Keeping a routine through the summer holidays

17 August 2026 · Sly Gittens

There's a version of the holidays with no structure at all, which unravels by the second week — and a version that recreates term time, which nobody wants. The useful answer is neither.

The first few days of a long holiday feel wonderful. Nobody's watching a clock, everyone is up late, the days have no shape. Then somewhere in the second week the house tips over: sleep goes, tempers go, and the freedom that felt like a treat starts feeling like drift.

The instinct is to reimpose term time. That fails too, and deserves to — it's a holiday.

Three anchors, and nothing else

Not a timetable. Three fixed points that don't move, with genuinely unstructured time between them.

The three that most families find hold everything together:

• 🌅 A get-up time — later than term time, but the same every day
• 🍽️ One shared meal at roughly the same hour
• 🌙 A bedtime, also later, also fixed

Everything in between can be genuinely free. The anchors are what stop the day from having no edges, and they're what make the last week survivable.

Why the get-up time is the one that matters

If you only keep one, keep that.

Bedtime drifts because the day started late, not the other way round. A child who got up at eleven is not tired at eight, and no amount of bedtime discipline changes that — you end up enforcing an argument you've already lost by breakfast.

Fix the front of the day and the back of it mostly looks after itself.

Let the content change completely

Term-time routines are about getting out of the door. That job doesn't exist in August, and keeping the same list makes the whole thing feel like homework.

Swap it. A summer list might be:

• ☀️ Outside for a bit
• 📖 Read something, anything
• 🧹 One job around the house
• 💬 Talk to someone who isn't in this house

Four loose things, none of them timed. The shape stays; the content doesn't have to.

Take real breaks, deliberately

A fortnight away, a week at grandparents, the days when everyone is out from morning to night — those shouldn't be tracked at all.

This matters more than it sounds. If a holiday shows up as a fortnight of missed days, the thing you come back to looks like a record of failure, and you won't want to open it. Pausing means the break is a break rather than a gap.

A run of days is meant to be evidence that a habit exists. Nothing about that is disproved by a week at the beach.

The last week is the one to plan

Nobody plans it, and it's the week that decides how September goes.

Roughly a week before term, start walking the anchors back — fifteen minutes a day on both ends, not an abrupt return. A child who has been getting up at half nine cannot be got up at seven on the first morning of term without everyone paying for it.

It's also the week to put the term-time list back in front of them, before it's needed. Recognising it on the Monday is worth a great deal.

And leave some of the holiday in

If something worked in August — a job they took on, reading before bed, the shared meal — keep it. The holidays are one of the few times a family gets to change how it runs without the change costing anything, and it's a waste to hand all of it back in September.

The short version

• Three anchors: get-up, one shared meal, bedtime. Free time between.
• The get-up time is the load-bearing one.
• Change the content completely — it isn't term time.
• Pause properly for trips, so they aren't recorded as failures.
• Walk it back over the last week, not on the first morning.
• Keep whatever worked.