‘Before you ask, Mummy, the answer is no.’ While this could be any number of conversations that I have with my seven-year-old daughter, this one has a particular tang. It is the thrice-annual bargaining round that I do in the run-up to any school holiday in which I try to get her to go to a kids’ camp. An executive at Goldman Sachs in equity sales does not work as hard as I do to seal the deal – but I fail every time.
For a brief, prelapsarian period when she was five and more biddable, I had some success. I managed to get her into all manner of summer holiday camps in Oxfordshire: activity camp, Shakespeare camp, tennis camp, even God camp. You name it, I signed her up. Sure, we had some argy-bargy at the moment of drop-off, but in she went. These days, I can only dream of such compliance. Which leads me to my conundrum: who are summer camps really for? Parents or children?
In terms of economics, this should be an easy question to answer. Notionally, summer camps exist so that working parents can maintain productivity during the school holidays, which stand at a staggering six weeks for state schools and as many as nine for private institutions. Come early July, the parenting supplements of any broadsheet paper in this country are stuffed with features of a similar lament: how can working parents possibly afford childcare during the summer holidays?
Such pieces are in the public interest since the figures are galling. According to Deloitte, almost quarter of working parents reported not having enough leave to cover the school holidays, while 39 per cent tell of using up all their annual leave to mind their children. Happy holidays, everyone. Bet you’re glad you spent your time off putting the telly on and loading the dishwasher. But if instead you choose to send your children to camp, you end up paying to go to work. The average summer holiday childcare cost in Britain is £179 per child per week, according to the charity Coram; for two children over six weeks, that adds up to more than £2,100.
Luckily, since I do not work in an office, I am spared the agony of finding a holding pen for my two children while I try to stop my career going down the pan during the school holidays. Instead, I take on less work, earn a great deal less money and cobble together what I can in the evenings or early morning hours, usually between 4 a.m. and 5.30 a.m. In theory, I don’t need summer camps. I can be entertainer-in-chief, chauffeur, chef and laundry maid in their waking hours and writer in the remainder.
Where we live in Oxfordshire, the vast majority of mothers do not work. Come May, however, the WhatsApp groups start filling up: ‘Who wants to do Pony Club?’ or ‘Anyone want to join Freya/Persephone/Annunziata at tennis?’
Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t quite come off in reality. Because while I don’t need a summer camp to work per se, my daughter does need to do something to fill the day and stop her brain atrophying and her teeth rotting. We are, then, in the camp of using the occasional summer camp for entertainment but not necessarily as childcare model. As a position, this doesn’t get you many brownie points as people generally assume you are loaded and/or on holiday for most of the time with a nanny in tow. Not so, you insist, but it doesn’t matter: you’ve lost them at the word ‘freelance’.
Where we live in Oxfordshire, the vast majority of mothers do not work. Come May, however, the WhatsApp groups start filling up with plans for summer camps where a day is generally priced at upwards of £80. ‘Who wants to do Pony Club?’ or ‘Anyone want to join Freya/Persephone/Annunziata at tennis?’ As is so often the case with modern, moneyed parenting, one-upmanship reigns. Putting the camp question out to digital tender allows you to not only exhibit your child’s skills – equestrian gets the gong – but also lets others know where and how often you are going away. ‘We’re away for most of July,’ is the standard preamble, ‘but could do cricket for two days before we go off again.’ As a social flex, there’s nothing like it, encompassing the grandiosity of being booked up with a sort of fey, mucking-in, no-nonsense attitude. My response, if I chose to chip in accurately, would go something like this: ‘We’re around for the entire holiday bar one week, but since the enthusiasm for social camps is a hard sell round these parts, we’ll pass. Again.’
Of course, I do nothing of the sort. ‘Let me have a think,’ I generally say, adding a handstand emoji, knowing full well that the answer from the Boss will be a flat no. Next year, I might try to book myself into a camp that markets itself exclusively for parents and cuts out the children entirely. Except I think that’s called an asylum and I won’t be sharing that on WhatsApp.
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