To wonder what working parents are meant to do in school holidays?

[StepAwayFromGoogle]

DD1 starts school in September. DP and I both work because we can't afford for either one of us to be off. I have applied for part time but my work have been spectacularly backward and refused point blank, which is a whole other thread. I am looking for another job but work in a very specific field in a very specific industry so it's not looking likely that I'll get something, much less part time.
DD1 school have a before and after school club which is over subscribed so she won't get in for the first year. We have scrabbled around and managed to cover the week with GPs and a childminder.
So on to the holidays. DD1 will have 13 weeks off school a year. Between us, me and DP will have just under 10 weeks holiday. AIBU to think that if the govt wants parents (particularly mothers) to work then there needs to be better holiday provision? I'm not blindingly sure what working parents are expected to do after 3pm every day and for the 13 weeks children are off in the year. At the moment all our holiday days will be spent covering time off school and we won't be able to have a holiday together as a family.

My parent's have their own jobs to get to funnily enough? It's a big assumption that gps are the answer. They might not want to provide childcare. I'm finding the be a teacher comments odd too. Any teacher I know says it is not a family friendly job at all. I do agree though that people shouldn't wait until the dc are school age to start thinking about the holidays. It's setting yourself up for stress.

Thanks @abracadabraba I’m not embarrassed. :) It’s stinky who’s grabbed the wrong end of the stick and run with it.

Agree with you OP. It’s grim. Holiday clubs round here either do a full day and cost £500 pw or are council run and quite reasonable and run from 10-3 Plus in the holidays there’s no access to the after school club so it’s no bloody use at all.

I’m lucky to be in a well paid job so had a full time nanny for years but now I’m reliant on cobbling it together from one leave allowance (single parent). I just spend a vast amount of money for some substandard clubs and wish away the years until they are able to be home alone for 13 weeks of the year.

genuinely believe the government could be doing more to support working families, that's all, by ensuring capacity meets demand

Not a popular opinion on here but I think the government should stop this policy that encourages 2 parent families both to go to work and pay someone else to bring up their children. What ever happened to looking after our own children?

I think gov helping single parent families is much needed but helping 2 working parents with childcare so they can go on nice holiday's is not on.

I live in an area with no holiday clubs, no breakfast clubs and no after school clubs. And we have elderly parents who can't help. And nine weeks of summer holidays...

We juggle, and juggle some more, both during term and during holidays. And ask for favours and offer favours in return. It's a balancing act.

Ds is 15 now so thankfully don't need childcare anymore. We used

dh and I mostly took separate annual leave
Self employed Dh took time off mid week and worked weekends (cost us a fortune in lost work)
School clubs
Lesuire centre clubs
Football school
1/2 day holidays, TOIL to work around club times
Reciprocal care with other parents
Grandparents (elderly, so only if really stuck)
Niece on holiday from college

We were luckily for a couple of years one of ds's friends had a parent who only worked 2 days a week and offered to take ds during holidays 3 days a week for several weeks each year as was company for her ds. We reciprocated by taking annual leave 2 days a week and took her ds the days she was working. Unfortunately they moved out of the area after a couple of years. We found parents, like us, with only one ds were most open to sharing so their ds had company during long holidays.

There was lots of care provision out there we weren't aware in the first couple of years until we heard about it from other parents. The first year or so is tough, but try to network with other parents for information and possibly helping each other. Always reciprocate so you both benefit or you'll find offers will dry up quickly.

OP it seems like you have been really unlucky to live in an area where childcare is so scarce. We've had the same childminder since our daughter was 14 months old (she's 8 now) and we didn't start looking until 3 months before I was due to go back to work.
If we had been in your situation where all the childminders were over subscribed and there was a year long waiting list we would have been really stuck too. Childminders and nurseries are being massively squeezed by the early years free hours which they have to offer but the government does not pay them properly for. It's much more difficult to be a childminder now then it was 10 years ago.

