“How parents can enjoy the school holiday”

Here are a few ways mums and dads can get the most out of the school holidays themselves with the added bonus of knowing that they might even be building better kids along the way – or at least happier parents.Warning: the following suggestions may require embracing the concept of “tough love” but your kids (and you) will be better people for it.Let them be bored…… and know that you’re helping incite and inspire their imagination and creative streak. UK research has found that the most creative people are known to have the greatest toleration for long periods of uncertainty and boredom. It’s been suggested that the only way kids can tap into their genius is to first be extremely bored.If they start to whine about being bored, at least you can tell them quite piously it’s for their own good.Celebrate the lack of a scheduleJust think, this is your chance to enjoy a few weeks of not making school lunches, signing excursion notes, pretending to take an interest in their homework or trying to track down missing-in-laundry sports uniforms. Without all that stuff pressing in on you, you can actually enjoy the mornings and evenings a bit more and maybe share an unhurried laugh with the kids over breakfast.Be a 70s-style parentThis involves sending your kids outside after breakfast and telling them they can come back inside at dinner time. Evidence is piling up indicating that children benefit greatly in many ways from contact with nature, as it supports their personal and social development, as well as mental and physical health.Yet somehow the message is not getting through to kids, with recent Australian research finding that less than 20 per cent of children have climbed a tree and 29 per cent had ever played jump rope, hopscotch or street games. Only one in three kids today played outside every day. These holidays don’t let your child be a couch-potato statistic.Ignore them and enforce the blood ruleThis takes discipline from mums and dads but any work-at-home parent needs to learn how to ignore the children or the holidays could plunge the family into bankruptcy.So close the door between you and them, put in your ear phones and tell them that they are not to bother you unless blood is spilled (hence “the blood rule”).Go free-rangeUS mum Lenore Skenazy sparked a global outcry a couple years ago when she left her nine-year-old son in a Manhattan department store with instructions on how to find his way home on the subway. The author of Free-range Kids was labelled “America’s worst mother”, yet her reasoning behind her actions was part of her call for parents to raise safe and self-reliant kids.Raising free-ranging kids is not just about dropping them in strange places and making them find their way home. It’s also about letting them build other skills like making dinner, doing the shopping or walking to the local park. The school holidays can be a good time for your kids to start building these skills.Send them awayThis is the ultimate way for mums and dads to enjoy the school holidays but is reliant upon having relatives or friends you can send them to, and who are happy to receive your crew of offspring.There is a drawback to this: parents who are able to offload their children for days on end to someone else lose all future rights to whingeing about the school holidays.Source: http://www.bodyandsoul.com.au/