Can I be honest and admit I'm not a fan of the school holidays?

Opinion: The next two weeks are about to be a real grind for many parents. Anna Murray counts the ways.

I won’t lie. When the bell goes at the end of the last day of a school term, I do feel a brief sense of euphoria.

Two weeks! Two weeks of not making lunchboxes. Two weeks without nagging small children to find their shoes and put them on RIGHT NOW, PLEASE. Two weeks of not having to worry about swimming classes, dance classes, spelling homework, reading logs.

And then the first Monday of the school holidays rolls around and I remember: Oh yeah, this can also be a real drag.

I’m told it didn’t always used to be this way. I asked my mother about her experience with the school holidays and it turns out she was a big fan.

Being a dairy farmer, she said she appreciated the extra child labour on the farm that the school holidays afforded her and my dad. She also enjoyed not having to worry about getting three kids to school while trying to milk cows or feed calves.

“It was like time out for parents,” she said, speaking like a true mother of the 1980s.

But this is 2024. And the school holidays are a grind. Here’s why.

Show me a parent who hasn’t had to drop a lot more money during the school holidays, and I will show you a liar.

Everything is going to be expensive over the next two weeks. If you’re lucky enough to be taking the family on holiday, do enjoy the upcoming premium on flights and accommodation.

If you don’t have the luxury of being able to work from home – a health worker, a retail worker, a public servant in Wellington, for example – your kids have to go somewhere for the next two weeks, which for many of us means costly school holiday programmes (more about those later).

And even if you get to mooch around home with the kids, the extra money sneaks up on you in other ways.

As my friend Lisa* pointed out: “I find it mind-boggling that a week’s worth of groceries during term time equals two days’ worth of groceries in the school holidays.”

The guilt that comes with parenting does not take a break for the holidays. Instead, it takes on new forms.

Most working parents have four weeks of paid annual leave, which they need to somehow balance against the approximate 12 weeks of school holidays most primary school kids have over a year. I am not at all confident with numbers, but even I can see the maths doesn’t math there.

This is why many parents will be working from home over the next two weeks.

You will want to be that organised parent who has some kind of activity lined up to distract the kids for a time. You will hope that you have some kind of backyard that you can tell the children to go and entertain themselves in.

But chances are also high you will be negotiating screentime allowances at home while negotiating deals at work. You will look up from a Teams meeting and see your kid engrossed in an iPad, probably ruining their eyesight or being groomed by strangers, and feel guilt that you’re not the parent who can just resort to using the kids as child labour on the farm out in the fresh air.

Then, there’s the guilt of simply not being able to spend as much time with the kids during the holidays as you would like.

While my old school friend Jane* enjoys not worrying about lunchboxes and after school activities for a couple of weeks, she says the holidays have one big downside.

“I hate the mum guilt of being self-employed in a small business with little flexibility and time off, so I never have days off to do fun stuff with [the kids].”

Ah yes, the school holiday programmes – the groups of mostly teenagers doing God’s work keeping children alive and entertained while their parents hold down a job.

These programmes can cover off a few of the school holiday pain points.

There’s the cost factor (pain point number one) and there’s the guilt (pain point number two).

That guilt can be multi-pronged, too. It comes with not spending as much time with the kids, and can also crop up when your child turns around and cries that they don’t want to go to the holiday programme anymore.

Also, you need to pack the kids a lunchbox to take with them for the day – and the absence of lunchboxes is supposed to be one of the perks of the school holidays.

If you’re really lucky (i.e. flush with cash amidst a struggling economy), you can bite the bullet and book a holiday for some or all of the two weeks to distract the kids.

But let’s be honest. Unless you are holidaying at a resort where you don’t need to cook any meals, wash any dishes or do any laundry, a “holiday” with younger children is really just dealing with the same routines of home, but in an unfamiliar place.

We splashed out on three nights in the sunny metropolis of Wellington during the first school holidays this year (brag) and returned home for term two happy, but also exhausted, quite a bit poorer, and with an obscene pile of washing to wade through.

The school holidays bring a few other downsides.

There are the sibling conflicts, for example. It’s a universal truth that siblings can only spend so much time in each other’s company before they start scrapping in the lounge. Good luck with the school holiday juggle of acting as a referee while also taking a work call.

If you’re lucky enough to be able to take your kids on a few outings over the next two weeks, then you need to brace yourself for that other school holiday downside: the crowds.

The usual haunts, like zoos, playgrounds, and museums, will be crawling with people. You will be dealing with everyone else’s children as well as your own.

My social media callout for thoughts and feelings on school holidays did produce some benefits that come with the next two weeks.

My friend Dave, father to a cavoodle, is one person happy about what lies ahead.

“I love school holidays because the traffic is better for me,” he said.

I was also reminded that one day, my children will be older and this school holiday juggle will be but a distant memory – even if that does come with new problems, as my friend Jessica* pointed out.

“I’m grappling with the horror that our now 14-year-old can be left alone in the house for the first time during these school holidays and praying he does not burn the house down.”

*Names changed to protect the frazzled. Dave’s name not changed, as he is not frazzled.

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