Jane Nixon is battling to get her head around an equation that doesn’t add up.
As her elder daughter, five-year-old Robin, starts school, Nixon and her husband have no family locally to help bridge the yawning gap between the four weeks of leave they can take annually and school holidays that total 12 weeks.
Nixon discovered over the summer that holiday programs cost about $100 per day.
It’s a struggle faced by many families with school-aged children, especially considering that both parents work in most two-parent Australian families.
“I don’t know how people do this,” Nixon says.
“We looked at the calendar, and we’re like, ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to make this work’ … I’m also amazed no one seems to be talking about it when it’s an issue for everybody.”
Between 1990 and 2025, the proportion of partner families in which both parents work rose from 55 per cent to 71-73 per cent, Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows.
Parenting advocates and workplace experts say, especially in light of the rising cost of living, the system designed around a parent being home during school holidays is so outdated that radical reforms to care support and work arrangements are required.
The stress on parents is so acute that women’s continued workplace participation, and even the nation’s flailing fertility rates, are at stake, advocates say.
Georgie Dent, chief executive of The Parenthood lobby group, has launched a campaign demanding universal access to affordable out-of-school hours and holiday care and “genuine workplace flexibility during predictable care gaps” such as the long summer break.
It wants out-of-school care recognised as essential infrastructure, “not a private problem”, and for employers winding back flexibilities such as working from home to reverse this, especially in January.
Dent also argues international strategies to help parents cope with school holidays should be considered here, such as Sweden’s entitlement to use paid parental leave as needed until the child hits 12 or finishes fifth grade.
“We don’t live in a world any more where you can reliably assume there is one parent at home who can absorb all the care during school holidays, yet we haven’t updated policy settings to reflect that reality,” she says.
”Every January, it’s particularly pronounced; we hear this from families around the country. The juggle is an absolute nightmare.”
”For families with a child in long day care, the gap between work going back and school going back is easier to manage, but for those with even one child in school or preschool, parents are pushed to breaking point.”
Sharp increases in the price of food, children’s activities and other living expenses had created “extraordinary stress” on family finances and meant both parents often work just to cover costs.
“In Victoria, for example, four out of five mothers are in the paid workforce: we have to confront the question, what do all these households do when school isn’t back but work is?”
Rae Cooper, University of Sydney Professor of Gender, Work and Employment Relations, says care policies currently imply families have “unpaid care on tap”, much of it from grandparents.
How other countries support working parents
- Sweden: 480 days parental leave, shared between parents, per child can be used until the child turns 12 or finishes Year 5.
- Denmark: One year of paid parental leave, split between parents, 13 weeks can be used until the child turns 9.
- Finland: 14 months paid parental leave per child, divided between parents, and municipalities offer organised school holiday activities, including sports, arts, and, workshops, mostly free.
- Netherlands: Up to 26 weeks leave until the child turns 8, extensive child care subsidies until the child turns 12, plus a non-income-based quarterly payment until children turn 18.
- Quebec, Canada: Universal low-fee childcare including school-based holiday programs and publicly funded out-of-school care, ensuring continuity of care during school breaks.
- France: Heavily subsidised school holiday care programs through councils and schools.
“There are lots of reasons that this doesn’t hold anymore. We’ve got the most educated female workforce in the world, and a booming women’s labour force participation, but many grandparents still work and many Australians have grandparents who don’t live in Australia,” she said.
Those with available grandparents are often using them heavily to keep afloat during the school term, said Cooper, a member of the Jobs and Skills Ministerial Advisory Board.
Boosting parental leave was one solution, but ensuring fathers felt they could use existing leave entitlements was still a challenge.
“We know they want to, in many cases, but they find it very hard to request and be approved to do flexible work [due to] norms about who is the appropriate person to care for kids and who is the breadwinner,” she said.
Mother-of-four Erin Bourke runs a not-for-profit with six employees and says school holiday programs for her children with husband Matt, a firefighter, would be prohibitively expensive.
“I have no childcare available [in January] other than asking grandparents who all live quite a distance from us,” Erin said. “Parents are absolutely exhausted, they don’t know how they’re going to do it all.”
More subsidised holiday programs at which children across age groups could be accommodated in one place would help, she said.
Sydney mother Lauren Martyn-Jones works as a consultant to an agency that supports flexible work, and makes term-time function by spreading four days’ work over five. But stress peaks and “the wheels really fall off” during school holidays – especially in January.
“I have never seen such relief as I did in the last week at the school gate, there were so many mothers who looked like, over the last couple of weeks, they’d been through the trenches,” she said.
“We need as a society to look at the way we structure school and work and to understand a system which worked really well for families 55 or even 25 years ago, doesn’t suit modern working families.”
Australia lagged other OECD countries in supporting parents to manage the cost and logistics of work and care, said Emma Walsh, chief executive of the workplace consultancy Parents at Work, who backs the campaign for government action to boost parental support with school holiday care.
Even after the government’s final incremental extension of parental leave, to 26 weeks, up from 24, which arrives in July, Australian parents would only receive half the OECD average duration, and at minimum wage, unlike many other countries.
“When I look at what will happen in the next 10 years, and the caring load that will be on Australian workers, it will be enormous – there is a care burden coming down the road that could potentially smash our economy if we don’t get it right.”
The employer group, the Business Council of Australia, was contacted for comment.
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Wendy Tuohy is a senior writer focusing on social issues and those impacting women and girls.Connect via X or email.