I work in childcare. I take care of the children, both mine and those of other parents. Summer is very busy for me.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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In my town, most of the summer camps fill up in March. Every dual-income family I know has a spreadsheet and keeps track of exactly when online registration opens. It’s a nightmare, and expensive too.
Mine are starting to get old enough that we are doing a mix of camps and WFH weeks. It’s not ideal but we’ve scraped enough together that it mostly works.
My wife has it figured out this year - she was laid off 2 weeks before her 20 year anniversary.
I’m so sorry. I almost wanted to downvote this because I want to downvote the circumstance.
But heeeeeey that would sort childcare… woohoo…
WFH, summer kid camps that did free or cheap activities during the day, friends who also had kids (returning the favor another day), relatives (mine were extremely unreliable), and all else fails paid child care.
My relatives were absolutely useless for childcare. Its fine if you don't want to look after your own grand children, just say so. But under no circumstances repeatedly say you will have the grand children then back out on the last day, many many times.
Dont you have a kindergarten?
What kindergarten is in session during summer?
Where I live, you get kindergarten basically all year round, except maybe 1 or 2 weeks off. You can also send your kid to kindergarten for 9 hours or more.
But then school comes, they go to school for like 4 hours a day and there are about 3 months of vacation throughout the year.
At that point my kid will be 7 years old and I will have rejoined the workforce. I have no clue what exactly the plan is here.
Whoa, that sounds awesome! It's better than where I live. Kindergarten is just grade 0. It's the 4 hours ish and only during typical school season.
Grandparents! They signed up for this when they had kids, or at least it's common practice where I live.
So many of my coworkers tell me their parents said they refuse to babysit. I'm can't believe the refusal to care for one's family.
If their parents are retired they’re Boomers. Considering the levels of “got mine, fuck you” attitude and delusions about how they “did it on my own without help” this doesn’t surprise me at all. Not saying this is the entire generation, there are actually very caring Boomers out there. But in general, it’s a pretty pervasive sentiment of today’s retirees.
My grandparents and great grandparents took care of me with mom. I would feel so betrayed if they pulled that stunt with my kids. I assume its an American thing with abandoning babysitting but I dk about other first world countries.
Yeah, if they don't work or live too far 🤷♂️
On the one hand, I'm lucky that my wife works at a daycare that runs day camps for children up to 8 (my daughter is 5), but we still don't like that she spends the entire summer with strict schedules and things like that, so that for 15 days she goes with my in-laws and 15 with my parents, in both cases they are retirees in very good physical health and eager to play with their grandchildren.
I'm going to assume you are asking because, you are too busy at work like most parents. Luckily the state and town I live in provide (our tax dollars) summertime activities.
Absent this kind of program I would look to an urban league, ymca, or mutual aid program for child care depending on the age of the kids. I encourage you to look for programs like these if you're in a tight spot for childcare.
I don't have children, but thanks for your advice
When they were younger, my wife and I basically had to work different shifts, although there were also long stretches where I just worked less(because I had found ways to make good money like so). Once they turned 6 years old, Boys & Girls Club was a lifesaver. During the summer, the kids actually prefered to go there on days we didn't have anything fun planned(nor $$$ for activities).
Either bring along a nanny or go to places that have nanny care available.
barely.
I don't really get the question. How do we "manage" it? In what way, what aspect(s)?
From parents I know, it can be a bit challenging, especially if they are too small to be left to themselves.
If on vacation, and a parent to small children, I'm going to assume any responsible parent will not leave their children alone whatsoever, unless the children are asleep in a safe place.
It's "challenging" as much as the rest of the year when not on vacation, in my opinion.
Maybe I'm still misunderstanding or missing something.
Summer vacation = kids not at school during the day, i.e. unsupervised during work hours.
Ah. Right. Sorry, I come from a country where we have "parental days", where we get paid by the government to be with our children. Forgot about the fact that not everyone gets that benefit.
Interesting, do you get that every year? In Belgium for instance parental leave in a one time thing, you only get it once when they are born, afterwards you have to figure something out
Ah, that's unfortunately not as generous as in Sweden then.
As a father, I get 10 days of emergency parental leave that are available from the day the child is born (and available within a window of maybe 2 months or something? Can't remember).
Then both parents get 480 days of parental leave days to share, per child. It's automatically split equally in a parental leave days account with the national insurance authority, handling such things as welfare and parental leave, etc.
We have two kids, so altogether me and my wife have gotten 480 days total, each.
Each parent can also transfer 45 days per child to the other parent, which I did because she wanted to spend more time with our first child.
