7.
Myself and my husband would get 27 days each holiday.

If you're in a similar situation how do you manage things?
Thanks :-)

Holiday club, take separate weeks off, week with grandparents, grandparents up for a few days, now they are a bit older I WFH and they have days at friends ( swap with days when I am off to have friends over)

@Khvdrt yes that's what's worrying me. The 11 year old also has additional needs which means he's not worldly enough to be left for long at all

Snap! A constant, unrelenting treadmill of stress

Annual leave, flexible working and holiday club. Dh and I largely work from home and dh is self-employed (no paid annual leave) and I am employed (28 days plus bank holidays plus 1 extra week each at Christmas and Easter). DC are 5 & 10.

We do a mix of:

I take annual leave while dh works and I have both dc.

Dh does a more low key admin day, where he can mostly manage everything from his phone, takes the kids out and I work. He can do this because he's the boss.

5 year old in holiday club and 10 year old bums about the house with dh keeping an eye on her, while I work. Sometimes with this we trade off so dh can go do something and I keep an eye on 10 year old. I barely see her in the course of a day, except at mealtimes, so it's no impact on my working unless I have something really critical or a confidential meeting (in which case, dh would be home with her anyway).

School holidays are generally a mix of all of the above - so in a given week 2-3 days off (me or dh or one day each) and 2-3 days holiday club.

We are fortunate because we have a lot of flexibility and I've never run out of annual leave in all the years we've done it this way. But if you have less AL/flexibility, you just need to buy in childcare. Holiday club here is £20 per day. Even with 2 children, that's £40. Dh and I both make more than £40 in a day's work, so it's well worth not working TTO as financially it works out in our favour to use holiday club instead of cutting our working time. But we still have plenty of time to enjoy the school holidays too.

Watching as I've been wondering the same thing 😬the holiday clubs here seem to be £30 to £35 a day so with 2 kids it's starting to seem unaffordable! 3 weeks over the year is £900+ I don't know how people on average / lower wages afford it 😞

The one we use is £53 a day 😫

Spread the cost over the year by setting money aside monthly and/or choose an Ofsted registered club so you can use tax free or childcare vouchers

We juggle holiday clubs, grandparents and annual leave. You can use childcare vouchers for ofsted approved holiday clubs so that cuts the cost a bit. Many have early booking rates or full week or sibling discounts.

Recently we’ll sometimes let the 9yo knock around the house while one parent wfh. She reads and watches tv or crafts while we work. I wouldn’t do this with my 7yo or 3yo though. Will you be able to wfh sometimes?

DH and I alternate our time off (e.g. I take holiday at Feb half term, he covers Oct half term) or DDs go to the local holiday club. We don't have family to help out.

It's a bit of a bummer as DH and I only get time off together at Christmas and for one week in the Summer (when we take our family holiday) but realistically it's the only way to manage it.

We try to mix up holiday club and time at home just so DDs have a bit of variety so for example for half term next week I'm taking one day off, then DH is taking two days off then DDs will go to holiday club for two days.

Random inset days we just try to cover by both working from home but it's not ideal as DDs end up having far too much screen time.

DH and manage all the holidays ourselves just with annual leave (I use one flex day each month which gets me about 12 extra days a year) the only holidays we don't manage are summer, we like to overlap for a week, have a an additional week off each, and then the remaining 2-3 weeks they go to grandparents, if they didn't we'd use holiday club.

Unpaid parental leave, which is a legal entitlement open to all parents. Plus annual leave and juggling with DH

How much unpaid parental leave are people allowed?
The job is with the NHS. No wfh nut it does say something about flexible working?

Ours is a mix of annual leave, going to stay with grandparents and holiday clubs.
It’s fine when they are in primary. Loads of clubs offering various activities though sometimes the timings are rubbish. A few only run 9-3. Sometime 9.30-3 which is absolutely no use if you work a 9-5 unless you can work from home. Which we can’t.

