Readers share their experiences on managing leave and school holidays

Australia Broadcast Center

08-07-2025

Do school holidays bring an added layer of stress to your life?
We recently wrote about parents' experience of juggling their annual leave entitlements with the number of school holidays each year.
More of you contacted us to share how you manage that juggle with additional challenges of financial pressures, not having family support, disabilities and inflexible working arrangements.
Luke Stone, father of three, Playford/Kaurna, South Australia
The balance of work and family "has been a massive issue", says father-of-three Luke Stone, from South Australia.
"Only now, starting a YouTube channel and working from home, have I been able to get around not needing to pay the money I earn straight into child care.
"[My partner and I] both work for ourselves which is how we've been able to dodge holidays being an issue, though it means leading up to the holidays we both need to work extra to make up for it.
"Or one of us takes time off for the other to work."
Luke believes the days of single-income families being financially possible are gone for most people.
School holidays were never an issue when one parent was always home. Now that both need to work there is an issue that we as society haven't truly solved.
"Yes, there are services like holiday care in place, but these can be out of reach, affordability-wise and location and numbers-wise, for many.
"Working from home in some instances is a solution and that's why a lot of places are now using it as an incentive to attract the best workers.
"Essentially though this all boils down to the cost of living being so much more than it was in days gone by."
Tiana Mullan, mother of two, Ceduna/ Wirangu, South Australia
Tiana Mullan, also from South Australia, works full-time and considers herself "lucky" that she will have one week off to spend with her boys, aged 12 and 10, during these school holidays.
"I've saved leave, so I've got enough to have a week off," she says.
"My husband doesn't have any leave because he had a change of employment, so he's not able to take time off. That would be unpaid, and we just can't afford that."
The family live at Ceduna/Wirangu, which has a population of just under 4,000.
Tiana says there are very few extracurricular activities in the remote area for her sons, who are both neurodivergent. She also doesn't have the flexibility to work from home.
"It's literally torture, like, I dread the school holidays, I have for years," she says.
"My special-needs child needs routine in school holidays and it ends up being the hardest time because of that lack of routine."
She would like to see a change to the duration of school holidays each year.
"So just changing those two-week blocks to one week and then having a four-week holiday period over Christmas instead of six, it just is such a long time to need to try and manage everyone's needs.
"Lighten the school holidays just a little bit to help take that load off so that parents can keep working and providing".
Amanda Brummell Lennestaal, mother of three, Sydney/Gadigal
Single mother Amanda Brummell Lennestaal says she uses most of her annual leave to cover disability-related care needs for her three children.
"School holidays present an extraordinary challenge as I don't have leave available to cover these," she says.
"My kids are currently on a four-week school holiday break; it's usually three but they are doing some renovations at the private school they attend."
The children are in the ages that Amanda refers to as "the messy middle".
"They are too old for vacation care but still need a supportive presence to help them navigate their days," she says.
She says the assumption that people have a wide family network to help support care is 'privileged and outdated'.
"There's not this village, or these tribes that sort of get thrown around that a lot of us can rely on," she says.
"Teens don't fit in the vacation-care system, my youngest can't go to vacation care [because] she's tube-fed and has other needs that make it really impossible to go."
Amanda believes the cost associated with school holiday care shouldn't automatically fall on women.
"We're forced into these really horrible binary decisions of roof over our head or a sustainable life where we take reasonable breaks and nurture our children during school holidays."
Bec Heffernan, mother of four, Giabal,Jagera and Jarowair lands/Toowoomba, Queensland
Bec Heffernan needed to get creative with her children's summer school holiday routine.
"It is tricky, we have nine weeks [school holidays] over summer due to a big boarding cohort [at the school]," she says.
"Our kids are day students at a private school that also has boarders, and our school has very long summer breaks from last week in November."
Bec says the family used au pairs for three months at a time to help care for the children while she worked.
"We have four children but usually the au pair would only have two for the majority of the day, the others might do a music program or similar, to split up the ratio," she says.
"We just had one [au pair] each year for three years while three were school-aged and one was kindy-aged."
She says the closure of vacation care services during part of the summer break also made it difficult.