The number of children enrolled in school holiday programmes is increasing exponentially, erasing, as it grows, the childhoods of yesteryear. With school holidays upon us, Bruce Munro asks whether we should be concerned about the different childhood memories we are creating for our children.
One of Andrew Bowen's most potent childhood memories is of making a stop-motion film with his mother.
The 49-year-old Dunedin resident was about 12 at the time, living on a small farm outside Wagga Wagga in rural New South Wales, Australia.
It was the spring school holidays and he was mad keen on making movies.
''There was a paddock next door to the house. I mowed it and created a film set for a race car circuit,'' Mr Bowen recalls as though it was yesterday.
''I had two miniature cars. A vintage car and a Lego racing car. And it [the film] was like the story of the tortoise and the hare.''
For two days, mother and son sat in that paddock, him moving the cars a centimetre forward and then her clicking the camera shutter. Again and again and again.
With immense pride, the completed three-minute stop-motion animated film was screened for family and friends.
The sweet sensation of being in charge, of patient persistence on a shared task, honing skills and celebrating the achievement left an indelible mark.
Today, Mr Bowen is founder and director of Kidz Inc, a Dunedin after-school and school holiday programme organisation. He is part of a nationwide industry fast replacing those sorts of childhood experiences with something which, at first glance, appears utterly different. On their way out, it seems, are school holidays spent at home whiling away the hours with a favourite board game or toy set under the watchful eye of a parent. Also close to gone are the school-free weeks spent roaming the neighbourhood with mates, creating your own excitement and mayhem.
School holidays were the formless clay out of which unforgettable experiences were fashioned.
And those memories are important because they play a central role in shaping who we are. They give us a sense of identity, reference points by which we know we are still the same person or recognise who we have become. And they strongly influence our decisions in adulthood, serving as a template for choices as to what we would, or would not, do in later life.
But what sorts of memories are today's children being given? When they have grown and look back, how different will their recollections be from those of our childhoods? Will their memories stand them in good stead, or is there cause for concern?There is no doubt that school holidays have become a different beast.
The key driver is the growing number of children with parents or caregivers in paid work.
Good, up-to-date figures are hard to find, exacerbated by the fact that data from the Christchurch earthquakes-delayed national census is still being crunched by computers deep in the heart of Statistics New Zealand.
What can be said is that the percentage of families with one parent (where the need for employment is particularly acute) has more than doubled in the past three decades. And the percentage of couples with dependent children who are both in paid work has risen from about 50% to more than 66% during the past 20 years.
And, of course, children get many more holidays than their working parents. It creates a quandary, often with attendant tension and nagging guilt.
Offering themselves to step into the breach are school holiday programme providers. A wide variety of community and church-run holiday programmes have been and continue to be run. But during the past five years the New Zealand school holiday landscape has been transformed by the arrival of a plethora of prime coloured, snappily logo-ed, adrenaline-rich private providers.
Among those riding that wave is Alex Saunders, managing director of Kelly Group New Zealand. The Auckland-based 28-year-old oversees 35 school holiday programmes throughout the country, including two in Dunedin. For the past three years his business has doubled in size every year, both in terms of the number of programmes and the number of children enrolled. During the July school holidays, 2000 children took part in Kelly Club or Kelly Sports programmes. These holidays, Mr Saunders expects that to be more like 2300.
At the same time, holiday programmes have also grown in quality, pushed along by competition between the burgeoning number of providers, Mr Saunders says.
And as the quality has improved to meet the expectations of a growing number of time-poor parents, so too has the perception of holiday programmes.
The old stigma about packing your children off to a day programme for the holidays is evaporating.
Curiously, this process may have been aided by a shift in middle-class sentiment about receiving government handouts.
Mr Saunders believes middle New Zealand's familiarity with Working For Families tax credits has helped those parents feel more comfortable about applying for Work and Income's Out of School Care and Recreation (Oscar) subsidies for holiday programmes.
This change in the status of holiday programmes is evidenced in two ways. Children are demanding to be enrolled.
''I used to work at school holiday programmes when I was at university, and we would have kids kicking and screaming when they were dropped off,'' Mr Saunders says.
''Now we have kids kicking and screaming when they have to go home.''
And parents are choosing holiday programmes for their own convenience.
In lower decile areas where a greater proportion of parents are working, full-time enrolments can be up to 60% of the intake. But overall, the proportion of children enrolled for full weeks is falling relative to the number of children enrolled for one or two days a week, Mr Saunders says.
