How do you work full time when the children start school?

[mummyclare]

It's a year off for us but I've been panicking for some time. We have had luxury of workplace nursery so far. I am going to try to reduce my hours - but that's only going to help with some drop-offs and pick ups and will do nothing for hols. Also local playscheme takes from 5. So what are you meant to do when they're still 4?

Help please. All ideas warmly welcomed.

I think one of the biggest issues around kids starting school is that a lot of parents just get hung up thinking about the 'covering' the out-of-school childcare, and not all the associated emotional stuff.

When kids are nursery/pre-school age it's actually (relatively..) easy to drop them off where YOU want them to go.

However as they get older their own preferences and personalities begin to come through and start making things more difficult ...

From my own experience:

• there MAY be an after schoolclub at your child's school, but they will likely want to go to football (elsewhere) with friend X instead.
• DS1 loves the holiday club, but DS2 HATES it, "Mummy - do I HAVE to go???"
• CMs may work less well if an older schoolchild is having to hang out with lots of babies/toddlers (my friend is having issues with her DS over this at the moment)

I also found the demands from the school grew enormously between Reception and Year3 :

• homework which (ideally) needs parental (rather than au pair) input
• Costumes for plays/ theme days etc
• music practice to be overseen
• parent meetings

-sports days

• concerts

-harvest festival

• carol concert/ nativity
• "mummy can YOU come and do class reading - everyone else's Mummy does..."
• requests for playdates
• mums coffee mornings
• etc

-etc

And of course you can be firm and say 'no you have to go to X,Y &Z' and sneak out of work/ feign illness/ take half days/ work from home/ juggle with DH to make it all happen, but after a while it may all get a bit too complicated, a bit too stressful, and rather heart-breaking, with a sense that you are doing neither thing (work/parenting) well.

So you leave/ go part-time/ freelance.

I've seen it again & again I'm afraid.

I say to all my friends with pre-school children, "by all means have a plan, but be ready to change it, when you see how you feel"

Oh god, yes, the bl*dy meetings!! And your attendance (or otherwise) is recorded and put on the dc's end of term report.......... It's worse that being at school yourself.

That sounds a mare LM. I have 2 at school now, it's a pita

Yes, agree that if your school doesn't offer a breakfast or after school club it is bloody difficult. I think that it's by 2010 that all schools have to be able offer before and after clubs or at least be in a pyramid of schools that do.

Frogs, I linked to The Scream below!

fatzak, see my post of 11.55.

If only it were that easy.

2 at school - oh yes - nightmare!

Freelancing only solves some of the problem. As in you volunteer - in the spirit of a brave young chap in 1915 - to accompany a class of five to seven year olds to the locl museum (to the sound-track of "mummy you were GOING to come last time and you said you had to WORK") because you have no bloody work on...and then three commissions come along at once.

Agree with everyone else - it's difficult and stressful. I have found child minding has worked well for us.

We have found one we and the kids really like - lots of activities. She will do school pickup and is flexible in the holidays.

Can be costly but seemed to work out about the same as playschemes/holiday clubs and kids were happier.

PS we (DH and I) have also, for the first time this year, taken our holidays at different times to cover more weeks of the school hols. This only works of course if you aren't going away and TBH it made us both miserable as we haven't had any time off together.

Good luck!

MI - ah yes - the guilty parent syndrome! I have been found working until 2.00am after gnashing my teeth through a farm visit I agreed to months before

You make arrangements ...

1. After school club
2. Aupairs/nannies/childminders
3. Both parents negotiate flexible working arrangements whereby you can pick up one day a week
4. You make friends with people in the same situation
5. You become very fond of your relatives who don't work

MI -- never volunteer. NEVER, d'you hear me? Keep those expectations low.

Feeling slightly jaded here as have dd1's french exchange here (lovely girl, but paralytically shy). So yesterday I had sundry of her classmates + their exchanges here (plus a babysitter for dd2 in the form of one of dd1's old primary friends from another secondary school because I'd stupidly forgotten that we had to take ds to a 2ndary school open day).

And when we got back there were 6 or 7 teenage girls all sitting in embarrassed silence in our sitting room watching a DVD, studiedly NOT talking to each other. I wanted to cry/bang their heads together.