You also have to spend your days before a certain age. Only 96 days can be saved after the age of 4. This is to encourage spending time with your child at a younger age. After the age of 12, no days can be saved.
So with all of these rules in place, you get to decide when and how you spend your parental leave days.
Still some caveats with respect to employers' perspective:
- employers usually require a certain amount of time of heads-up before you go on leave, but 3 months is enough that they can't deny your request, by law.
- employers only have to honor 3 parental leave requests per year.
So that's it, basically. 👍
For smaller children there is heavily subsidised preschool (max monthly fee 1600 SEK or so where I live) that you have a right to if you are working (i.e. not on vacation), I think there is "fritids" for older children? It's so far away for me that I haven't looked into it, but AFAICT if your kids are not old enough to take care of themselves at home they are usually entitled to some sort of care.
I keep forgetting that childcare is generally unavailable, unaffordable, or both since where I'm from I've never heard of anyone unable to afford childcare.
Where I live the max daycare fee is 2110 SEK for two children, which we pay. It is based on income though, so you could pay less with less total monthly household income. The fee is 1,265.63 SEK for the first child and 843.75 SEK for the second child. There's a descending step system for the fee, per child, so the more children you have in daycare, the less you pay on average, per child. There's also some sort of tax reduction included with that price, like 20-25% or something. Can't remember exactly the details.
I checked now and we pay 1688 SEK / month, which I think is the maximum.
For one child?
Edit: Ah, right. Yes, it's the same fee for us, possibly we live in the same kommun.
But there's also a special clause for children above 3 years of age, which both of mine are.
För barn 3–5 år som enbart går i allmän förskola (15 timmar per vecka) betalar du ingen avgift.
För övriga 3–5 åringar med plats på förskola och pedagogisk omsorg minskas avgiften med 25 procent automatiskt med anledning av rätten till allmän förskola. Det gäller från 1 juli det år då barnet fyller tre år.
So that's 1688 - 25% = 1266 SEK (for our first-born). Possibly you don't have that discount because your child is younger than 3?
Yep, and also she’s there between 08:30-16:10 every day so quite a lot more than 15 h/week.
Ah, sorry, didn’t see the second bullet point. Yep, she’s one and nine months.
Beautiful age 🥰 Enjoy it!
To add to what @[email protected] was saying above, you usually also have the right to work fewer hours if you have as small child (unpaid), but I'm not sure about the caveats. I work 75% through that mechanism. In my case it's not really a choice; if I'd work 100% like my wife too many chores wouldn't get done. I also wouldn't be able to do that on the amount of sleep and rest I'm getting (a few hours too few and almost none).
I should also add that you are explicitly only given subsidised childcare when doing paid wage work. You're not allowed to for example pop in and do some shopping on the way to pick-up, which I presume most people do anyway from time to time because who is going to check.
This system is nice in the traditionally social democrat smoke stack sense of allowing you and everyone else the freedom to do paid wage work at the factory and very little else. With a more or less private system you're paying for the service of "please take care of my children", which means that the marginal cost of "please take care of my child for an extra hour while I talk to my wife/go shopping/clean at home" is huge by comparison, but what you get for that is a greater degree of equality and availability.
I write the last part mainly to work against the stereotype of Sweden as a socialist utopia; sure this is a socialist policy, but it's a pretty boring one that's very 1950s.
You're not allowed to for example pop in and do some shopping on the way to pick-up, which I presume most people do anyway from time to time because who is going to check.
Indeed. Another perspective (not my own) is:
"I work weekends sometimes as a nurse and I get no freaking rest and recovery unless I send the kids to daycare on the one day in the middle of the week that I'm not working this week, lest I collapse from exhaustion". Not gonna lie, it's more healthy for the kids as well because it creates a better routine for them.
Or,
"If I don't pop in to buy this carton of milk for 5-10 minutes before pickup, we'll have to do it after pickup, in which case it'll take 45 minutes to an hour and the kids will be tired and irritated (and so will I) and get less sleep because of the extra time before supper and they'll be cranky tomorrow morning causing all kinds of domino effect havoc".
Both cases are worse for the kids, if you follow the rules.
🤷♂️ I'm definitely guilty of not following the rules 100 %. Actually somewhat proud of it, but I can't admit to it to anyone because I'll be guilty of fraud or some shit.
Very interesting, thanks!
My pleasure!
I hope you find better answers to your original question than I was able to provide. 😊
Should be okay, quite interesting so far!
Yes, that's what I meant, thanks!
Edit:I guess "summer breaks"is probably more what I meant than "summer vacation", so I changed the title
There are many summer day camps for children that cover parents’ typical work hours.