I recall having a chat with a friend of mine. He’s a dad of two kids, although his are slightly older than mine. During our conversation he made a comment about his children largely get on and entertain themselves without parental involvement.
Interestingly, this chap had done what I did. He’d reached a point in life where he felt the need to completely retrain and do something entirely different career wise. While he didn’t explicitly say as much, I’ve often wondered if he took this decision because the labour-intensive years of parenting had passed, granting him a little more freedom to explore other options.
Not, you’ll understand, that this is the point of this blog post. Oh no, I’m thinking more about the impact this has on school holidays.
With my family at one end of the country and Mrs Adam’s at the other, holiday periods always used to involve a certain amount of shuttling between the different families. We’d also squeeze in a trip to Pizza Express, maybe a day trip to London or, depending on the time of year, a visit to the seaside etc.
I always used to love the six week summer holiday. When the kids were at primary school and my biggest non-family commitment was this blog, I used to organise summer in a way that our feet did not hit the floor. It wasn’t intentional, but I always tried to squeeze in a brief camping trip, they’d have been visits to see the family and there was an Air BnB in Porthcawl, Wales, that we visited a few times that the kids adored. The woman who ran it love kids and she had an insanely large dog and we’d buy ice cream and eat it on the sea font.
I do sometimes think I went a bit over the top, truth be told. I don’t recall Mrs Adams and I having disagreements about the state of the bank balance at the end of the summer holidays. On more than one occasion, however, I clearly remember thinking I needed to rein in the spending.
While I do feel a certain amount of guilt at the spending (while also feeling fortunate to be able to spend such time with my kids), in some respects I see it as an investment. We made memories and spend quality time together. The kids got to camp, see different parts of the country, see relatives they rarely do and so on. On one particularly memorable visit to Porthcawl we nearly got blown half way down the Bristol Channel when the weather turned bad but, hey, as I say, this is the kind of thing that memories are made of.
These days school holidays are very different. The eldest wants to hang out with friends and has work commitments. The youngest wants to listen to music and is quite content doing so for hours on end. When she isn’t doing that, she is playing football for a local team.
I simply couldn’t organise school holidays the way I used to. Or rather I could, but it would interfere with the kids’ work and social, work and sporting commitments. They wouldn’t be happy with it and for good reason. You have seen how a teenager reacts when you interfere with their work, social and sorting commitments, right? It doesn’t end well for the unthinking person who planned the clashing events.
Yes, I do feel a little sad those days have passed. On the other hand, it was always going to happen. It’s not like we can’t gather the family together during the school holidays, it’s simply that it tends to be in short bursts: An afternoon here, an evening there, a quick portion of churros at a nearby café.
There’s also a question about modern parenting. If I think back to my childhood, school holidays were never massively organised. Sure, I went and spent some time with extended family and maybe a sleepover with a family friend but that was it. The rest of the time I was left to my own devices. I think most kids were.
I could get deep and philosophical about it, but I won’t. Kids grow up cuz. It’s just the way of the world innit? The kids want to do their own thing and that’s natural. I simply hope they have happy memories of holidays from when they were younger.
