The Six-Week Problem

There’s a particular kind of dread that arrives for working parents around the start of July. Not dread about the work — dread about the six-week logistical marathon heading towards them. Who’s got the children on Tuesday. Which holiday club still has spaces. How to keep a job running through the middle of it all.

I hear it every summer from the businesses I speak to, and the research backs it up. International Workplace Group found almost seven in ten parents are stressed about arranging summer childcare, with the average family needing to find an extra £686 to cover it — and nearly one in five saying they’ll use up all their annual leave just to plug the gap. The Parentkind National Parent Survey found more than two million parents have taken a child out of school in term time because they couldn’t otherwise afford a break, and that a record 459,288 fines were issued last year.

But the numbers only tell you half of it. The other half is the bit parents don’t say out loud.

What people don’t tell you

You’d think the summer holidays would be something to look forward to. In my experience, that’s rarely the emotion that comes up. What comes up is guilt, pressure, overwhelm — and sometimes resentment, either at having to work, or at a system that was never really built for doing both.

And most people say nothing at all. They keep demonstrating that they’re just as committed, just as ambitious, just as productive as they were before, because they don’t want anyone deciding that becoming a parent has quietly lowered their ceiling.

That instinct to hide is the thing I’d most want employers to understand — because the people doing the hiding are not asking to be let off. They still want to do brilliant work. They’re not asking for lower expectations or special treatment. They’re asking for a bit of understanding, real flexibility where it’s possible, and the chance to be honest without feeling judged.

So the job isn’t to lower the bar. It’s to remove the pretence.

I work with plenty of clients who have mandatory office days and good reasons for them. That position and a supportive summer aren’t in conflict. A temporary exception isn’t the same as breaking the rule — and where an unavoidable squeeze hits at a certain point in the year, a decent manager can make a temporary arrangement without the whole model being renegotiated.

Which is really my point. The mechanism here is the manager, not the policy document. There’s no magic to it. Just a good relationship and an honest conversation.

Five things I’d suggest

1. Start the conversation in June, not August. “Let’s look at what’s coming up over the summer and make a plan” takes two minutes and removes the stress before it builds.
2. Normalise the fact that people have children. Nobody should be pretending otherwise. When leaders talk openly about school holidays, everyone else feels able to.
3. Make it safe for plans to fall apart. Childcare collapses and children get ill. “If things change, just tell me” saves people from covering things up — which is always worse for the work than the disruption.
4. Judge outcomes, not attendance. And don’t let that expire in September. Flexibility with a use-by date isn’t flexibility.
5. Equip your managers, then trust them. Every role and every family is different, so rigid one-size policy is the wrong tool. Give managers the confidence and the latitude to solve it person by person.

One more that barely counts as advice: ask “how are you doing?” Not the project. Not the deadline. The person. Sometimes that’s the question people need most.

Parents are usually the first thing to fall off their own to-do list. Looking after your own wellbeing isn’t selfish — it’s what lets you show up as the parent, partner and colleague you actually want to be.

The maths won’t change. Six weeks off will keep outrunning 5.6 weeks of annual leave, next July and the July after that. The culture around it, though, is entirely yours to shape — and it costs far less than the goodwill it buys back. Meantime, Aunty Suzie has some activity planning to do for the nieces and nephews about to descend!