No school means summer hellidays for parents of teenagers who are too old for a babysitter and too young to work. But shouldn't the State help working parents, asks Kate Holmquist

School's out for summer - bringing joy to young teenagers, but hellidays for their parents. For mums and dads, this is the season to be a teacher or a stay-at-home, rather than having to parent via mobile phone. Office-bound parents text back and forth with children, hoping that they're safe and that they're where they say they are. When kids sleep in until lunchtime, parents are relieved because it means at least they're safe in bed.

Sound negative? It's the reality.

"Parents of 12- to 15-year-olds are leaving them to their own devices and relying on them to sleep late until noon or 1pm, then monitoring them by mobile. It's nearly accepted that these kids are home alone. Secondary school kids have 12 weeks of holiday - it's way too long," says Annmarie Wade of schooldays.ie, an online resource for parents and teachers.

"The length of the summer holidays is one of my pet peeves," says Mary Forrest, director of Teen Counselling, which is part of Crosscaire, an initiative of the Dublin Catholic Diocese. "Young teens are beyond babysitting age and yet it's part of Government policy to have women in the workforce. It's hard if there are two working parents, even worse if there's one. It's the teens in first, second and third year, aged 12 to 15, who are really the problem. When they turn 16, they can get jobs. But the ages 12 to 15 are a difficult time."

A plethora of summer camps, many of them residential, endeavour to take young teenagers off working parents' hands, but it's expensive. A day camp costs about €60-€150 a week and a residential camp can run to €500 a week. Forrest says that many working parents, especially those with more than one child, have a stark choice: send the kids to camp or take a two-week family holiday in Spain. Many families cannot afford both.

Keeping the kids at home poses dangers, Forrest warns. "Many parents don't have the option of the expensive camp. I would know from my work in Teen Counselling that parents allow kids to sleep in late until 1pm or 2pm, which means that the kids stay out late, until after midnight. It's a bad habit and other bad things can happen as a result."

What Forrest terms "unhealthy friendships" can develop when children are unsupervised. "Somebody calls someone on the mobile and the next thing there's a mob in the house and the teen is not able to say No at the door. When teens are home alone, they can be victimised, bullied, forced and coerced. We see this all the time and we work hard to show parents that their teens didn't invite the 'friends' in. Things can get out of hand and things happen that were never planned or intended," she says.

Angry parents come into conflict with their young teenagers and the situation spirals until August. "When a summer starts badly, it continues badly and by the time they get back to school the parent-child relationship has been damaged," says Forrest.

MORE SENSITIVE, INTROVERTED teens can be "safe" at home but excruciatingly lonely, locking themselves in their rooms with TV, computer games and the internet. Their parents may be grateful their kid is not out on the streets, but isolation can bring too much time to think and depression that lasts far longer than the summer.

"The whole of society has to think about what happens to families for the three whole months when children have nothing to do," she says.

Rita O'Reilly of Parentline, an advice phoneline for parents, agrees: "The whole childcare debate centres around younger children. My experience is that's not where the problem is. Younger children are happy to go to creches, which continue throughout the summer, or they have nannies. Many women work part-time and are able to juggle this around school schedules.

"It's the 10- to 14-year-olds who are the problem. You can't leave them by themselves too long, but many don't want to go to summer camps all day. They don't want to leave the road. They want to be at home." Parents used to be able to hire au pairs in the summer to keep their children safe, but au pairs are becoming harder to find. "It's very hard to get au pairs now because there are so many other jobs. It's a dreadful dilemma," says O'Reilly.

Even when parents can afford to pay for a schedule of summer camps throughout the summer, their children may rebel. As O'Reilly points out, 13-year-olds hate being lumped in with seven-year-olds, with whom they have nothing in common. Many a parent has paid the fees, only to find that their child went once to the camp and refused to go again, she says.

Many pre-teens and young teens are happy to go to day-camps specialising in sailing, golf or GAA, but these tend to run from 10am to 3pm. The rest of the day has to be juggled with parents sharing pick-ups and the home-time responsibilities. "But that's not easy either; if a parent is working a half day, that means the parent is coming home to another job of looking after their own and somebody else's kids," says O'Reilly.

Term-time working for parents is one solution, but it tends to be available only in the Civil Service and in large companies, such as IT, insurance firms and banks. And even then, parents take a pay cut, since their reduced hours are spread over the year.

Besides, the term-time option may be available only as a once-off, or every second or third summer.

"It makes you envy the teachers and the stay-at-home parents," O'Reilly says. The sensible advice to any Leaving Cert student who wants to have a family would have to be, 'be a teacher', she adds. "Teachers say their jobs are stressful, but so is my job and so is yours," she adds.

The stress of juggling the summer holidays is something that Wade, of schooldays.ie, is also familiar with. "The trend is that parents are either sending them away to residential camps, or leaving them home alone. Some parents stagger holidays so that the mother takes two weeks at home, then the father takes two weeks. That leaves a gap of a couple of weeks with kids who are too old for babysitters. If 12- to 15-year-olds don't have an interest they can pursue, then they are just hanging around and left to their own devices."

SO WHAT'S THE solution? Term-time working or reduced summer hours can help. However, "many employers would not be sympathetic to parental leave for teens," says Wade, whose background is in human resources.

Forrest believes that secondary school buildings, empty for most of the summer, should be used as centres of activity and learning for 12- 15-year-olds, who could take modules in subjects that would earn them points towards their Junior Cert. The State should accept that its policy of having parents in the workplace has consequences, and as a result should provide parents with an alternative to school during the summers, she says.

The Department of Education funds places for 11,000 students at risk of leaving school early in summer programmes around the State. But families with children who fully intend to stay in school haven't got such support.

Until they get it, parents will continue to juggle time off work with expensive summer camps and - yes - leaving kids home alone to their own devices. It's not often talked about, but lots of parents are doing it.

See also www.ireland.com/ theticket/summerevents/