Oh yes, and said french girl has to be delivered back to the school BY 9am on Saturday morning, which coincides with dd2's music group and ds's cricket coaching.

[sound of brain frying]

Oh god yes, exactly what Norma said. Sometimes what's available just isn't right for the child.

The costume making used to drive me mad

And what Frogs said about Secondary. DD will have 4 half days in Oct & Nov because the staff need to meet with GCSE and A level students about their targets. And from next week it's the round of secondary school open days and evenings for ds in Y5, plus:

• harvest festival
• dd trip to orthodontist
• dd trip to opthamlologist
• bloody annual gas boiler service

Oh and add in Book Club. I wasn't fully informed of dd's potential secondary choices (pah! choices!!!) because, as a well-meaning friend told me with pity, "You don't go to book club, do you Primula?"

LOL at Frogs

It gets harder every year in fact, not easier.

DD does hockey and netball after school
DS does tennis after school

These after school clubs are on different days

Means varying arrangements necessary

I use King Camps which is a nationwide scheme that runs sports-based extended-day holiday clubs for school-aged kids - generally run in schools with excellent facilities. Luckily, my DDs adore going, however it only runs for 1 week at Easter and 4 or the 6 weeks in the holidays. Consequently we actually build our holidays away around these times.

In October, we plan to go away, but in Feb next year we've nothing arranged yet...

Ah yes, our old friends the dentist, orthodontist and the eye clinic. Who will all only book appointments in studied defiance of the schools' absence policy, ie no later than 4pm.

Buggerbuggerbuggerbugger.

Twas for this I got my rather swanky degree, honestly. I could mastermind the invasion of a medium-sized country from the calendar on the front of my fridge.

AND of course everyone knows that if YOU don't socialise with the other parents your child(ren) will be ostracised, so don't forget to add in all those PTA meetings/ parents' night outs/ seeing other Mums.... all at times when you should really be catching up with all that work you missed when you slipped out to see DS perform in the local schools' music festival....

Oh and volunteering is an impossibility. Do not bake cakes for those bakeathon things either. Lose all shame about it.

Get used to apologising and saying to people "I'm sorry but I am in too much chaos even to THINK about volunteering/PTAing/Baking. It's as much as I can do to turn up to the right school."

Note please never say that you are too busy because people can sometimes interpret that negatively - ie think that you mean you are too important to bake. Rather than literally not having a second in the previous two weeks.

Maybe we've just been lucky but all 3 of our primary schools have had good before and after school clubs on the premises. They cater for the preschoolers as well, our current one is run in the preschool room after school so the preschoolers don't even have to move, their siblings come to them.

We also have a tame local childminder who can cover emergencies and takes my preschooler in the holidays sometimes when the older two go to holiday clubs.

We also share drop-offs and pick-ups and sometimes more childcare with other parents living nearby

it can be a pain but I don't find it as hard as working with babies and toddlers - at least with school age children you can get their views and know better how happy they are with their childcare, which I find makes it easier to leave them in it.

lol @ frogs, got to be quote of the week. But it's true, you have to be a logistics expert....

Lol frogs!!!

Is yours a pristine spreadsheet, or have arrows, crossing out and squiggles all over it?!!

Some enterprising company needs to make a magnetic one, with magnetic schoolkid and parent counters

What Quattro says re after school clubs is sooooo true!

My DCs clubs change every half term!

Football matches are sometimes at 'home', but sometimes 25 mins drive away..
DS1 does French until 4.30 for 5 weeks only until half term.
School play rehearsals start after half term, so all the other clubs get shuffled around!

It is IMPOSSIBLE to plan anything for more than a couple of weeks at a time.

We have a MEGA timetable which I update (in excel for the kitchen wall, and I have updated it FOUR times already since the start of term.

I thnk the afterschool club I'm talking about is a bit different to the particular activity type club. The one we use is after school until 6pm on the school site.

so it never changes, although it doesn't run on last days of term sadly

DS1's school started alternate days of mornings and afternoons for the first half term, ie. he was never there more than about 2 1/2 hours at a time. I work full time. DH was commuting weekly across the country. So I got pregnant in late Jan and went on leave at 36 weeks...But I don't really want babies at four year intervals until I retire.