How poor would the health and/or relationships in your family have to be for all 4 grandparents to be dead, demented or otherwise completely unavailable for childcare when your children are young?

All 4 of my GP were dead by the time i was 4 so i dont remember them and my parents had no help from GP. My mum died when my DC were 4 and 1 (she was in her early 60s). My DF is in his 80s and not able to look after my DC. My IL have occassionally offered some childcare but they are in their 80s and live 1.5 hours away so we prefer not to ask them unless were really stuck.

The government make plenty of financial decisions for us and our tax money though. Quite often the wrong ones.

I’m guessing every single person in the UK has a different view about what the governments priorities should be.

I work part-time as a poll clerk for my local council. The turn-out for local elections is woeful. I wish people would get out and vote to change their local council if they don’t agree with how it spends their council tax.

The lack of childcare is why the UK has skill shortages and low productivity compared to other countries.

How does it benefit anyone to say we will force nearly 50% of the adult population to either go unemployed or do jobs way below their skills level or do we as a population just have to stop having children and import all our workers from abroad?

Right so I am going to completely ignore the political debate going on but will offer some practical advice. Ifuouhaveyhe soace consider an Au pair. Your needs (care over the summer holidays) are ideal for many au pairs who only want to work a few months over the summer. If it goes well over the holidays you could consider having someone all year round to help with school run etc. We’ve recently welcomed an au pair into our home and she’s an angel. We also live in an area where it is impossible to get proper childcare provisions (it all ends at six latest which just isn’t suitable for most proper jobs especially if you are commuting) and we have no family that can help so I really sympathise. It’s not as simple as researching all the options. There are no options beyond finding a nanny willing to work unsociable hours (like gold dust except more expensive) or having an au pair (which only works if you have a spare room and a certain amount of luck finding a nice one).

helping 2 working parents with childcare so they can go on nice holiday's is not on.

More like helping 2 working parents so they can pay bills and put food on the table. Most families have two working parents to keep their heads above water not live in luxury.

I ended up working in a school. I managed the pre school years fine with a nursery but there wasnt a lot of wrap around care available and my DS had special needs so a lot of what was there was unsuitable for him.
I do think school needs rethinking. The children are generally exhasuted as are the teachers by the end of each term and a longish break is needed. But i do wonder if shorter days in school with less holidays would work better. Its an easier business structure to offer after school care providers too. Its quite hard to employ people for 3 hours a day after school, term time only. Our school really struggles to staff breakfast and afterschool club.

It is a struggle of a juggle, and you just have to use whatever resources you can to solve it.

I looked on the high cost of holiday childcare as an overhead that enabled us (their father and me) to work year round.

We (including DH) did swaps with close friends and other family members, having each other’s kids for days, took our holidays in relays, used TOIL and flexi-time, holiday clubs, holiday child minders.

You might have guessed by now that I very much don’t see this as an ‘especially mothers’ issue. Childcare enables men to work too, and they need to take equal responsibility.

I find it very hard now that my son is 11 as the options for childcare are limited more so because of his age. I don't have any family near by and childminders won't take on a nearly 12 year old. No after school clubs I can rely on long term either.

And transpants just added a bit more to the guilt

How about you grow up. Facts that you don't like aren't about adding to the guilt. Trying to drown people down with that kind of attitude is bullying and self-defeating. The simple fact is that in an economy where one of the main staples of life, housing, is priced by supply and demand, the government subsidising one kind of family automatically penalises the other. And that "other" is actually the one the family lifestyle that the majority profess a wish to be. We have to stop insisting that the government financially facilitate the type of family life that most people don't want to the detriment of the lifestyle that most people do want.

Especially when families are significantly more secure and can weather economic shocks better when they can live on one income. If economic facts like that "add to your guilt" then I'm very sorry to tell you but you have a super messed up perception of guilt. Someone or someones did quite the number on you. Either that or you are just petulantly trying to shut down anyone who states anything you have closed you mind to. Which is a really shitty, massively bullying thing to do.

