Should I stay or should I go?
“It’s not a mortal sin to take kids on a foreign holiday”
FORGIVE me if I’m ever found guilty of whisking a child out of school during term time because to delay another fortnight would price us right out of the market.
I’m talking about going on holiday to a country where outdoor activities are actually possible because of this thing called sunshine, rare enough where we come from.
I’ve done the Dingle thing. Three years in a row I’ve sat in a car, two smallies in tow, driving around stunning Slea Head unable to see more than three feet ahead because of the rain that never, ever stops beating against the windscreen. We’ve admired all the unrivalled beaches around the peninsula through the small lined space of the rear view window.
We’ve run from car to café and back again, spent a small fortune in the aquarium and tried to convince our children that swimming in the sea will be one day possible if the mist would just lift long enough for us to see them.
But there comes a time when you draw the line because holidays are not meant to be an endurance test. You think “To hell with it. I’m going abroad. I want two weeks fun in the sun and if it means breaking the rules and taking the kids out of school, so be it.”
It’s not that I don’t set store by an education. There’s nowhere as apt as the classroom for learning the basics.
But just as there’s more than one way to skin a cat, there’s more than one path towards enlightenment and travel’s right up there.
I ended up at loggerheads with a colleague who insisted parents who break school rules are irresponsible. It was effectively playing truant, endorsing absenteeism, setting bad example. I was bad, she said, badder than Leroy Browne, the baddest mum in the whole damn town, and were it in her gift, she wouldn’t hesitate to send me down for it.
Given I consider her a liberal, she caused me to re-consider. Could I justify the kids missing school for a frolic in the sun that culturally taught them nothing because that’s not the nature of a package holiday? Would the fortnight they missed ultimately cost them that place in college because they never quite mastered Pythagoras’ theorem? Would they screw up ministerial speeches for want of an apostrophe? Or was I over-thinking the matter?
Yes, I decided, I was. It’s not a mortal sin if a kid misses two weeks schooling because mum and dad can’t afford a peak-time holiday, or because temperatures are prohibitive at a later date. Kids need their days on the beach in the heat, soaking up Vitamin D and dipping in and out of a sea not cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. And aren’t overworked mum and dad entitled to lie nearby, knowing that if a waterside rescue is necessary, it won’t involve plunging into sub-zero temperatures?
We all need a little sunshine in our lives.
I admit a package holiday falls some way short of the Great Wall of China, but it nonetheless involves travelling to a country where people speak a different language and practise different customs. Any new experience augments our horizons. So if you’re worried about them missing school, you can always request homework from teacher — they’ll have the rest of the summer to rehearse those contrary theorems.
“Boundaries that cannot be broken by dutiful parents”
I BLAME my mother. My mother was never one of those 1950s-inspired, sweet-as-honey types who melted like chocolate as soon as she heard a fragile cough from our bedroom.
We had to be on the verge of A&E, sweating, shaking and vomiting profusely before we got a get-out-of-school card. Just as we expected packed lunches in our bags and a clean uniform on a Monday, she expected us to troop out the door like little soliders every Monday to Friday from September to June.
I hated Mum for it at the time but as I got older, I gradually realised that (a) I didn’t have the cavalier attitude to sick days that many do and (b) it subtly taught me how in life/society, you have certain obligations that aren’t always to your liking. You can whinge, moan or overanalyse them but often it’s easier physically and mentally to just to get on with them. Just do it.
Clearly all of this has fed into my feelings on taking kids out of school for sun or skiing holidays. I won’t frown upon you for doing it, but it won’t be happening with my kids. Why? Firstly, I think that respecting the school calendar is a subtle yet powerful way of telling your child that education is important and also teaching them that there are boundaries in life.
Secondly, in the majority of cases parents are only fooling themselves with the whole ‘holiday as education’ argument as the educational aspect of many such holidays is questionable.
Please tell me how splashing around a pool on a package holiday in Spain or Portugal and at a push, picking up the words ‘hola’, ‘gracias’ and ‘un helado por favor’ is going to grant a 10-year-old a deeper understanding of a foreign culture?
The vast bulk of eight year olds aren’t spending hours immersed in the Guggenheim or Louvre on their May jaunt. They won’t go on a weekend fishing trip with a Swedish family, or marvel at rice being grown in a water-logged Paddy field.
They’ll spend their day in a pool/water park/kids club and evenings picking options from a kids menu. At most they’ll learn that (a) if you don’t reapply sun cream by day, you pay for it by night; (b) if you wait until your parents polish off their first bottle of wine, they’ll give you endless cash for ice cream as long as you and your brother play where they can keep an eye on you.
And, there’s also a little matter of rule-breaking and the middle class belief that we can justify it as we are generally superior parents the rest of the time.
I took my 10-year-old out of school for a day last year to go see a certain US President speak at College Green in Dublin. I claimed I wanted them to experience a moment in history but, like parents who take their kids on sun holidays in November, it was all about me. I’d sworn that if he ever travelled to these shores, I’d be there.
There’s no way that the then nine and four-year-old picked up on the emotional and psychological significance of Obama’s ‘Is Feidir Linn’ speech. As far as I remember, he had just taken to the podium when the younger one suddenly needed to go to the toilet.
But do they ever mention that day? Yeah often. Out of the blue, the smaller one asks “Mum when we’re in Dublin the next time, can we go to Eddie Rockets again?”
