Summer holidays as a child are idyllic. Six weeks of uninterrupted, unstructured bliss – no teachers, no homework, no lessons and no early morning starts. But ask any busy working parent and they might view the extended time differently.
Without school routines, the summer period can often be a stressful, logistical nightmare in which parents struggle to juggle the exhaustion of full-time work with full-time childcare. Particularly for those without grandparents or relatives living nearby who can regularly help out, summer clubs, childcare and sports camps are often a no-brainer. But in the UK, they notoriously cost a small fortune, especially if families are sending more than one child.
Alexandra Watson can attest to the ways summer can feel financially ruinous for working parents in Britain. She remembers the struggle of working through the summer and paying over £1,000 a month for childcare in Nantwich, a market town in Cheshire. “It honestly felt like we were working through the summer then watching so much of what we earned disappear straight back into childcare,” she says. “It was awful.”
This all changed 10 years ago when Alexandra, her husband and their daughter Theia, now 12, moved to Jávea, a beach town on the Costa Blanca in Spain. “I first discovered the whole summer club thing during her first summer off school when she was three,” says Alexandra, who runs a history YouTube channel and History Mystery Agency, a children’s history puzzle company. “We started sending her when she was about five so she could keep seeing her little pals and I could actually get some work done.”
