Are You Ready for the Summer Holidays?

With summer holidays rapidly approaching, parents are once again preparing for both the joy and challenge of having a houseful of children to keep happy and entertained through the weeks of summer.Today we’re taking a look at some of the things you can check off to make sure you’re ready!

Hydration Stations  

Dehydration is one of the biggest risks that can strike during the summer, especially with heat waves now a regular enough occurrence for the Met Office to bring in a special Extreme Heat warning category. If your kids are busy playing outdoors (or wrapped up in video games indoors) it’s easy for a state of serious dehydration to creep up on them.

As a parent or carer, it falls to you to be the boring one and set a timer to remind the kids to drink up and stay hydrated. Trying jazzing up drinks with fruit juices and infusions to sweeten the pill a little, and consider using products like ORS hydration, that replenish electrolytes to ensure they don’t fall victim to heat stroke.

Sunburn

Sunburn is possible even on the cloudy days that make up so much of the British summer. It’s a great thing if your children are able to spend lots of time outside, so don’t let that be marred with painful sunburns. 

Find a sun cream that will really do the job: you need protection from both UV-A and UV-B ultraviolet light, so look for one that has an SPF of at least 30 and four stars of UVA protection.

It’s important to make sure you reapply regularly! Even if you’ve got waterproof sun cream, it will still deplete in effectiveness and if you don’t reapply it, you risk burning even worse due to overconfidence that you are protected.

Activities

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the summer holiday is to find ways to keep your children occupied and happy. Child care is a perennial challenge, and balancing work and children from home is a new issue many are faced with in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic: even with many restrictions lifted in the UK for now, home working will likely account for a much larger proportion of more people’s lives going forward.

Leaving your children in front of a screen might feel like a failure to make the most of the summer, but it does have the advantage of not needing constant, direct supervision. Try to find activities that are likewise attention grabbing for longer periods, but that might lure your kids into the garden. Try setting a scavenger hunt, encouraging your children to return with examples or photos of flowers, insects and other garden treasures that could keep them busy for hours!