I used to believe in spreadsheets, that formulas and colour coding had magical powers to put order on a chaotic world and reveal the path to an optimised life. It worked for travel planning, for career choices and for household budgets. But then I tried to make it understand the magical thinking of the maths of Irish family life, and both my spreadsheet and my faith in rationality disintegrated into a sea of alarming little red triangles with exclamation points.
The final straw was summer holiday childcare maths. Irish workers are entitled to four weeks of annual leave per year, while Irish schools and (many) preschools are closed for about 13 weeks a year. Parents can request unpaid “Parent’s Leave” from their employer, which is roughly 2 weeks per year per child for the first 12 years. This would mean that even if there are two parents, and each takes different holidays, and the unpaid leave, a max of 10 of the 13 weeks off could be covered.
For households where all adults work – and for those with the resources to do so – this is where camps come in. Summer camp as a concept has a dreamy quality; it conjures canoes and tyre swings and lifelong friendships formed by the bonfire. The reality, in Ireland at least, is a little more prosaic. There are frantic Google searches, fights for places, fistfuls of cash to mostly private providers, and all for the pleasure of depositing your child at a random scout den before dashing to squeeze some work into the 3-4 hour window you have before you need to pick them up again.
[ The summer juggle: How to work while the kids are offOpens in new window ]
My child is 4½, and we’re facing our first summer of this. After several weeks of planning she signed up for six weeks of camps during the nine weeks of summer break. I have co-ordinated with other families to make sure she turns up at each random scout den with at least one familiar face, though this means she will be attending camps by five different providers, in five different locations. The total cost, for one child, is €757. And for this money, even optimising for longer camps, across these six weeks we’ll be getting an average of 3.6 hours of cover per day.
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These short hours add another incentive to team up with other families. The only way I can imagine getting through the summer as a working family is to participate in the elaborate barter system known as play dates. Sometimes this “I’ll pick them all up Tuesday if you do Wednesday” is explicit, sometimes it’s unspoken. Often it’s a lifeline.
Some families have moved beyond the barter system to something approaching co-operatives; parents banding together over school holidays to take turns minding each others’ kids. Taking one day off to mind four or five kids is the same hit to finite holiday allowances as taking one off for just your own, without the expense of private camps.
This reinvention of traditional economic models – bartering, co-operatives – on a micro level should signal to us that something approaching market failure is happening at the macro level. Most camps feel designed to deliver a few mornings of entertainment and maybe educational enrichment to children who are otherwise at home for the summer, cared for by a non-working parent. But two-thirds of Irish mothers work outside the home, according to the Growing Up in Ireland Survey.
This disjointed maths – the gulf between the world a system presumes exists and reality – feels very familiar. Like how we have six months of maternity leave, but childcare for those under 12 months old doesn’t exist. Like how you can get a mortgage for 3½ times your salary, but average Dublin house prices are 8 times average salary levels.
This cognitive dissonance leaves tens if not hundreds of thousands of households scrambling to find ways to make things work. But no amount of spreadsheeting can solve a problem that was never designed to be solvable.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Public provision of childcare outside of term time is the norm in many countries, such as France, where schools and municipalities organise affordable offerings throughout school holidays that cover the work day.
More could also be done to facilitate those who want to spend more time away from work over summer. Policies such as parent’s leave, that give employees the legal right to request unpaid leave. I am planning to reduce the hours I work per day over the summer months, something I can do as I work for myself, and that allows me to keep the lights on and get projects lined up for the autumn. This idea of “summer hours” is common in some parts of Europe, but would probably take government support to become mainstream here.
Parents have built patchwork systems that somehow work, cobbled together from WhatsApp groups, favours, and sheer will. Imagine what we could do if the official systems tried even half as hard.
Summer childcare: Tell us your experience of juggling and paying for camps and what’s the solution? You can tell us using the form below
Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at thebriefing.ie
