No more wrapping our wriggling kids in snow suits and hats they refuse to wear, looking for lost gloves and dealing with frozen feet.
It’s that heavenly time of year where getting dressed takes three minutes, and they can play happily in the park for three hours without having to be hauled off to defrost in a municipal swimming pool or an indoor play area filled to the rafters with bacteria and the smell of old chip fat.
But… Life is rarely that simple and easy. The longer, hotter days bring their own share of fresh problems and worries, which we parents have to deal with just the minute we’ve already dealt with the other 400 problems and worries.
Here are some of the big hitters for the hot months of summer with children:
Getting children to go to sleep
You know how it is, your children are tired. They need to sleep. They are hot and bothered. It’s already an hour past bed time…and then you hear ‘Mummy! I can’t sleep! It’s still day time!’ You switch off every light in the street, install blackout curtains and roller blinds, board up the windows, cover your children’s eyes in three pairs of blindfolds, play soothing music, switch off the soothing music, turn all the clocks forward two hours so they think it’s actually midnight….but still. ‘Mummy! I can’t sleep!’ The bad news is that this is just the way Summer goes. It’s light. During the summer children don’t want to sleep when they know it’s ‘daytime’ out there. The good news is that they DO eventually adjust. Usually about a week before the clocks change back and it gets dark at 5 o’clock. Perfect.
Sun damage
Children’s skin is suuuuuper sensitive compared to ours. Just because we’ve turned ours into elephant hide through years of sun exposure in the days when nobody knew it ruined your skin and we’d all look like leather shoes when we were 45, doesn’t mean our children should receive the same treatment. Use a high factor sun block every day, as part of the normal school day routine. They’ll thank you for it one day.
Allergies
HELLO SUNSHINE, HELLO HAY FEVER. Ohhhh, it’s the cruelest thing, hayfever. JUST when you can finally go out and play… you can’t. It’s always better not to take any medicines if you don’t really have to, but there are very effective antihistamines available for children these days, so talk to your doctor if your child seems to be really struggling with it.
Letting them go
The months of summer with kids means letting them go out and play for long periods of time, often on their own or with friends, when they are old enough. It’s a period of freedom and space, which is really important in childhood, and all too rare these days. But with this comes a worry for parents about where exactly their children are, if they’re safe, how many trees they’ve fallen out of, and rivers they’ve fallen into.
Often the very thing that should be relaxing actually turns out to be more stressful than having them at home in front of you! There is no simple way to overcome this worry, except to accept it, and let it happen. If you do everything you can to make sure your child is somewhere safe, then the time just comes to start letting them take small risks, stray out of your comfort zone – which is often a lot smaller than theirs – and slowly learn that it’s OK, and bad things almost always don’t happen.
Enjoy the summer. It will probably only last about 2 weeks, and then we’ll be safely back to colds, flu, darkness at 5pm and those lost gloves again.