For example, I'm definitely not figuring my son's grade 2 timelines into my travel plans. He loves school and everything, but he can skip it for a week somewhere if that literally saves the family thousands.
Years later I was having dinner with a coworker and his teacher wife and explained it to her. "Yeah we'd go to like science exhibits and museums and all, it was really fun!" She was just aghast. Like 'y-you can't just t-take kids out of school?!'
Some people treat their job as if it's the most important thing in the world, to everyone.
Dentists still can't realize that flossing isn't everyone's #1 priority every single day :P
Also, schooling for younger children isn't exclusively about the obtaining of actionable knowledge. For some children, it can be disruptive to yank them out of school.
Other families might have a problem that this teaches their children the lesson of "rules for thee, but not for me" --- that it can be okay to ignore rules just because you don't want to follow them. That isn't something that everyone is okay with.
Can you elaborate, so I can strike them off my to-move list forever?
>Also, schooling for younger children isn't exclusively about the obtaining of actionable knowledge. For some children, it can be disruptive to yank them out of school.
Yes. Your child-mileage may vary. My kid doesn't care, one week out of school does not impact him negatively, whereas travel impacts him positively.
>this teaches their children the lesson of "rules for thee, but not for me" --- that it can be okay to ignore rules just because you don't want to follow them.
They can then take great care to ensure the kids understand that this is not, in fact, the lesson. My kid doesn't attend school because "that's the rule, gotta go to school", he enjoys it for the social and the learning aspect, so his showing up to class does not rest upon compulsion either by the parents or the school. If this ever changes, I'll deal with that then. Also, it is of course completely okay to ignore rules you do not think of as important if there are no consequences to breaking them. My responsibility as a parent is to carefully curate the consequences bit to ensure I only enforce non-stupid rules. I want my kids to learn that too.
Thankfully, school systems do tend to stagger their spring breaks so at least there's some variation there.
Grades and school projects mean a lot to my kids and one of the most important things I'm trying to teach them right now is to have a sense of responsibility and respect for their own work and commitments.
Just another casualty of Goodhart's law, it would seem.
That might be an acceptable tradeoff for you, but it's worth knowing about beforehand.
No, they're saying that there's nobody else for them to play with while on vacation.
Some people, particularly with younger kids, plan vacations that have some sort of child care component to them, which gives the kid opportunity to socialize with other kids their own age (and also gives the parent some free time to do things that they can't do while taking care of their kids). Some hotels offer this as part of the package, as do cruise ships, etc.
If I have two strikes after this comment, I'll just see myself out.
Currently, everyone with kids takes vacations at the same time. That means that all kids go on vacation at the same time, so whenever they're on vacation, there are likely to be lots of other kids there.
If everyone with kids took vacations at staggered times, fewer kids would be on vacation at any given time, meaning whenever they're on vacation, there are likely to be fewer kids there.
That is the tradeoff that OP is referring to.
More generally, if you have a small child, the probability of sleep deprivation is pretty high, so i should have taken that into account.
So, like every other trip ever that doesn't involve meeting people we know?