School's out

But are any of the kids really on holiday?

Last week I met a friend with school-going children for coffee. Seeing her look more frazzled than usual, I asked what was worrying her. It’s the school holidays, she confessed. And she was going mad coordinating the different activities that her son and daughter were signed up for. “I can either do my job,” she complained. “Or spend my day ferrying them from one place to another. I can’t do both!”

She is far from unusual in this. Most of the young kids I know spend their summer holidays going from tennis lessons to ballet classes, fitting in the odd tuition for physics or maths in between (“It’s their board year, you know”). And their parents end up going slowly mad trying to keep their children on time for their various ‘summer activities’.

You can call this insane scheduling a lot of things. But what you can’t do is call this a holiday of any kind. 

I can’t help but think back to my own summer holidays with a healthy measure of nostalgia. Now I may have my special rose-tinted, hindsight-enabled glasses on so you must forgive me if I wax eloquent too long. But my memories are full of halcyon afternoons spent lazing in the sunshine doing nothing more strenuous than reading a book. The evenings were for dropping in on friends or inviting them for some snacks and a few silly games that we made up to keep ourselves entertained. The nights were reserved for family time, when we sat on the verandah after dinner and chatted, my grandparents and parents regaling us with anecdotes of their childhood years spent in faraway land now called Pakistan, which we could never visit. 

But my favourite summer vacations were the times I spent in my aunt’s tea estate in Assam. It was here that I was allowed to run completely wild, blissfully free of any supervision as the adults spent their afternoons enjoying a well-earned siesta. As the entire household snoozed, gentle snores emerging from the bedrooms, I would head out to explore. 

Walking through the gardens, I would imagine myself to be a princess who had been imprisoned by a madman in a magic kingdom, thinking up new and inventive ways to free myself from his clutches. Striding further up on a hill, I would pretend I was an explorer who was conquering mountains that had never been climbed before. Exhausted from my exertions I would sneak back into the house, heading straight for the kitchen, where I would fix myself a tall, cold drink which I would sip while swaying gently on a swing installed on a nearby tree, dreaming of all the adventures I would have the next day.

Something tells me that the kids of today will never have this vast expanse of time to explore their surroundings on their own, the space to let their imaginations take flight without being trammelled by a hundred different demands on their days. 

So while I am loath to extrapolate from my own life experiences, I will make an exception in this instance. And the next time summer rolls around I will ask the parents around me to just let their children be. Don’t sign them up for summer camp. Don’t make them learn a new skill. Just grant them the time to be on their own. Give them the gift of leisure. Allow them to create their own fun. 

Let them have a real summer holiday.