Breakfast club starts at 8am. After school childcare only goes to 445pm. Oversubscribed.
Holiday clubs here at pricey. Closest one to me is 0830-1530 at £31. It's 4.50 more per hour until 6pm. I use this sparingly as it adds up.
I use AL and family mainly. I work 13 hour shifts so compressed hours--it's a massive struggle to find childcare when doing unsocial hours. A lot of NHS/Police have this problem due to having to do nights, very early starts and late finishes.

OP, I went self employed when DD started preschool, so that I could work around school hours and then work evenings and weekends to catch up. But then XH left us 6 months before she started school which meant that I needed to work full time.

I used after school club, Rainbows, school choir etc, as many free school clubs as I could get, as well as the paid one. I am lucky that my mum is nearby and that my neighbours had kids of a similar age and would collect DD if I were running late. XH's mum is disabled and lives miles away, so there was only one GP available to help, not everyone has 4.......

XH has never had DD in the holidays because he "has to work"......

Holidays were a nightmare though as mum couldn't have her 5 days a week and there is real lack of childminders and clubs around here, or else nurseries that were a 20 mile round trip in the wrong direction for work.

Just to add, times and rates are for where I live in the SE.

This is exactly why I struggle to comprehend the mentality on here that life gets so much easier once they start school. Posts about going back to work after having young children are strongly in favour of returning full time and paying the huge childcare fees with the intention of all costs reducing once they start school.

From where I'm standing, there is wraparound care on either side of school day, holidays, sports days, assemblies, parents evenings etc in addition to the endless list of things they need to make/do at home with you (when both DH and I would get home after 7pm if working full-time) that just makes it so much harder. If at after school club each day, we also wouldn't be able to do evening activities with them. Also, getting home so late would mean we don't get enough time with them to find out what's happening at school, how they are etc

I fully agree its our responsibility as parents to budget for and provide this care but just don't agree with this idea of everything magically getting easier and better once they start school. If anything, its much much harder

How does it benefit anyone to say we will force nearly 50% of the adult population to either go unemployed or do jobs way below their skills level or do we as a population just have to stop having children and import all our workers from abroad?*

This neatly sums up the impasse that the U.K. finds itself in.

I live in a European country where nurseries, after school and holiday clubs are heavily subsidised. It doesn't totally remove the problem - when my kids were little our town's holiday club closed for part of August to coincide with annual factory shutdowns - but it makes life a lot easier for working parents.

@speakout exactly. Totally agree with you. Tbh I even think that working from home masks the issue; how much quality work are you actually getting done during the school holidays working from home? You can’t supervise your children properly and concentrate on your work. It’s just moving the problem around.

It’s so so simplistic to just say ‘you should have thought about this before you had children!’ But IMO that is just encouraging this stagnant, outdated attitude of making children and childcare a problem. It sails dangerously close to ‘if you don’t make xyz amount of money and fit a certain mould then you don’t deserve to have children!’ It’s valid for people to want better. It’s valid for people to want quality care choices for their children that don’t cost the earth and that actually fit their working requirements.

How poor would the health and/or relationships in your family have to be for all 4 grandparents to be dead, demented or otherwise completely unavailable for childcare when your children are young?

My children's surviving grandparents are two octogenarians and a severely disabled 75 year old. Sometimes my 7 year old stays with them for 15 minutes whilst I nip to the shop. They think they're looking after him and he thinks he's looking after them.

Initially we shared a local childminder with one other family. She was fantastic. As DC got older and too old for our childminder we got them into breakfast and after school club. I would drop them off at 8 and pick them up at 6pm. It was grim. In the summer/school holidays it was holiday clubs. We had no family or GPs close by to help out , but we were very lucky as our childminder had become a family friend and would still help out in emergencies.

I had no problem using holiday clubs