Taming the holiday cost of your children

By JOHN KARIUKI

Tragedies seldom come alone, but in a chain.

So, to compound the food shortage in some parts of the country, a runaway inflation and a weak shilling, children are at home on holiday.

And a consequence of the modern hustle is that many parents often don’t know what to do with them. They simply let them free.

But this can be costly. In deed, many children use this freedom to wreck everything in their wake. But between taking them to upcountry to "greet their grandparents" and enrolling them in the apparent "prison" of tuition classes, expensive pursuits in themselves, there are many ways of cutting down on the holiday costs.

For a start, financial experts say that one should let his or her children work around the house to earn their pocket money. This way, an invaluable lesson in the connection between work and money can be learnt.

Children can also help out at family businesses by running errands like paying bills to get a grasp of the overheads that their parents incur.

According to Bibian Wambui, a Nakuru resident and a mother of three, cooking food in bulk when the children are at home saves on energy cost.

"I cook a lot of food in the evenings for supper. We warm the left over at lunch time the following day instead of cooking more dishes," says Wambui.

After tracking the cost of her electrically bill for several years when her children are at home, Wambui has devised an effective cost cutting strategy. "I bought an energy saving jiko with which I heat up bathing water. We have all adjusted our washing time to the evening," she says.

This way, she saves money on the instant hot water shower which everybody would previously use.

Every school holiday, Ms Wambui’s meals rely heavily on the foods and fruits that are in season. "Right now my meals contain a lot of potatoes which are retailing at Sh150 a bucket; green peas, at Sh35 a kilo; green maize, at Sh10 for a cob and cabbages at Sh20 a piece," says Wambui.

Gideon Kamami, a city-based civil servant and a father of two, says that he and his children draft "the holiday rules" every time they come for vacation.

"They select the television programmes and DVDs that they wish to watch and we make a pact on the times that the television set should never be on to save on power,"says Kamami.

The rest of their free time is shared between doing household chores and studying, adds Kamami.

Repair costs

"As part of the holiday rules, my two children take turns to wash my car every few days, saving on fees to commercial car washers."

But whereas Kamami is bold enough to write and enforce holiday rules with his children, Teresia Mutu, a Nyeri parent, is more discreet.

She is a mother of two teenage boys who would be left at home on their own. Naturally, her house would turn into a magnet for all neighbourhood children every school holiday.

"I would dread school holidays because of the speed with which things would get finished", she says. The bills for repairing the boys’ mountain bikes and damages on windows and bust water pipes would also soar.

Ms Mutu took two days’ off from her workplace one school holiday to monitor the situation. And the culprit was the large number of her sons’ friends who would call for play. "As courtesy demands, my sons would invite their friends to a cup of tea or a meal", she says. The boys and their friends would raid the kitchen for any consumables and even the farm for any fruits that would be season, besides putting on the television set and radio the whole day, she says.

Ms Mutu has since asked her brother who operates a hardware shop in town to be employing the two boys every holiday."By the time they get home to bathe and study, there is hardly any time for their friends to congregate at my house", says Mutu.

A favourite and costly pastime of some children while on holiday is to try out new recipes between the proper meals. This habit must be kept under control lest the household budget balloons out of control.

POWER BILL

Besides the cost of the food items themselves, there are some consequential costs of the accompanying ingredients like milk, cooking fat, sugar, margarine, lemons and so on. There is too the cost of cooking fuel and the risk of household accidents, like an injury and a fire, especially if the experiments are unsupervised.

Others keep the lights on overnight in their rooms, ostensibly to read. This not only negates the purpose of a holiday but also raises the power bill.

Others get hooked to computer games, which raise the power and internet costs.