How do working parents manage in the school holidays?

[ADJ1151]

Question says it all ^^

I have two Dc. Now my eldest is settled into full time school (she went part time for the first term) I need to start thinking about going back to work...

My husband works and earns a comfortable wage, we do manage quite well on his income but some extra income would be nice.

I’ve been looking at jobs in school hours and also the option of breakfast and after school clubs.

My two children have additional needs which makes it harder I think.

But how do you manage in the school holidays?

My Facebook newsfeed is full of parents asking if others can help out with their children during half term..

The school holidays will me my biggest hurdle. Like I say both my children have additional needs, family either can’t or don’t want to help out. I’ve never expected them to.

My children’s school don’t have a holiday club.

There are two childminders in the area but they are full.. and I would be concerned because they are both fairly new childminders and probably haven’t dealt with children with autism before.

If my husbands hours stayed the same every week I would work around that but they don’t. He is on alternating shift but does overtime etc as well. He tries to book all of his holiday in school holiday time but often with half term he doesn’t always get it off because there’s a lot of other people working there who also want it off..

Aibu to think it’s really bloody hard? With the added difficulty of both my children having autism... making finding childcare harder.

What’s the other options? Working from home? working term time only? (what kind of jobs, don’t want to work in the school)

Help?

@curlsnotfrizz

Quite the opposite actually, why would OP give herself the stress. Don’t be ridiculous there’s no such thing as “unleashing” a child on anybody SEN or not. What a cruel comment.

We’ve got it hard enough as parents let alone having to navigate childcare hurdles through holidays when every other Reason were given for lack of childcare is shitty funding?

If OP truly needed to work then obviously there’s no other option but she stated they were comfortable but it would be “nice” for an extra income.

More well off families shouldn’t expect proper holiday/care provision for children with additional needs? Is that really what you are saying?

If this is what Mrs A is saying, it's bonkers! "More well off families" are probably higher rate taxpayers. If there's no holiday care, the parents can't work / have to take unpaid leave and there's less tax going into the system and less funding to go round. Duh.

OP I feel for you. My eldest has ASD though luckily coped ok with holiday club. I would have been stuffed if he hadn't. PPs have mentioned au pairs which may or may not work for you. Did you know you can get a 6 week only summer au pair? That might work if you didn't want to do the whole year and then you could save a lot of your leave for the other holidays.

Thanks all. I live in a rural area. I am not sure if there’s any holiday clubs around. Most of the schools locally to me are very small schools so most probably not. I’ll have to look further afield.

Our families don’t really help out. They live close by but they have their own commitments.. I don’t have many friends close enough to trust.

Not had time to read all replies yet. But sounds very similar to us @Hoik! It’s so hard! I don’t think DS would manage in a holiday club but DD might..

Quite the opposite actually, why would OP give herself the stress. Don’t be ridiculous there’s no such thing as “unleashing” a child on anybody SEN or not. What a cruel comment.

you are backtracking. You comment was framed in the context of putting stress on childcare providers, there was no concern for the stress levels of the mum.

"Then we wonder why schools and care providers are so stretched for funding."

This still hasn't been explained.

@poopbear I didn’t not insinuate or say that SEN children be treated any different. It was a summary of the OP.

Don’t be so quick to jump to conclusions, Ive spent a lot of my free time looking after my best friends daughter on the severe end of the Autism spectrum so she could study.

Another poster made this about the children.

We have no family nearby and have never once used family childcare.

I do work shifts and my DH flexitime office hours so we can joggle pretty well. Our kids are now teens and pre teen and can be left alone for a few hours - were lucky that they're good kids and don't really fight (a fight for them is a couple of cross words about eating noisily or a disagreement about which music to have on in the living room). With one parent doing shifts and one flexitime office hours we never have to leave them for more than 3 hours.

Oh and we also:
Tag team annual leave
Use unpaid parental leave
Flexi time (so I usually work 2 half days but I worked one full day this week when the kids were in club and now I'm off today).

Then we wonder why schools and care providers are so stretched for funding.

mind to elaborate?

@curlsnotfrizz how is station facts from the OP me being vile about children? Just goes to show your own mindset. You could’ve taken anything from my first comment but that’s what you chose, I also said OP was “comfortable” meaning no need to go through all that just for some extra income

We have to juggle between us and call on friends for favours, and offer them favours in return. There are no holiday clubs in our area (or breakfast or after schools clubs) and the surviving grandparents are too old to help out.

The number of days of school holidays exceed our entire combined annual leave entitlement, so just juggling between us isn’t feasible, particularly since we want to use some of the leave to go on a family holiday.

I take a week AL
My husband takes a week AL
Luckily the grandparents help out with a week if they can get the AL

Otherwise it's holiday club

how did you mean then the comment about stretched funding, MrsA?

I am a single parent with 3 dc one with autism. I worked part-time (once I got to a certain level where my pay could support us).
Had a childminder who was great term time (she also would help out in emergency during holidays). I then had a holiday club designed for children with sen as well. Because it was all inclusive all 3 could go at the same time.
I never left them with friends as Ds1 needed routine and not being passed to different friends. I also worked set days which helped him know what was happening. I also took 1 day annual leave most school holiday weeks to reduce the cost of childcare and so I could spend quality time with the dc. It worked for many years till I could no longer work.

