GIVE ME A BREAK: School holidays can be great for the children - but hellish for the parents. So, if there's maternity leave, maybe we should be given 'teenager leave', writes KATE HOLMQUIST.

AS PRIMARY SCHOOL children start counting the days until the summer holidays, we working parents are on a countdown to nine weeks of martyrdom as we seek ways to keep the kids safe and occupied. For the big kid in all of us, this stinks, frankly. A season that we associate with freedom and fun is for us parents a time of greatest hassle, worry and financial outlay.

The solutions we find are as varied as we are: au pairs, summer camps, letting the kids stay up half the night and sleep in, working really efficiently in the office to get home sooner or working from home. And there is the ultimate solution - each parent taking holiday time separately so that for most of the summer there's one parent at home with the kids. This isn't a solution for single parents, unless they have a good working relationship with their children's other parent, and for two-parent families, separate holidays aren't great for family life. Having a grandmother who will take the children is a boon at a time like this.

But all these solutions bring their own problems. Au pairs can be lovely, but they can also be sullen teenagers, who only said they liked kids on the application form so they could get away from their own parents.

I've had more than my fair share of au pairs who knew where all the underage drinking establishments were within 24 hours of arrival. Somehow "be home by 11pm" translated in their languages into "be home by the last Nitelink". Then there was the one that turned out to have been pregnant before she arrived. And the one with the eating disorder that had her exercising excessively at 6am and baking cakes that she refused to eat.

Many summer camps cost a bomb and they're not always for the entire day. When you have three kids, spending €200 per week per child on a camp just isn't on. One dad told me recently about how his family had to choose between sending the kids to summer camps and taking a family holiday. Neither parent wanted to lose their jobs, so the family holiday was scrapped in favour of the children being put into a day of structure and routine, which may not be good for them anyway.

The school year is relentless in structure and routine, so young people deserve some imaginative time to drift and smell the roses. Unfortunately, this creative downtime is usually spent in front of a screen of some sort, because parents are too busy working to provide alternatives and they're terrified of letting their children out of the house.

There are excellent summer camps and some kids love them, especially if the camp caters to a special interest or sport. But there's something sad about having to keep up a military routine over the summer, delivering kids to camp where they have to interact all day with new people and then picking them up in the evening and offering the usual quick meal.

Once the kids are past camp age, which could be as early as 12 or 13, what do you do? Some parents let their kids sleep in or watch TV until lunchtime, then try to juggle their work so they can do some of it from home in the afternoon. Not everybody has a job that allows this flexibility. And there's always the chance that kids left on their own will get in to trouble, not necessarily of their own making.

The financial and psychological pressures are so great that you hear parents saying on the last day of school, "I should have been a teacher".

Term-time working really does seem to be the best answer, which gives me an idea. All parents of children under the age of 16 should be entitled to term-time working. The social benefits would be enormous in terms of child development, family happiness and so on. There's a reason that kids from wealthier areas tend to get in less trouble: it's because their parents can afford either to have a full-time parent at home, or to keep the kids occupied, while also being able to afford a week or two at summer camp. The rest of us have to scramble through, hoping that we'll survive the repeated complaints from the kids that they're "bored".

So let's give parents the benefits of teachers. We are our children's most influential teachers anyway, and if we don't do the job over the summer, then others will - TV, the internet, computer games and peers who may not have our children's best interests at heart.

Some taxpayers and employers will protest that parents already get maternity leave and parental leave. (Every time I see a pregnant colleague leaving for a full year of maternity leave, I wonder how I ever put up with 14 weeks.) But rearing babies and toddlers is easy compared to coping with rambunctious school-agers desperate for stimulation. Babies aged one-plus have crèches that run 12 months a year. It's when children start school and develop into distinctive individuals able to walk out the door at short notice that the real problems start.

So here's another idea: teenager leave. We definitely deserve that.