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Working Parents rejoice – school holidays are finally over.

School holidays around the country are coming to an end. For parents working from home, school holidays are an incredibly challenging time. I spoke to a diverse range of parents about their experience and here’s what they had to say:  

I feel you, I feel all of you. It’s so hard to concentrate when you’re kids are apparently starving and begging for life saving Oreos.  

But the interruptions are not the hard part for parents. It’s the guilt. We have no choice but to mostly neglect our children and palm them off to ipads/ computers / TVs / gaming consoles. Because these devices literally make it feel like your children have vanished somewhere safe, of course. But vanish none the less.   

We feel guilty because we know that excessive screen time is bad for a child’s brain development, posture, sleep, health, social development and more. That’s why normally the rules are strict.  

But then school breaks and the holiday rules comes in. 

Don’t feel bad. You gotta do what you gotta do to survive. I’ve been a working parent for almost ten years now so I wanted to offer guilt free holiday ideas you can use in the future.  

Tip 1 – Take your entire family on a coastal holiday. Choose a huge waterfront holiday rental with enough room for you to work and your kids to watch you tube in their own stunning rooms with a view.  

Tip 2 – Buy blue light blocking glasses for your children. Just because we’re stunting their brain development, doesn’t mean the eyes can’t thrive.  

Tip 3: Buy them a physically active game for their gaming console – like Just Dance. Make them sweat it out for at least an hour so you feel a real sense of achievement. Take it up a notch – heat the room and turn it into Bikram gaming.  

Tip 4 – Set up a step tracker on their ipad. Tell them to walk and watch and if they hit 10K steps they unlock more screen time after dinner. Which means you can sit on the couch and watch whatever YOU want because parents need screen time too.  

I hope these tips help for the next holidays. You don’t need for guilty for using screen time to get through work. Ultimately, we’re only doing it for our children. So they can have a better future. The screen use may create tomorrow’s movie directors! Game developers! Computer engineers! Sure, some may end up poker machine addicts who wear nappies to the casino so they NEVER have to leave the machine. But isn’t that kind of commitment the work ethic we all strive to instill in our children? 

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