What to do with kids in the summer?

There is a poem that has always stayed with me.

It’s by acclaimed Italian writer Gianni Rodari and it’s called “Ferragosto”, after the Italian public holiday that falls on August 15. It’s about children who can’t afford to go on vacation. I can’t find an English translation, and I am not a literary translator, so I’ll summarise the end of the poem: it envisions a government that provides free trips to the sea and mountains for all children.

The poem made an impression on me as a child because I was well aware of how lucky I was to have vacations and to be able to travel. My parents owned a camper van, and we spent long summers driving through Greece and Turkey, learning about different ways of life and languages. I knew this set me apart from others in my public school because I had classmates who couldn’t even afford a day trip to the beach (and I grew up in the outskirts of Naples, on the Mediterranean Sea), while others had holiday homes somewhere in southern Italy and went back to the same place every year.

My long vacations were possible because my mother worked as a teacher and my father worked as a freelance engineer and could organise his time off.

But they also had a second job, which was buying everyday-use objects and antiques around the world and then selling them at markets — so our vacations were also opportunities for them to work and for us to trail behind them in dusty markets and poorly lit antique shops around Turkey and eastern Europe.

How summer vacation can widen inequality

But the type of summers I had were by no means the norms.

The truth is that long school vacations are completely out-of-sync with modern-day society. With two working parents, nuclear families in small apartments in cities, and increasingly hot summers, the question of what to do with kids in summer becomes more complicated.

Countries like Italy have among the longest school vacations in Europe (11 to 13 consecutive weeks depending on the region). But many other countries in Europe have more than 12 weeks holidays for primary and secondary education, including Ireland, Greece, Latvia, Malta, Portugal, Albania, and Iceland, according to EU data. This differs significantly from countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, France and some Swiss cantons, where there are *only* around eight weeks off.

Early childhood education (for children up until the age of five) usually involves shorter vacations — in some countries, nurseries or daycare centres are open all year round, or only shut down for a few weeks. This is because there is an understanding that young children need continuous supervision and they cannot be left to parents who need to work.

But what about six or seven year olds? How many parents have more than a month of vacation to look after them? They can alternate vacations if there are two parents, or maybe they have grandparents around, or they can afford summer camps. But what if none of these options are available?

That is when inequality increases — only families who can afford it go travelling or engage in learning activities, while others are forced to use screens as babysitters. This has effects on children’s cognitive abilities, mental health, and on their physical health too, as they become more sedentary. Even in the UK, where summer vacations are about six weeks long, summer vacations may widen health and educational inequalities for children living in poverty.

Priced out of vacation

Having time off with the family can create great opportunities for children’s brain development, much like unstructured play and exploration do on a daily basis, as Margot Sunderland, a British child psychotherapist, argues in this article in The Telegraph. She refers to research by Jaak Panksepp, the late neuroscientist at Washington State University, who wrote extensively about the benefits of play.

But there is no need for distant travel for that, nor is travel necessary to have time to relax with children. If the parents are stressed (because the vacation is expensive or because they are stuck in an airport for several days), then the potential for family bonding decreases too.

And making vacations a tenet for middle class life can bring a lot of stress. Rodari may have written “Ferragosto” in the 1950s, some seventy years ago, but holidays are still unaffordable to lots of middle class families in the Global North. Research in Italy shows that three families with small children out of ten cannot afford to go on vacation, while recent data by the IELKA Institute in Greece, which surveys consumer goods trade, says that one in two Greeks will not go on vacation this year — too many foreign tourists have made travel unaffordable for Greeks. In the U.S., a 2021 survey found that nearly half of travellers were likely or definitely going to take on debt to fund summer travel, with millennials and parents of younger children more likely to incur debt.

Alternatives to vacation

But what alternatives do we have as parents when our young children are out of school and they are too young to be able to entertain themselves? If you are lucky enough to have family around, then you may have grandparents willing to help while you work. (But beware, because grandparents can also burn out when they become the only childcare option that parents have.)

Otherwise, you need to have enough money to spend on childcare or summer camps. In Italy, as this article in Domani newspaper points out, summer camps cost between 100 and 220 euros per week per child. That is a huge sum, if you multiply it for at least eight weeks. In the United States, besides being very expensive, there is the added pressure of summer camps being hard to get into too, as there is a lot of competition.

Around the world, some schools are experimenting with summer opening hours. In Italy, there is a project to keep schools open in summer, but it is aimed at older children and it is mainly to fight against the summer learning loss — children who are not at school unlearn a lot of their academic knowledge. In the Netherlands, some schools remain open 50 weeks of the year, and parents (and students) choose when they go on holiday.

I do understand why so many countries in the Mediterranean have long vacations — with outdated infrastructure, public schools may not be able to offer children the right conditions to stay cool, as heat waves last longer. And many cities in the southern Mediterranean are far from child-friendly — especially in the heat.

But governments should have public policies in place for this total mismatch between parents’ working life and children’s school times. This is not to say that school years should be longer, or that teachers should work more, or that education should replace care — or be confused with care. It is really about putting the idea of care at the centre of our policies so that long summers are not only a burden for parents.

So, let me go back to my own version of Rodari’s poem, which is less romantic but a lot more realistic: let’s give children a chance to have subsidised summer camps and paid holidays, or at least give parents more of a chance to be with them over the summer — with more flexible schedules, and some financial compensation.

*I published an earlier version of this essay in 2022.

What I’ve been reading

This article looks at a study on how children are helping teach AI about language. Researchers at New York University trained an AI model on 61 hours of video from a helmet camera worn by a child in Australia. The child, called Sam, used the camera off and on for one and a half years — from the time he was six months old until a little after his second birthday. The camera caught the things Sam looked at and paid attention while he was awake and registered the words that were spoken by Sam and the adults around him. The study concluded that the AI managed to match words to objects, but it lacked the complexity of children’s full language abilities. What’s really fascinating is that future research aims to enhance AI by incorporating elements of human learning, such as parents’ gaze, in language learning.

What I’ve been listening to

Greek singer Marina Satti, who is of Greek-Sudanese descent, released a song ‘Ah, Thalassa’ (‘Oh, Sea), in partnership with UNHCR, which she dedicated to children refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean.

Without love
I don’t want to live here on land
But you are so calm my sea
Mirroring birds
But I am a wave…

The video clip shows a Greek beach behind a barbed wire, in contrast with families playing with their children, enjoying their swim. We also see life jackets and remnants from castaways, and some clothes and other objects on the bottom of the sea.

What I’ve been watching

This short documentary film by Kern Hendricks at Undark looks at how Palestinian youth are being affected by the war — and what the toll of trauma in their lives is. Even before the war in Gaza started last October, The World Bank, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, and other organisations found in 2022 that more than half of Palestinian adults in the West Bank and Gaza suffered from depression, which is about 10 times higher than the global average. But the report did not take into account children and under-18s, who make up nearly half of the population in the region. Filmed in the West Bank, the documentary looks at how fear and anxiety are part of the daily emotional landscape for children and families living under occupation.

What’s been inspiring me

This picture of U.S. gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles bowing down to Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, who won the gold for the individual floor exercise final, makes me incredibly happy. It is not only wonderful to see the act of sisterhood in action, but it is also special because the trio made history as the first all-black podium in men or women’s gymnastics at the Olympics. Andrade is an amazing gymnast who lived in poverty growing up and has an incredibly inspiring story. More of this, please, and of great women stories in sport.

With love and care, 
Irene

📣 The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.

Photo credits and alt-text: engin akyurt on Unsplash, Children’s beach toys scattered on the sand, including a blue bucket, a yellow sieve, a green mold, and a blue scoop.

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