''We're reaching a new community of people who don't actually need the child care . . . It's a chance to catch up with coffees. or whatever it might be in those higher decile areas.''
They might be more popular and even sought-after, but what of value are holiday programmes actually offering our children? In an already frenetic, entertainment-oriented, relationship-poor world, is it just more structure, more spoon-feeding, less connection and less opportunity to recharge expended batteries? Are holiday programmes glorified babysitting services for young people already struggling to grow up? Will they forge memories that tell them they are capable and belong, or that reinforce the message that they are entitled consumers and little else? Jeremy Botting began his working life as a marketing and statistics graduate working for business advisers Polson Higgs. Now he spends his days planning programmes and supervising staff who run eight after-school, and nine school holiday, programmes throughout Dunedin.
The 35-year-old director of Magic Kids Club agrees that historically holiday programmes probably were viewed as surrogate babysitting sessions. But that is not the sort of programme he wants to be running.
Since inheriting the fledgling business from his sister when she went overseas 13 years ago, Mr Botting has built Magic around two maxims; learning through fun, and letting children be children.
''We want the kids exploring their world and learning without even realising they are learning, and having heaps of fun doing it,'' he says.
Ensuring kids can be themselves flows from getting the balance right between structure and free time, he says.
''Some kids crave structure and others just want the freedom to do what they're doing. We have to cater to both.''
Mr Botting's own childhood holiday memories are a mix of camping with family on the edge of Lake Aviemore, in Waitaki Valley, ''lots of downtime'' at home, and being ''left to our own devices'' to have fun with friends.
Most holidays, his mother took time off work.
''But now it's a busier world. And that's where we come in,'' he says.
''It's up to us to create those memories. That's the challenge for us.''
It is clear some providers invest plenty of thought in their programmes in order to achieve those goals without making it seem forced.
Just how much becomes apparent when Mr Bowen, of Kidz Inc, is asked a couple of leading questions about what lies beneath all the activities and games.
A trained teacher with a background in training technology educators, his consuming passion is childhood development.
We all have five basic needs, he says. Survival, belonging, freedom, empowerment and enjoyment.
''This forms the core of how we work with the kids,'' Mr Bowen says.
''All their behaviour, both positive and negative, is designed to meet these needs.''
Whether a child is building a hut with fellow programme-goers, reading a book, or learning to create an electronic circuit, it is all about them meeting their felt needs.
''Circuitry, for example, can be about empowerment and fun. And they are working with another person, so it might also be about relationship, belonging.''
This framework remains unseen by the children until there is a glitch. Then a staff member talks to the children to help them understand what need drove the inappropriate behaviour and how it can be resolved so that everyone is happy. It also gives the children a process they can begin to apply themselves.
''It's very effective. We rarely have behavioural issues,'' Mr Bowen says.
If needs drive behaviour, then motivation is key to growth.
Mr Bowen structures the programmes to give the children ample scope to pursue activities they find engaging.
''We're always being told what we have to do, and we don't have downtime to explore what we want to do,'' he says.
Through having the opportunity to find out what they like doing and what they are good at, children start to get a sense of who they are and the sorts of things they want to do. The memories of that self-discovery can bear fruit for many years.
For one young woman taking part in a Volunteering Otago holiday programme, it is the sense of achievement and belonging that has struck deep.
The community organisation's Dunedin holiday programmes are open to all young people but are deliberately hosted in lower decile parts of town, Volunteering Otago manager Anna Clere says. They are funded by the Ministry of Social Development's nationwide Break-Away initiative which aims to give 30,000 children a year a holiday programme experience they would not otherwise be able to afford.
This particular teenager, who had low self-esteem and difficulty building relationships, was referred by a social worker. The week-long programme included activities such as baking for a food bank, visiting the SPCA, and creating a community radio show.
At the end of the week, in a card given to the programme co-ordinator, she expressed her gratitude for the new friends she had meet and the successes she had experienced.
On the face of it, the holiday programme-laden memories of today's youth will be a world away from the childhood memories of the previous generation. But parents can cast off their guilt in the slightly disconcerting knowledge that their child's holiday minder may well have a more thoughtful and comprehensive approach to parenting than they ever will. Scrape beneath the surface, and a well-chosen holiday programme will be creating those same powerful memories we all need to build and navigate a life.