Liz Carolan: We need to stop guilt-tripping parents for wanting a few hours’ break from their kids

Our first holiday after becoming parents was a shock. I am not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the moment that became my abiding memory of that week: sitting on a damp kerb outside a Spar waiting for a coin-operated tumble dryer to finish. Welcome to holidaying with kids, we were told, which is just parenting in a different location without enough stuff. It is all about making magic for the children now. It wasn’t what we expected, and it wasn’t what our sleep-deprived bodies needed either. As a society, we have spent hundreds of years fighting for labour rights, for a balance between the human need for work, sleep and leisure. But this fight is no match for the modern anglosphere idea of parenting as the total denial of self. It is not so, I have since learned, in France. Last week, my five-year-old waltzed into our hotel’s kids club, which accepts babies from the age of six months for your choice of half or full days of supervised activities. Our friends from the region assured me that this is not just commonplace but actively expected by French parents. I walked away with a giddy, guilt-tinged delight. I suddenly had several hours of free time in front of me. Now I just had to convince my nervous system that I didn’t have to instantly open my laptop, that childcare for my own leisure was something I was allowed to enjoy. Childcare is usually something we pay for to be able to work. In summer, it is something we pay over the odds for too little of, to feel guilty about neither working nor parenting enough. Every June, half a million primary schoolchildren are sent home for nine weeks with no systemic planning for how their parents will work. Summer camps, most of which run for four, maybe five hours a day, provide just enough coverage for the economy not to collapse. And it comes at a cost. This year my husband and I paid €817 for one child for six weeks of part-time camps so we could tag-team our way to doing our jobs, some €80 more than I paid last year. READ MOREWith such a short window, the countdown to picking up your child begins the instant you hand them over. You can see it on parents’ faces. The encouraging smiles of the goodbye hug fade the minute the little backpack disappears through the door. Necks stoop to open email inboxes and earphones go in for the first call before anyone has even walked out the gates. Meanwhile, for me at least, a little voice is guiltily enumerating the summers left before that child is completely bored with me, and trying to plan some afternoon activity that “makes the most” of the summer “break”. A former colleague would lament that employed parents are expected to work like they don’t have children, and parent like they don’t have jobs. But even this complaint does not entertain the idea of parental leisure as something that needs to be part of the equation. In Ireland, it often feels like we swing violently between two concepts of reality: one where we pretend that children do not exist, and that work is balanced out by the old labour movement slogan of “eight hours labour, eight hours sleep, eight hours leisure”. On the other hand, parents, whether they work outside the home or not, are expected to deny their own needs for the enrichment of their offspring. Neither acknowledges the reality of modern family life. And this doesn’t serve anyone. No one needs a break in summer more than stay-at-home parents. It shouldn’t be a luxury to have four hours to yourself, to exist purely as a human and not as an employee or parent. But when we conceive of and price summer camps to enable paid work, this becomes hard to justify in terms of household finances and parental guilt. [ I brought my three boys from England to Sligo to replicate my childhood summer holidaysOpens in new window ]It doesn’t serve kids either. My daughter had the time of her life at that club, collecting leaves in the forest, playing games and ziplining with her new friends. A highlight of her holiday was getting the public bus throughout the valley, with “no seat belts and no parents”. My guilt at taking up the kids’ club was lying to me. My daughter did not want to spend 14 hours every day with a pair of burnt-out 40-somethings. She got to test the freedom she’s been pushing for, and then have adventures with her parents, rested and somewhat whole again. Our time together was fresh with the energy of people who missed each other for a few hours. It is easy to pick out one aspect of another country’s way of life and lament not having it here. Sure, there are structural barriers to us having available, affordable childcare. But the thing I am taking from my French sojourn is the ease with which the parents expected and accepted childcare not for work, but to fulfil their own needs and right to leisure.