School’s Out!

Memory is unreliable—we all know that—but my childhood summer vacations seemed endless. I remember getting out of school at the end of June and not returning until the beginning of September: three months of pure fun. And, I now realize, three months of stress for parents who had to figure out what to do with their children while they got on with their lives. All-day outings, sleepaway camps, staying with relatives, and a week or two of family vacation: organizing these and other entertainments-with-babysitting must have been hell for my mother, but I never thought about that. I just got on with enjoying the summer, both its organized events and the many unorganized days I spent reading and playing alone or with my sister and our friends.

Google tells me that summer vacations in the US are currently eight or nine weeks long, not twelve, which is a good thing since studies show that long summers out of school cause kids to forget too much of what they’ve learned the year before. Besides, more mothers work outside the home now than when I was a child (yay!). Figuring out what to do with children during school-free weeks must be harder than ever.

Here in the canton of Bern, children and teenagers get thirteen weeks of vacation, and these weeks are distributed throughout the year: five consecutive weeks in July and August, three in the fall, two at Christmas, one in February for skiing, and two in the spring. The fall vacation, which comes only six or seven weeks after the end of the summer holidays, used to be called the Potato Vacation because it was timed to let children help their parents harvest potatoes. Today, there are fewer than 50,000 farms in all of Switzerland, but the fall vacation dates remain the same. Tradition, tradition!

The February holiday is still called Sports Week because it used to be teachers, not parents, who took children and teenagers skiing in the Alps once a year; this outing was considered part of school rather than vacation. Today, few schools in Bern still do this; now, children either go to the mountains with their parents, which is much more expensive than a school-sponsored ski camp, or they don’t go at all. That is one of the reasons why fewer Swiss can ski today than fifty years ago.

I experienced the Bern vacation schedule while our son Tommy was in school, and I thought distributing time off throughout the year made sense. It seemed much more sensible and fun for kids to have their breaks spread out, and the time off was easier for us parents to organize. By law, all Swiss are given at least five weeks off from work (not counting holidays), so they have time to relax with their children if they want to. Whether they rent an apartment in the mountains for skiing or a little cottage on a lake in the summer for swimming, it’s doable for the majority of families.

I believe most Americans don’t have this kind of time off from work, and renting a lakeside cottage for a month is beyond the budgets of many. Don’t forget that Switzerland is the richest country in the world, even if we, too, are surrounded by rich people getting steadily richer and poor people getting poorer. It remains a nation where going away somewhere for a week or two with your kids is almost compulsory.

I’d be curious to know what some of you think about long versus short summer breaks and the idea of distributing school vacations throughout the year. How long were your summers off when you were a child? Do you have good memories of those hot, lazy days?