Ciara McDonnell: Cúl Camp serves to highlight lack of community in modern society

Like a constellation in the night sky, WhatsApp groups lit up with the words “open now”. With the same adrenaline we felt while attempting to secure tickets to the Garth Brooks concerts, fingers were trigger ready, hovering over the refresh button in an effort to secure places for offspring before receiving a “sold out — sad face emoji” message.

If you were one of those who missed out, commiserations. Cúl Camps are one of the only affordable ways to ship your kids out this summer, and it is a crucial part of so many of our childcare plans for the holidays.

Between holiday allocation, parental leave, and a few kamikaze weeks of exchanging your children with friends in the hope that play dates might cover the work day, a week of Cúl Camp can feel like balm to the soul.

As I watched my phone vibrate and light up and deliver messages of discontent or victory — depending on whether or not a friend managed to snag a golden ticket — I thought to myself, ‘this is the juggle. This is exactly what is driving families into the ground’.

We work two jobs to pay the mortgage and balance the cost of living and then we siphon off half or more for childcare. If we’re lucky, a family member will step in to cushion the blow and during the summer months, it’s the rare, affordable camps like Cúl Camps that figure out the rest.

Summer camps specific to your child’s interests can run upwards of €200 for a week learning how to code or to perfect their acting technique. This year, most of us don’t have this kind of cash to spare; this year, the squeeze may be tighter than others.

And we don’t say it. We don’t share how stressful it is in case we expose ourselves as bad at this family-raising thing. We haven’t normalised saying ‘my God, how are you handling this, because I feel as though my ship is sinking?’.

We have all lied to each other so much in order to paper over the cracks of our own failures that the landscape of what it means to be a ‘good’ parent and ‘have it all’ has become a strange sepia-toned caricature that is half Little House on the Prairie and half Road Runner.

I’m sure your phone reminds you of it all the time. Every time I open Instagram I am flooded with videos of calm mothers dressed in beige cheesecloth who are scrubbing their showers with The Pink Stuff and decanting a week’s worth of shopping into glass containers for the fridge.

Set to a soundtrack of soothing piano music, these confrontations of someone’s curated reality make me feel like a failure. It’s like a constant reminder that no matter how much you do, you’ll never be enough.

Because, raising a family in today’s society is relentless, and no amount of piano music or well-organised fridges is going to make it less so. 

We have never been more pressurised when it comes to bringing up children.

We are household worker bees, operating family Google Calendars to ensure that one parent is home to deliver and pick up and feed during the work week.

At the weekend we are buzzed up in hyper-parenting mode, packing in ‘as much family fun’ as possible to make up for the guilt we feel for the rat race that Monday to Friday has become.

So, what has changed between generations to make the young parents of today feel so alone? What makes parents in 2023 feel this level of dismay because their children can’t get into Cúl Camp? We hear that “it takes a village to raise a child” but where is our village?

Isn’t it poetic that it takes the GAA — a symbol of community — to highlight the lack of it? Isn’t it poetic that it takes a summer camp to show parents the support we could be offering to each other but don’t?

We have become like little self-sufficient satellites operating around each other rather than communities that thrive on connection and support.

In many ways, living in this way makes our lives smaller and more insular. We connect with fewer people on a daily basis and as a result, relationships fall by the wayside.

A great example of this is me. I am 41 years old. When I was a small child, my mother was at home, raising me and my brother and my sister. That was her job. And it was a really common one — in fact, I think my childhood friend group had only one mother who went out to work.

As a result of this, a community mushroomed. As children got older, one mother took a group of children into her home and her job became childminder as the other mothers went out into part-time work.

Our parents were content because we were safe and loved, and they were working and the mortgage was being paid. My oldest son is 12. To him, a mother who is at home with the children is a rarity. He would struggle to identify a mother who does not work outside of the home.

In 30 years the landscape of parenting in Ireland has changed dramatically, and yet our infrastructure of community has not flexed to change with it.

So, sad-face emoji. No Cúl Camp here either. What are we going to do about it?