Buried in the reports of the First Family's low-key European tour was a fact to snag the eye: the Obama girls, it was said, had just begun their 13-week summer vacation. Thirteen weeks?
It sounds crazy, but it's true: the school Malia and Sasha attend, Sidwell Friends, broke up last Thursday, and classes don't start again until 8 September. This is of course a private school, and proof of the fully transatlantic axiom that the more you pay for school, the less time your kids actually spend in it. But in America even state school kids get nearly three months off, from mid-June to early September. What do they do all summer?
In my day we did nothing and liked it. Some of my friends were sent away to camp, and the city offered free tennis lessons, but I remember spending an inordinate amount of time in the backyard hitting a tree with a stick. We also indulged particular hobbies, in my case usually some form of arson. The long, idle, slightly boring summer is a staple of American childhood - it drives the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird and countless other books and films. As a parent in Britain I applaud the six-week summer break, but the American boy in me still finds it ridiculously brief. It doesn't give you enough time to get bored, much less dangerously inventive.
For American working parents, who tend to get only two or three weeks' paid leave a year if they're lucky, there is no easy way to keep your kids busy. Sleep-away camp runs to about $1,000 a week. Day camps are cheaper - those run by the YMCA cost between $100 and $200 a week, sometimes more, depending on where you live and what you get. Otherwise one relies on childcare or, if the children are old enough, you send them out to work. To a large extent the US summer leisure industry relies on an influx of cheap teen labour.
The problem is, of course, that the long break isn't conducive to learning. Kids forget everything. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book Outliers, children from lower-income families fall progressively behind wealthier peers over successive summer vacations, while middle-class kids tend to spend some or all of their time in an educational environment, be it tutoring or computer camp.
I don't know what Malia and Sasha have planned for the rest of their summer, but I'll bet it isn't hitting a tree with a stick.
