How Summer Vacations Have Become A Curse For Parents

There is a poem by acclaimed Italian writer Gianni Rodari that has always stayed with me.

It’s called “Ferragosto”, after the name of the Italian public holiday that falls on August 15 , and it’s about children who can’t afford to go on vacation. I can’t find an English translation, and I am not a literary translator, so it will have to suffice to say that the poem ends with the idea of a government that makes trips to the sea and to the mountains free for all children.

The poem made an impression on me as a child because I was well aware of how lucky I was to have vacations and to be able to travel. My parents owned a camper van, and we spent long summers driving through Greece and Turkey, learning about different ways of life and languages. I knew this made me stand out from others in my public school because I had classmates who couldn’t even afford a day trip to the beach (and I grew up in the outskirts of Naples, on the Mediterranean Sea), while others owned a house by the sea somewhere in southern Italy and went back to the same place every year.

My long vacations were possible because my mother worked as a teacher (and so our vacations as children and hers coincided, which does not happen for most adults out there) and my father worked as a freelance engineer and could organize his time off.

But they also had a second job, which was buying everyday-use objects and antiques around the world and then selling them at markets — so technically our vacations were also time for them to work and for us to trail behind them in dusty markets and poorly lit antique shops around Turkey and eastern Europe.

But the type of summers I had were completely exceptional — even friends I knew who owned two summer houses did not have parents who could afford more than one month off.

The truth is that long school vacations are completely out-of-synch with modern-day society — with two working parents, people living in nuclear families in small apartments in cities — all the while, summers are becoming hotter across a planet facing climate change.

What to do with kids in summer?

Countries like Italy have among the longest school vacations in Europe (11 to 13 consecutive weeks depending on the region). But many other countries in Europe have more than 12 weeks holidays for primary and secondary education, including Ireland, Greece, Latvia, Malta, Portugal, Albania, and Iceland, according to EU data. This differs significantly from countries like Denmark, The Netherlands, France and some Swiss cantons, where there are *only* around eight weeks off.

There is no need for distant travel for that, nor is travel necessary to have time to relax with children.

Early childhood education (for children up until the age of five) usually involves shorter vacations — in some countries nurseries or daycare centers are open all year round, or only shut down for a few weeks. This is because there is an understanding that young children need continuous supervision and they cannot be left to parents who need to work.

But what about six or seven year olds? How many parents have more than a month of vacation to look after them? They can alternate vacations if there are two parents, or maybe they have grandparents around, or they can afford summer camps. But what if none of these options are available?

That is when inequality increases — only families who can afford it go traveling or engage in learning activities, and the others use screens as babysitters. This has effects on children’s cognitive abilities, mental health, and on their physical health too, as they become more sedentary. Even in the UK, where summer vacations are about six weeks long, summer vacations may widen health and educational inequalities for children living in poverty.

Free play as a good ally

Having time off with the family can create great opportunities for children’s brain development, much like unstructured play and exploration do on a daily basis, as Margot Sunderland, a British child psychotherapist, argues in this article in The Telegraph. She refers to research by Jaak Panksepp, the late neuroscientist at Washington State University who wrote extensively about the benefits of play.

But there is no need for distant travel for that, nor is travel necessary to have time to relax with children. If the parents are stressed (because the vacation is expensive or because they are stuck in an airport for several days), then the potential for family bonding decreases too.

And making vacations a tenet for middle class life can bring a lot of stress. Rodari may have written “Ferragosto” in the 1950s, some seventy years ago, but holidays are still unaffordable to lots of middle class families. Research in Italy shows that four families out of ten cannot afford to go on vacation, while in the U.S., a 2021 survey found that nearly half of travelers were likely or definitely going to take on debt to fund summer travel, with millennials and parents of younger children more likely to incur debt.

Alternatives to vacation

But what alternatives do we have as parents when our young children are out of school and they are too young to be able to entertain themselves? If you are lucky enough to have family around, then you may have grandparents willing to help while you work. (But beware, because grandparents can also burn out when they become the only childcare option that parents have.)

Otherwise, you need to have enough money to spend on childcare or summer camps. In Italy, as this article in Domani newspaper points out, summer camps cost between 100 and 220 euros per week per child. That is a huge sum, if you multiply it for at least eight weeks. In the United States, besides being very expensive, summer camps are hard to get into too, as there is a lot of competition.

Give parents more of a chance to be with their children over the summer.

Around the world, some schools are experimenting with summer opening hours. In Italy, there is a project to keep schools open in summer, but it is aimed at older children and it is mainly to fight against the summer learning loss — children who are not at school unlearn a lot of their academic knowledge. In the Netherlands, some schools remain open 50 weeks of the year, and parents (and students) choose when they go on holiday.

I do understand why so many countries in the Mediterranean have long vacations — with outdated infrastructure, public schools may not be able to offer children the right conditions to stay cool, as heat waves last longer. And many cities in the southern Mediterranean are far from child-friendly — especially in the heat.

But governments should have public policies in place for this total mismatch between parents’ working life and children’s school times. So, let me go back to Rodari’s poem: let’s give children a chance to have subsidized summer camps and paid holidays, or at least give parents more of a chance to be with them over the summer — with more flexible schedules, and some financial compensation.