As the school holidays are now underway, we want to give a shout out to all those parents who manage the moving parts and carry the day-to-day responsibility of childcare.
It’s something of an assumption that they’re a break. Up close, each carries its own planning, cost, logistics and emotional load. It’s already been months in the planning before it even starts. You do work that is routinely overlooked, often alongside competing professional and personal commitments.
All education systems build in breaks: time to recuperate, reset and re-energise. But this isn’t how breaks land for every learner or every family, especially those with executive function (EF) challenges – the everyday skills that support planning, organisation and self-regulation.
Even with the structure of a school timetable, many such learners find it hard to be on time, be prepared and keep track of materials. When that structure isn’t there, whether for a single day or a longer holiday, the impact can be significant.
Some learners don’t realise how much they rely on school routines until they disappear, and for those facing resits or unfinished work, the break can feel less like recovery and more like pressure. When that happens, the load often shifts to parents, and for parents who also rely on routine, breaks can be the times when what they hold is most acutely felt.
Parents carry an enormous, often invisible organisational load and breaks stretch that load because they are the ones who preempt, scaffold, plan ahead and hold the
whole thing steady.
You often don’t notice the scale of something until someone shows you the context. At the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the American flag painted on the Vehicle Assembly Building doesn’t warrant a second glance, until you learn that each stripe is nine metres wide and each star nearly two metres across. And when you hear that the doors are tall enough for the Statue of Liberty to pass through, the building stops being a backdrop and becomes something vast. The moment you understand the scale the whole image shifts. What looked like a large building becomes something far more immense.
Most parents don’t get the chance to step back and see the scale of what they carry. Life is busy, and once you’re in the cycle, you just get on with it, planning, organising and absorbing more than you realise. Many parents have a high threshold for load, quietly adapting around whatever needs to be done.
Breaks demand time, preparation and emotional energy long before they arrive, and by the time they’re underway, parents are already stretched. Part of what we’re doing here is offering the context you’re rarely given, so the work you do can be seen in the scale it truly holds.
We say this quietly to individual families all year. Today we’re saying it to all of you.
Something to think about.
More next week.