hankyoreh

By Lee Jae-uk, staff reporter

Salary woman Park Tae-eun, 36, whose husband also works, has recently been typing “summer camps for kids” into search engines every spare minute she has. Her seven-year-old son’s kindergarten goes on summer vacation for a week in early August, but Park is leading an important project at work and cannot stay home with him. Park’s husband will be able to take only a few days off of work during their son’s vacation, but for the remainder of the dreaded week, the parents will have to find some other solution. “Since the Sewol ferry incident, it’s unsettling to send my son off to some program but there’s no other way,” Park said in an interview on July 21.

Kim Young-woo, a 36-year-old father who works in Seoul, is worried about what he is going to do with his 5-year-old daughter as well. Her preschool summer vacation is a whopping 2 weeks long, and he has little idea how to fill the childcare gap. “My daughter’s preschool sent parents a letter asking for our consent to a 2-week summer vacation, and I couldn’t say no, considering how hard the staff work. But it’s not as if I can take a whole two weeks off of work. It’s a headache,” Kim said.

As summer vacations for preschools and kindergartens have begun, online “Working Mom Cafes” have been blowing up with complaints, saying, “What are we going to do with our kids during summer vacation?” There are those places that operate “summer classes” during these short breaks, but parents whose children attend small-scale preschools and kindergartens are out of luck. “My daughter attends a preschool with only 20 kids, which provides no summer school options for kids with two working parents,” Kim said.

Expansion of childcare options is the ideal answer to these parents’ worries, but for now, working couples have no choice but to shake in fear two times a year when their children get out of school. We have seen little return on President Park Geun-hye’s 2012 presidential campaign promises to increase the number of public and private childcare facilities available, as well the number of parents who qualify for public nanny services.

Lee Joo-hwan, 40, who has a 7-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son, expressed his frustration with the situation. “I should spend time with the kids during their summer vacation, but I have to work, and as of right now, we have no idea how we‘re going to get through this.”

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