Secondary becomes more problematic as there are little to no options from y7 onwards and some parents don’t want to leave them alone all day

Holiday clubs with some half days of leave.

Sports camp, music camp, drama camp

Compressed hours so we only have 3 days to cover in total.

I am cynically trying to encourage the kids to like sports that have good holiday camps as this should work well in the early secondary years which are otherwise difficult!

I have a spreadsheet which lists all the days the kids are off school in a year. I then work out what days DH and I will both cover (eg family hols), what days one of us can cover (eg this week we are splitting the days between us that kids are off), or we use holiday clubs. My mum occasionally helps but we prefer not to ask if we can.
They routinely do a holiday club/ sports camp for the Feb week, one of the Easter weeks and for a few weeks during the summer.

We do a lot of holiday camps, but I normally have to wfh as they often run until 3pm. Some have optional later finishes, but most dc finish at the standard time and it can be a bit boring staying an extra couple of hours as no activities are organised. We choose a range of different ones through the summer to fit in with their interests, and that can mean quite a bit of ferrying around (but we are in North London and there's a huge choice, if you have the budget for it). Often have 2 dropoffs as my dcs have different interests or the age group doesn't work.

DH and I like to take as much time off together as we can to go on family holidays/spend the Christmas period together. But that does mean we have less AL overall as most of it overlaps.

I don't like having the dc at home with me while I wfh, I think it's healthier for them to be out doing stuff and with other dc. They are with me sometimes if I do the pickup then I have to carry on working, but often I don't get back to working until later in the evening.

A mixture over the years..........

Afterschool ran a summer club which was cheap, but he didn't want to go to that after P5 (yr4) as it was mostly younger years and "boring".

dh and I taking annual leave at different times
dh working long days at weekends and taking mid week days off (self employed)

Reciprocal arrangements with other parents. ds was friends with a boy whose mum only worked 2 midweek days and was more than happy to have ds to keep her own son entertained. We had hers back on her working days.

Niece (17) was off college some of the same days and covered a couple of days

Local leisure centre did full day clubs where they had the full run of the centre and could swim, skate, etc. Even younger teens would go to it to hang out all day with friends.

WFH for a few days if stuck and work are supportive, but don't take piss - only an option if kids are more independent/older and you can flex your work. Didn't do this much as it is a boring option for dc too.

We were "lucky" with dh being self employed he was flexible, but it cost us a lot of money we could barely afford then if he wasn't working FT during those weeks and put a lot of pressure on him if he had to juggle jobs that took more than a few sequential days, or ran over, in customers homes.

I, more dh who was a bit of latch key kid from a young age, wasn't comfortable leaving ds at home alone at all, especially as we also had a medium/large dog at home - a big soft lump of a Labrador, but I could see ds inviting friends in, or leaving a door/gate open and I don't think children should be responsible for or left unsupervised around any dog.

18 weeks for each child up to their 18th birthday. Max of 4 weeks per year per child. It might be worth exploring: Unpaid parental leave: Overview - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Holiday clubs.

When I was between 11-14, I did a lot of summer camps, some residential, some day. Sport, drama.

This

Always a mix of my leave, DH's leave and holiday club,

Basically dh and I are only ever off together on bank hols and 1 week in the summer. I've inoreseef my hours, which deals with one day a week.

Combination of holiday clubs, begging favours from relatives and working from home. I'm a lone parent so I had no choice.

In my uhb you can only request parental leave after you've worked there for a year so may be worth checking your policy if you're relying on this

I wasn't able to cover it so I asked for a term time contract under flexible working. I do however realise that this is not an option for everyone. It also means that I am not technically full time

We used to take 2 weeks off separately which covered 4 weeks and Grandparents helped out if we were stuck.

We did try a babysitting swap with our siblings so cousins were looked after en masse but gave that up as CF SIL wasn't good at taking their turn.

My dp works for NHS and gets one week paid parental leave. There are certain requirements to qualify but it really is a great benefit.

My old job also allowed us to 'buy' an extra week of annual leave which was a great help, it cost me about £60 a month.