Navigating the Summer Holidays - The True Test of Parenting

Problem solving is a common denominator throughout the entire animal kingdom: identifying issues, searching for potential solutions, and deciding on the best course of action is a skill as old as time. Indeed, evolution itself is essentially one big perpetual, problem-solving mechanism.

History holds problem solvers in high esteem, original thinkers from Marie Curie to Bill Gates, people who turned ideas into reality to improve, repair or create.

Of course there are many others whose names don’t trip off the tongue so readily. I couldn’t tell you who invented suction cups, micro umbrellas, and after years of drawers getting stuck, a folding potato masher. And then there are those who devoted their lives to creating solutions to problems that didn’t exist. No one ever needed a curved avocado slicer or a two-person sweatshirt.

These unique minds are truly exceptional, but walking among us is a group of people whose unrivalled problem-solving skills go largely unrecognised.

As summer approaches, and with it the longer days, warmer weather and better living, there looms a perennial problem that doesn’t affect everyone, but for those it does impact, it’s immense.

For working parents, school holidays pose a quandary that no one warns you about before having children. It’s not mentioned in the pregnancy books, never flagged at doctor’s appointments, but one day, and seemingly out of nowhere, it rises like a leviathan, and becomes an annual dilemma for approximately 14 summers per child.

“Aha!” it mocks. “You thought you had this parenthood business conquered, eh? Well I’m here to raise you eight weeks of school holidays, rising to 12 in secondary. The air fryer can’t help with this one pal.”

It’s a logistical, and often costly, nightmare for working parents, planning around their own annual leave, relying on grandparents or friends to share the load, or perhaps trying to work out the confounding matrix that is The Summer Camp.

Summer camps are great in theory. In an often futile attempt to upsell them to kids as not just school by another name, some are sport based, others focus on art or languages, and more again are a free-for-all — group childcare in a chaotic, but secure setting, staffed by bewildered foreign students questioning their life choices and immune systems.

​But for working parents, knowing their kids are corralled into a yard, supervised by adults with at least some first aid training and unbranded rice cakes, is OK. There’s enough to feel guilty about.

Within the many permutations and combinations of family types that exist lies the working single parent, and these singular people need more solutions than an Ikea warehouse.nmute

With no second parent to help, these extraordinary beings could run the world without batting an eyelid, and there’s no time where their unique set of skills are put to the test quite like summer holidays. Because, you see, even if you can afford the camps, it’s not as straightforward as handing over the fees.

They book up faster than Glastonbury, and often don’t mirror traditional school or working hours. Some are 9am to 2pm, others might be afternoons, and a rare, precious few might offer all day, but these are the ones that book up quickly.

I’m in the single, working parent demographic — a town typically twinned with illegal working conditions — but as a freelancer I’m fortunate to have the flexibility to hang out with my son for great swathes of the summer holidays, underpaid but favoured by fortune, with only a few weeks of camp necessary.

There’s a single mother of two who we call Turing, because she is the “The Woman Who Cracked the Summer Camp Code”. Working full-time with no family support, she must replace virtually all school hours during holiday time.

I imagine her kitchen with an evidence board like the one you might see in a detective drama — red string linking addresses, dates and times.

She knows that language camp is 9am till midday, the GAA one is within walking distance and runs from 12 to 3pm. They don’t run all summer long, but in the middle there’s a Lego club, and for the last week before school starts up again — a barren, no man’s land when most of the camps take a break — there’s one in the local leisure centre which no one seems to know about, but she has it booked.

I know there are many who think parents are always whingeing about something. If it’s not childcare it’s the cost of something else, and if we didn’t want the hassle that comes with having kids, then we should have thought twice.

Parenthood is a life full of broken promises, but only to yourself, never your children, and someone has got to raise the next generation.

We’ll all need fully functioning new members of society to run things in years to come, and to pay taxes while we’re struggling through our increased life expectancy with insufficient pensions.

So the next time you’re cursing a stressed parent whose child is making noise in a cafe, or holding you up on the way to school, summer camp, or the park, just remember: that child could well be your future pharmacist, or bus driver, or might one day be hoisting you into a bath in the nursing home.

Be kind. Even better, open a summer camp.