Return to the rat race: do parents dread the new school year?

The beginning of the scholastic year focuses on the plight of the kids having to face scary new teachers, heavy school bags and blisters from their new school shoes.

However, parents seem to dread the end of summer holidays even more than their offspring: as it also means a return to the fight against time to get kids off to school, get a day’s work in, then back to ferrying kids from one private lesson to another, then homework, supper, bath time and get them off to bed in time to start it all over again the following day.

To some parents it is the thought of having to drag sleepy children from their beds at the crack of dawn. To others – working mothers – it is the whole day that seems to be a race against time. One particularly frazzled working mother of four describes a typical day once school has started.

“The alarm clock goes off at 5:30am. I wake the kids up one by one, dress them, prepare breakfast (packed lunch would have been prepared the night before). Then it’s my turn. I get showered and dressed, drive them to school and carry their bags in – the little ones are too small to manage on their own, deposit them in their classrooms and dash off to work.

“I normally pick them up from school, feed them and rush back to the office inevitably covered in a smear or smudge of some sort. I’m lucky that I get to go home to feed them after school, as a lot of working mothers don’t have that luxury.

“After work I have to stop and buy groceries, then rush home to start homework – they won’t do it on their own – cook, feed and bath them to have them in bed by 7:30pm otherwise they won’t get up a 6am the following day. Between the homework, catechism and some extra curricular activities there is no family time at all.”

Timetable turnaround
Rather than simply complaining about the situation, this mother of four has a solution to the predicament. Using the Swedish educational system as a basis, she is proposing children spend more hours in school so that parents can cope with their jobs as well as their family life and come home without homework so that time after work can be spent with the family.

During this extra time at school children will be fed a proper meal and get help with any academic exercises the school thinks the children should practice.

As part of a school hour reform, she suggests that schools do not break for more than six weeks at a time, as is the case in other countries. The long holidays put extra pressure on the working mother as well as incurring high costs, as alternative care must be sought in the form of summer schools, carers or nurseries.

The government’s support for mothers returning to the workplace is simply not enough, in her opinion. Opening a few daycare centres will not provide the support necessary to solve the problem of childcare if both parents are working.

Female participation in the workforce in Malta still lags behind other European countries. Part of the reason for this is cultural. As a race we still believe that the mother’s place is at home and that the children whose parents both work suffer as a result. However, for some, the sheer impossibility of working whilst raising children keeps them out of the workforce.

School times are completely dissimilar to working times. Most schools start at 8:30am, when offices start at 8:00am – 7:45am in the public sector. Similarly, they finish early too. Church schools finish at around 1:30pm, government schools at 2:30pm and among private schools, the latest finish at 3pm.

If a parent has more than one child attending different schools, this can become quite an issue, with taking children to and from school taking up a large portion of the day.

In a recent interview with MaltaToday, Dr Romina Bartolo, National Commissioner for the Promotion of Equality, proposes a reform of school hours to bring them into line with working hours. She claims that Malta has a lot to learn from other countries in this regard. Non-academic activities have been established to be beneficial for a well-rounded education.

“After school many parents take their children to music lessons, dance lessons, sport lessons, among others. As things stand this only adds to stress for parents to be there to ferry children from one place to the next. It would be in everyone’s interest to offer the same activities at school.”

Dr Bartolo acknowledges that the situation with childcare has improved over the last seven years. Today there are approximately 40 childcare centres across the island, where there were hardly any before that.

“A childcare centre is not just a place where you dump your children while you’re at work. The environment has to be beneficial to the child. There has to be an outdoor area, interactive activities, controls on ages of children grouped together and controls on the number of pupils to each carer.”

Dr Bartolo says that although we have come a long way in the provision of childcare we still have a long way to go before we can claim to meet the Lisbon treaty which aims for every EU state to provide childcare for 90% of school age children and 33% of children under three.