JEDDAH — Parents and children’s vacation do not often match. When students have a vacation, they and their families start wondering what to do with it. Students are now in a one-week break between semesters.
What is to be done in this vacation is the parents’ concern: It is too short to travel or be enrolled in courses; at the same time, it feels too long, as children have nothing to do.
“I’m bored mommy! I want to go back to school!” said Bushra, a 10-year-old fourth grader, to her mother Haya. This is what parents have to hear from their children every time they have these short vacations.
One week is too short for traveling. “I pity my children who do not have the chance of investing their time in beneficial activities. In one week, they cannot enroll in a foreign-language course, for example. At the same time, even if I could take off from work, I cannot afford to buy my four children tickets to travel abroad. One week is not worth it,” said Abdulaziz Habeeb, a Saudi.
Staying home, sleeping, going to shopping malls and playing video games are the things students on vacation now do.
Haya, 30, has three children. The eldest, a sixth grader, follows the end-of-each-semester examination system and had a one-week vacation.
Her younger siblings, a fourth grader and second grader, follow the continuous assessment system. So, their vacation is different.
Those who follow the latter system took their vacation earlier than their eldest sister. “Their total vacation is four weeks,” Haya said.
The parents both work and they cannot be available for long hours during the day. They cannot leave the children with relatives and there is no baby-sitting system here.
“I leave my children to sleep until I come back from work and that is what makes me a little relieved to leave them home alone,” she said.
“My elder daughter, who was still having her exams when her brother and sister were on vacation, was wasting so much time playing with her siblings because they were teasing her while she was studying and they were playing. That caused her GPA drop from 98 percent to 94 percent this year.”
There are mothers who are teachers and they also have vacations that do not match their children’s. Those who teach high school students and have kindergarten children face the same problem. Who will take care of them?
Aisha, 24, said that members of the family do not meet except during the summer vacation.
“This is the only time we meet. There is no system for vacations in Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, they do not pay attention to the conflict in the vacations of family members. My siblings who are in international schools have a month vacation for Christmas and New Year while my brother who studies in the Saudi school system does not have that vacation,” she said.
The mid-year vacation will be a one-week break for the next 10 years according to the 10-year-plan by the Ministry of Education.
