How to make parents lives difficult! A little rant.

While Peter stays on at our house-sit, I have come up to Brisbane just 45 minutes away to stay with our youngest son and his family. They have had a new baby, and his wife had a caesarian, so she is supposed to be a bit careful with lifting and housework for the first few weeks. I am on hand to do bits and pieces round the house. They only have a small place, and there is not a lot to do, so it’s not a big job.

Baby is a tummy sleeper and loves this little bear rug.

One of the things I do is take their oldest son to school in the mornings and pick him up in the afternoons. He is a really good boy, well behaved and easy to look after, so that makes life quite easy. However, I am amazed at how difficult it is to get kids to school these days.

At the moment he lives too far away to walk. It seems the ‘in thing’ these days to molly coddle kids far too much, so that most children are taken to school by car and picked up again. In this case, he needs to go by car. However this particular school seems to have gone out of its way to make life difficult for parents.

He goes to Thornlands State Primary school. He is six years old, so it is still early days for him, but he knows his way around very well.

This amused me...trying to do the bright thing...I don't think so..
not when it comes to parking around the school.

This school has a policy of absolutely no preschool or after-school supervision. School starts at 8.50 am. And if you let your child go at 8.30 there is no teacher to watch them. I guess no one would dare to let them go earlier than that! If your child goes at 8.40, there is no supervision for the ten minutes prior to school starting. This means that your child has to roll up within a few minutes of 8.50 am. Every child. All of the little darlings. Of course you can go earlier than that, but you must sit with them until 8.50 am. And your children are not allowed to use the playground equipment before or after the start/stop of class times. Apparently this was instigated because some parents were dropping their kids off much too early....the perennial problem, give someone an inch they'll take ten miles and spoil it for everyone else.

This is not a huge school, and I don’t know how many children go to this school, but can you imagine the mayhem at 8.45 and 8.50 as all the kids roll up at once? It’s a crazy time. There are lots of parking spaces, but many of them are way way down the road. If you want to get there early and park close to the gates, you need to be there really early. It is okay to drop the child off, which is okay for a child who knows their way around but for a new child, until they are really settled you need to take them into the classroom…we all did that anyway…but to get a park and do that you need to be there far too early.

Picking up the child in the afternoon is worse. School finishes at 3 pm. To pick him up, I must go to the classroom and the teacher must see me and release the child from the class. So I have to park and go in. This means that every child has a parent or grandparent waiting for him/her outside the classroom at 3 pm sharp, and there is resulting mayhem with children parents or grandparents trying to find bags and drinking bottles etc.

To get a park for this little trip you need to be parked outside the school about 2.15 or all the close parks are gone. In this summer heat, sitting in the car for 30 minutes or more is no good.  It’s far too hot.

The worst part, in my view, is not for people like me, but for young mothers with other toddlers. There are mothers there sitting waiting with 3 or 4 year olds that have been plucked out of their comfy beds where they were enjoying a necessary afternoon sleep, put upright into a car seat, then carried into the seats by the class and have to try and stay asleep on their mother’s laps waiting for the 3 o’clock exodus. Then the mother must take the school child and the trying-to-stay-asleep  toddler and get them home via car seats back to their beds to continue the necessary afternoon sleep. 

What sort of craziness is this? Other mothers are sitting there rocking sleeping toddlers in pushchairs etc,  more toddlers who are having their afternoon sleep interrupted.

Poor toddlers getting their afternoon sleeps interrupted. I have cropped it so the mother
is not visible, but you can see a sleeping toddler on her knee.

Now if this was an occasional thing I wouldn’t even comment. We all do things from time to time to fit in with schedules. But this is an everyday affair. And in my book, it’s no fun.

I have had similar hassles in the past, when my youngest was a baby I had a two year old and a four year old and a nine year old and a fourteen year old. The older ones rode bikes to school or walked. And when the three younger ones got to school age, they walked unless it was raining when it was a matter of loading up the car and depositing them at different schools. But they were allowed to come out the front and wait for me.

I’m told that at Thornlands school they are allowed to leave the classroom without a parent showing up at the classroom when they are in grade two.

This routine is not the same for all schools.

My eldest granddaughter went to a primary school in Wynnum and they had a terrific arrangement. This school was on a busy road, so they had a drive way off the road with a roundabout so you could drop off and go. A teacher was there to keep an eye on things. There was also a parking area if you wanted to go into the school. When it came to pick up time, each parent had a big name sign in the inside of their windscreen visor, and the teacher could see who was coming up in the queue so they got the children ready so that the parent could pull up, pick up the child and go. It worked a treat.

I understand the problems of security for young children….but honestly if a school wants to impose such tight time restrictions on drop off and pick up they need to make some provisions so that the poor parents are not spending between one and two hours a day doing it.