Teesside day care provider hopes to alleviate the 'guilt' of working parents
The six-weeks summer holidays has started
A Teesside day care provider say they are hoping to help alleviate the 'guilt' of working parents by looking after their children.
It comes as many families here are now having to make plans for the six-week summer holidays.
Nicola Rahman-Knight, operations director of Zizus Day Care in Middlesbrough, said: "We've seen quite a big increase in demand from working parents over the holidays compared to the last couple of years. There's so many clubs available now so there's something for everyone depending on what the child's interest is.
"What we find with the adventures and outings that we go on, it helps in way to alleviate the parents' guilt of having to go to work and leaving their children, because they're getting to do really exciting things that they might not normally do.
"It's amazing and seeing them come back absolutely in mud sometimes, they've climbed trees, paddled in streams, they're talking so fast because they've had such an amazing day, they've seen sheeps and cows in fields and they've built sandcastles.
"If we take the children out on a big day trip, parents who have two, three, four children might not normally be able to affrod that whereas the youngest or oldest child are able to go and experience that. They get the experience and parents get to work. It's a win-win situation.
"What we found over the past couple of years with the changes to the funded childcare from nine-months up to four-years now, is that more parents are having term-time only contracts with the nursery so that actually gives me more capacity for my whole-year staff to be able to do the holiday club, so we've actually expanded the number of places available.
"I think where it's really going to hit is the parents of the nine-month old children who've put their children into childcare who might normally have made other arrangements and then suddenly, the summer holidays are here, the parents are still working but they don't have anyone else to look after the children and then their childcare fees are going up a lot."