What To Do With Your Tween When School’s Out
By: Justine L
Tags: Parenting, Child Development, Childcare, Working From Home, Tweens

The strange in-between land that childcare forgot

Photo by Allen Taylor on Unsplash

These days I don’t think twice about leaving my daughter at home while I pop out to the shops for 20 minutes or go and pick up the Friday night pizza. I’ve been known to leave her to her own devices while I take a brisk walk — probably a win-win for both of us when Saturday afternoon cabin-fever sets in.

She’s 11, so I’m finding myself wading through the murky grey territory of tweendom, somewhere between constant supervision and teenage self-sufficiency.

It’s particularly the case now that the summer school holidays have kicked off in Australia. This week I planned a rare pandemic era trip to the office to forget that school would be out.

She’s long past the stage where bringing her would have been novel and fun (for her at least). Vacation care is no longer an option because they don’t seem to cater to children over about 10. The very suggestion of spending a day there fills her with despair.

This is not the old days where you can leave them running around with the neighbor’s kids or school mates. People’s calendars are booked up months in advance, and frankly, who needs to add to their mental load with the responsibility of someone else’s kid?

We don’t live in the village anymore. Extended family is hours away, so it’s pretty much down to me. Sure my child is my responsibility, but I’m no less perplexed by this unexpected tween childcare gap. What do people do? What am I expected to do?

Clearly, leaving her at home all day is a very different proposition to the quick grocery dash. My gut told me, no, but my head wanted more clarity on just what is standing in the way.

As with many areas of life, the law is only useful when dealing with the extremes of human conduct. Even then, it’s hazy concerning leaving children at home. It’s essentially about what is reasonable in the circumstances.

Understandably, the guidelines focus on safety. You can’t leave a preschooler in front of the cartoons while you check-in at the local tavern. Leaving an eight-year-old in charge of three younger siblings is out. You need to make sure your child knows what to do in an emergency and, ideally, not cause one in the first place.

I’m reasonably confident that my daughter wouldn’t burn the house down. But having spent a day working from home with her rattling about, I realise there’s a whole other world of things to consider.

I worry that the same issues that cause tension at home will be left unchecked if I am not there. Habits around nutrition, hygiene, and good order that many of us of more advanced years hold dear don’t figure as priorities. I’m likely to return to a sea of discarded clothing and food wrappers as I gaze wistfully at the untouched fruit bowl.

When you’re 11, time is not at a premium. It stretches infinitely before you. The older I get, the more a sense of urgency governs my days, each with a rolling list of tasks to complete. It’s a constant reminder of skills not developed, interests not pursued, hounded by the ever-present pressure to live my best life. When you’re 11, you want to get through the day without exploding from boredom.

Our day together, when I was working from home, was undeniably stressful. I was a distracted, yelling mess every time I bounded into the kitchen to investigate an unexplained noise. I may have been a thrown a bit off balance by finding the lettuce in the freezer.

Yet, I wonder how much of this is due to my own trigger points rather than an actual need to enforce acceptable standards. If I hadn’t been there for her to drive me nuts, there wouldn’t have been an issue.

It’s because she’s gaining rather than lacking maturity that the tension arises. It’s about having someone asserting their agency in my space. I’m more likely to experience this kind of boundary dispute with an adult than a young child.

It’s not a fear of her endangering safety so much as a pre-occupation with whether she’s making sensible decisions and using her time well. But at some point, kids need to figure it out for themselves. And the only way they can do that is by having the autonomy to make their own decisions.

I see a key part of my parental role as equipping my daughter to make good decisions. This means being able to think through possible consequences and then own them and learn from them. If I do this right, she might not always be happy with the outcome but might at least be satisfied with how she handled herself in getting there.

It makes sense for me to focus on the input rather than the output: I’m responsible for providing the grounding, the structure, and the moral guidance that sets her up to live her life. But I can’t control the outcome, and sometimes I need to stand back, as painful as it may be.

After all, my job is to prepare her to live her life on her own one day. In the meantime, I’ll take the odd brisk walk to buy chocolate and hide it when I get home.