Teacherwith2kids, it is quite possible for parents to go for a whole year without being able to get the school hols off, and I have colleagues who have worked nearly every weekend for the last couple of years. Our rostering system is extremely complex and uses mainly seniority to award the work (i.e. those who have been there longest get the pick of the work) so the junior pilots get the crap weekend and low value work, with the knowledge they will one day get more senior and get better work. The change in retirement age in 2006 from 55 to 65 now means there is a bulge of pilots sitting at the top and the forecast movement onwards and upwards has stagnated for a decade. Those at the bottom have been in the worst place for much longer than they expected to be.
Wrt leave, we are given points based on the popularity of the week in question, and those who have the best weeks one year have to 'buy' them with their points. The points are very heavily skewed in favour of not taking the main holiday periods off. To make matters worse, in recent years (coincident with the ban on term time holidays, perhaps?) the summer, Easter and Christmas holidays have become ridiculously busy, and to deal with this (and other factors too complex to go into here) there has been occasional 'shaping' of the weeks leave available i.e. there might be more weeks available in June or September than are available in August.
All of this together means that, yes - it IS possible for someone in my job to go all the way through a year without seeing their children at a weekend (at all, if you are on a tour away) or having leave in the school holidays. That kind of person - and it does take an educated, intelligent person to become a pilot - will probably say 'fuck it, I'm taking my kids away for a week in term time.' I realise this is more info than you need, but I felt it necessary to explain how it works for us (the people who will be flying you around in those lovely school weeks off!) as there are so many people who still seem stuck with 'but you MUUUUUuuuust be able to get a week off! Surely!'
I only know about my own industry in depth, but I find it quite easy to imagine that there are many other jobs out there which present similar difficulties. Obviously it is easy to tar everyone with the same brush and pour scorn on parents who want to spend their precious days off with their children before they are too old for it, but not everyone is the same. It cuts both ways though - I've seen so many replies from teachers on MNs defending their profession when a parent says their child has spent the last days of term watching DVDs or playing board games. Lets just remember that while a child will probably spend 16 years in education, and it needs to be a partnership between parents and school. Working together - that is not just blindly doing what school say because they are teachers and they know best. The vast majority of parents have their children's best interests at heart, and do not knowingly damage their education. But it is simply not possible to fit all aspects of every adult who has a child's life around school all of the time, even with the best will in the world.
Childhood is an amalgamation of experiences. Not all of those experiences are at school. While school provided me with a basic education it was my experiences outside of school that have lead my siblings and to where we are today. Not one of us would be where we are as a simple result of just going to school. Our parents instilled ambition, wanderlust and hard work among many other qualities in us that a school where the teen pregnancy rate was higher than the success rate for uni applications was simply unable to. So I send my children to school, and support and encourage them there. But goddamit I will take them out for carefully chosen family time and adventure when I see fit - and it is so much easier if I am able to have the discussion of when will be better for the school like an adult rather than being made to feel naughty for doing it.
