My son finished his second Lego set by Saturday morning, and school had only been out since Thursday. He’s five, he started Prep a few weeks ago, and last week was his first ever school holidays. I honestly thought I was ready for this. I was not ready for this.
He built the first set that same afternoon we picked it up. I figured that would buy me the whole weekend. It bought me until Saturday, 9am, when he wandered into the kitchen holding an empty instruction booklet and asked what we were doing today. It was day two. There were still more than a dozen days to go.
So we went looking for how everyone else handles it. We dug through parenting forums, social media groups and community threads to see what hundreds of other mums around Australia actually do with their kids during the break, and it turns out almost nobody does the same thing. There wasn’t one answer. There were about six.
The vacation care crowd
The single most common reply, by far, was some version of “just send them to holiday care, it’s the same as after-school care but all day.” A lot of primary schools run this through an outside school hours care (OSHC) provider, and one mum pointed out something I genuinely hadn’t clicked onto as a brand new school parent: Child Care Subsidy doesn’t stop the day your child starts primary school. If your child is under 14 and not yet in high school, CCS can still apply to before-school care, after-school care, and vacation care, provided the program is run through an approved OSHC service. Depending on family income, that can cover a large chunk of the daily fee, which makes the “just book vacation care for the whole two weeks” option a lot less painful on the wallet than it sounds. Services Australia has the detail on eligibility, and it’s worth checking before you assume you’ll be paying full price, because plenty of parents in the group admitted they’d been doing exactly that for a year or two without realising.
The camp-everything crowd
Then there’s the group running their kids through a rotating door of sport camps. Swimming squads, basketball camps, tennis intensives, gymnastics from eight in the morning to five at night. One mum said she’d booked golf lessons for week one and tennis for week two, purely so her son would be tired enough to fall asleep without a fight. Another had her daughter doing a full day of gymnastics camp every single day of the break. It sounds intense, but the logic several of them gave was the same: term-time is already packed with school, so holidays are actually the only window where a kid can do five straight days of the one sport and make real progress, rather than the usual once-a-week lesson. If that’s the direction you want to go, our classes and workshops listings and sports and fitness programs are a decent starting point for finding what’s running near you.
The home-camp parents
A smaller but very determined group is running what one mum called her “homemade camp.” No official program, just a strict daily timetable of maths and Chinese in the mornings, reading and instrument practice in the afternoons, and screen time as the reward at the end of it. She’s drilling her son on times tables, working through addition and subtraction, and going back over pinyin and the basic Chinese consonants and vowels, because term-time simply doesn’t leave room for it. It’s not for every family, and honestly it’s not for mine, but a few mums swear it’s the only way their kids keep up with weekend Chinese school. If Chinese language practice is part of your own holiday plan, there are a few Chinese class listings on the site worth a look.
The playdate economy
This was the one that actually made me laugh, because it’s essentially a barter system. A handful of mums coordinate so that today the kids are at one house, tomorrow at another, and the parents rotate who’s “on.” Nobody is paying for anything, nobody is driving anywhere they wouldn’t already be driving, and the kids get two weeks of near-constant company instead of two weeks of being bored at home with just a parent for entertainment. A few said they mix this with rainy-day trips to an indoor play centre when the weather turns, which tracks, because Brisbane’s holiday weather is never quite as reliable as the calendar suggests.
The big-trip families
Then there’s the group who basically write off the whole break to travel. Camping trips, a few days at the coast, a drive up into the hills, or timing a visit around something like the Sydney Royal Easter Show, which can easily fill several days on its own. One mum told me her entire second half of the year is planned around booking the four school holiday trips as early as possible, then just counting down until the next one. It’s the most expensive option of the six, realistically, but for families who see the holidays as the only real chunk of time off together, it’s non-negotiable.
The mix-and-match approach, which is what most of us actually landed on
Once I’d read through everyone’s replies, the honest pattern was that hardly anyone sticks to just one of these. Most mums described something closer to a patchwork: a couple of vacation care days when they’re working, a sport camp squeezed in somewhere, a playdate or two, and a day trip to break it up. For our own two and a bit weeks, we ended up with something like this:
- Week one, weekdays: two days at vacation care, one sport camp session, and a playdate on the Wednesday.
- Weekend in the middle: a day trip somewhere new, because two weeks stuck around the same three parks gets old fast for both of us.
- Week two: a few home mornings doing a workbook and reading, afternoons split between the local library’s holiday activities and an actual free afternoon where nobody had anywhere to be.
That last bit turned out to matter more than I expected. A few mums in the group said the same thing, almost word for word: kids need at least one or two genuinely unstructured days in there, or the holidays start to feel busier than school itself.
What I’d tell my past self
If you’re staring down your child’s first ever school holidays and feeling the same low-level panic I had on that Saturday morning, the two things that actually helped were checking whether your OSHC provider’s vacation care is CCS-eligible before assuming it’s out of budget, and accepting early that you don’t need to fill every single day. For finding what’s running locally, our activities directory covers everything from indoor play centres to museums and theme parks by category, and it’s worth a scroll before the holidays start rather than during them, because the good sport camps and holiday programs book out fast. And if you’re trying to work out exactly how long you’ve got until the next one, our Queensland term dates page has the current Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer dates laid out so you’re not caught out the way I nearly was.
We’re two days into week two as I write this. He’s onto his third Lego set, which I bought pre-emptively this time, and I’ve stopped pretending I know what tomorrow looks like until I’ve actually planned it the night before. Apparently that’s normal too.