Six years into this parenting gig, and I still get blindsided by that sneaky, singular week in August when summer camps have ended, and schools have not yet started — also known as the “childcare dead zone.”
This year, however, we Frankensteined a plan at the last minute with two other families to divide up the weeklong, end-of-summer intermission. We survived, and we couldn’t have done it without a little homegrown ingenuity and modern-parent gumption.
I got together with two friends to go over our schedules
To patch together a plan, two of my mom friends and I looked over each of our households’ work and activity schedules for the week and went from there. Our initial conversations looked a little like this: “Hey, I’ve got calls all Monday morning, could my kid come over to your house then? The next morning, we can switch, and your kid can come over to our house from 9 to noon. How does that sound?”
And so began this shifting and shuffling of childcare around work calls, doctor’s appointments, and deadlines. In the afternoons, when our workdays were slowing down, we’d meet at a local playground to let our kids run wild and free — hauling snacks, water bottles, and a relief that we muddled through yet another day in a country that doesn’t support working families as it should.
We got more done, and our kids bonded
While our 6-year-olds played musical homes, they engaged in a barrage of imaginative play — building towers with blocks, constructing inventive marble runs, creating sidewalk art with chalk, water-painting, drawing, donning costumes, and cracking up at newly formed inside jokes. We, parents, mostly followed a laissez-faire approach — only interrupting to offer a healthy, balanced snack platter of veggies, fruit, protein, and carbs or to suggest a bathroom break.
There was no need to offer screens as the kids were engrossed in unstructured play. During our reflections, the adults agreed that if the kids were at home by themselves, we would, at some point, have relied on technological entertainment to help them pass the time and allow us to fulfill our work responsibilities. With our own piecemeal programming, we curbed the need, and it worked out beautifully. Our kids had a great time, and we did, too, catching up and laughing in the mad moments between pick-ups and drop-offs.
Through our example, our rambunctious runamuckers saw in real time how adults work together to solve a problem while also gaining the opportunity to develop the same skills themselves — together — in their own spaces. Every day, I saw their faces light up as they greeted one another. Their bonds deepened by engaging in various home activities and working through what to do when a friend doesn’t want to do the same thing as you.
Our hands-off approach worked beautifully
The adults mostly stayed out of the way, allowing the kids to work out their own problems. As a parent, it is sometimes difficult to take a step back and resist stepping in when conflicts arise between our children, but I’ve learned that if we have faith in our kids and equip them with the skills they need to manage various challenges — taking advantage of learning opportunities as best we can — then they are more than capable of handling their own tricky situations with friends.
I suppose the internet would call this approach “90s-style parenting,” but I like to think of it as a glow-up from that era: taking the good of our 90s childhood experience (fostering independence, loosening boundaries, encouraging innovation) and blending it with the good of today, with a more informed approach to the developmental needs of our children.
In the end, our inevitable “childcare dead zone” week transformed into “childcare LIVE zone,” because we worked together as human beings, seeing one another in our struggle, acting, and saying ‘yes’ to lending a helping hand. These days, we often hear the question: “Where’s the village???” We finally found ours.
Read the full article here
