Call me a bitch, but I say 10 weeks of summer vacation is an anachronism and unfair to us working moms.

It is now week six of summer vacation, and I am not quite a wreck.
When I think of summer vacations, I remember endless days hanging about in a gang of kids. Swimming a bit, getting bored, reading books (the entire Anne of Green Gables series in three days of torrential rain), catching tadpoles, playing hide and seek and watching bad TV.

It was a hazy, lazy kind of time, which usually included a trip to my grandparents’ dairy farm and time at the beach.

This wonderful sloth was possible because my mother didn’t work until I was in my teens. In contrast, the average American working mom get 10 days vacation a year, and most of that (from what I see) gets used up staying home with sick kids, taking a long weekend here or there, and a desperate dash to see relatives at Thanksgiving and a few days at the beach.

Are they really vacationing for the entire summer vacation? I think not.

Even the Obamas are only taking two weeks as a family at Martha’s Vineyard in August.

Contrast my childhood summers in Australia (about eight weeks) with my children’s summer vacation (ten weeks plus a few days in Maryland).

I had unstructured days.  My children have structured days in camp.

I played with the kids in my street, roaming the neighborhood on bikes,  scooters or by foot. They hang out with kids at camp and the handful of kids that remain in our neighborhood.

I had nothing much to achieve. They have pages of instructions from school about summer reading, journal keeping, etc.

I don’t remember any pressure from my parents.  My twins are gently urged to write or count or read  (see  Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers’ chapter on test results after summer vacation: Rich kids  do better after vacation, poor kids go backwards, thus we need longer school years to even up the gap between poor and rich kids).

My mom was angry. She didn’t like being a stay at home mom.

I am guilty, happy to work and still have time with them, but exhausted. I want them to have lazy unstructured days, but I can only do so much with a full-time job.

Let’s face it, ten weeks of summer vacation is a hangover from the olden days, when we rode our horses to school in winter and were let out in the summer to bring in the harvest. Yee haw …

10 weeks summer vacation is as anachronistic as riding your horse to school!

Why don’t they break school vacations into more manageable breaks throughout the year? Why don’t they extend the school year so all children get quality care year around?

It’s okay for people like me who can afford quality care over the summer, but for the rest, it is a patchwork of care by relatives.

And you know the other thing that really irks me and all the other working mothers I know? We are the ones organizing the patchwork of camp, and after care, and field trips, etc. We are the ones squeezing work into shorter days and later nights to give our kids some semblance of an old-fashioned summer. Suppose there’s nothing new about that.

If it wasn’t summer, I’d say bah humbug.

Related articles

• A Brief History Of: Summer Vacation (time.com)
• The Importance of Summer Learning (brighthub.com)
• The Case Against Summer Vacation (joshharris.com)

Related Posts:

• Planning a family vacation: 22 tips for stress free getaways
• Maria Shriver: Summer vacation more stressful than anything else