What worked best for us some years ago with two full time jobs and two children was to recruit a student to help. The last year we did this we got a newly qualified teacher who was bout to start her first job in September -she was great. After that we had an au pair for a year. that was quite hard to begin with but by the end of the year we were really sorry to say good bye. We also used to take leave at different times to each other, although this meant no family holiday.

I work 3 days a week in holidays
I have 1 set of committed grandparents who have covered most of this for me
2 other sets og grandparents who do odd days here and there.
Use holiday clubs
Use my own holiday and husbands holiday allowance only during school holiday time

We have been enormously lucky with grandparents doing the bulk of our holiday childcare whilst children were younger (under 12)
I also work from home so as they have got older they can be quite around the house when i work
Arrange for sleep overs / play dates with friends to help out.

I'm a single parent so have to work.

I juggle it. Luckily I have an ex who is involved and he works shifts so often has days off mid week. He will have DS on all his midweek days off in the holidays.

I use all my annual leave on the school holidays.

I also have a fair few family members who I can rely on occasionally who also work shifts - one is a TA so gets the holidays off and one is retired. They help out.

My mum, bless her, works full time but takes a week off in the summer holidays to help me out too.

Any days that I can't cover I then use the holiday club.

I've had to make sure that I live close to family to make it work and luckily my workplace is walking distance from my house.

Our old ds is autistic and we've done a combination of holiday care at his school (which is fortunately excellent) and holiday clubs/activities like coding day camp, Lego activities, circus skills, rock climbing day camp (we're in Australia and these are all just commercially operated activities in our city).

He found some activities tricky if he didn't have a passion for them but, as I told him, both me his dad have to work to pay for our food, house and toys. I would have considered a temporary nanny for holdays if he'd preferred that, but he's always preferred going to the other holiday activities, so we've stuck with them. It's tricky at times and expensive, but worth it. And he's made friends and found a passion (rock climbing) through the holiday clubs, so there has been a positive for him too.

@MrsA2015 you are blaming the OP for the state of education funding.
You do know that people who work, pay taxes? And that's how we fund education?
Maybe you don't.

*So your children have additional needs, you’re comfortable but it would be “nice” for an extra Income?

Then we wonder why schools and care providers are so stretched for funding.*

@mrsa2015

What a ridiculous and strange statement! You do realise that schools are funded by the local authority, and whether the parent works or not is totally irrelevant?
After school clubs and childminders charge for their services. They want your business, so it is in their interests for parents to go to work.

@curlsnotfrizz going based on our local care providers, holiday clubs require more staff, more resources and more budgeting throughout the year for the setting. They’re thinking of closing down permanently due to being unable to stretch care throughout the year. We’ve been asked by staff if we’re not in dire need of holiday care to withdraw as they only have limited spaces that parents who have no choice to work actually need.

THATS how I came to comment. Nothing to do with children.

MrsA2015 you linked the OP wanting to work with school and care providers having to stretch funding.
Why are they linked.

Thanks all. I will read through all your replies. I’m not sure I phrased my original post very well. Although my husband earns a wage we are comfortable on. He isn’t a high earner. He earns about 32 grand a year which isn’t high compared to some but decent for the area we live in which is generally minimum wage, casual work (touristy area). We own our home and because our mortgage is half the price of what my neighbour is paying in rent we don’t struggle too much. We are sensible, haven’t had any holidays in six years etc. We get by by an extra income would be nice one day! Plus I think getting back into work would be good for me.

I will look into all the options. We are also considering my husband going part time (he’s worked so hard over the years and would love to cut his hours down) and me working full time and switching roles for a while..

The worrying thing is I don’t think my children will ever be in the position to be left alone so even when they are older I don’t think both of us will ever be working full time at the same time!

DH and I sit down in January with a calendar and sort out the split. In the past it works mostly like this

February half term - holiday club
Easter - I take a week or we take a week together if we go away, second week club
May - mostly DH unless we go away (was every 3 years as I had to jiggle two other colleagues with school children)
Summer - two weeks together, rest holiday clubs with the odd day thrown in
October - depends if anything was left over, otherwise holiday club
Christmas - always DH

I worked 3-4 days and apart from the odd day where DD went to a friend or I had a friend over we never swapped with others, too unpredictable. The clubs were often not linked to the school, the two times she went to the school club she hated it.

Regarding Special Needs, lots of clubs will take children, especially if they are in mainstream school. It will be a bit of hot and miss to find the right one though. We have one club, run by the SEN TAs from a special needs school in Easter and Summer, it is actually designed to give the family a break and let them take siblings away for a day. You may want to look of there is something like a holiday/after school nanny available, that would give your children more structure.

A term job with school hours is like gold dust. Could you use the rest of the school year to try things out, ask local fb groups for club recommendations and speak openly to the providers about SEN.

I also used childcare near to where I worked rather than home which helped reduce the time they were there (not the cost as it was a set price).