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In my naivety, I was excited. Thrilled. Overjoyed, even, to be leaving the cesspit of germs, the $180-a-day fees, the baby-ness of long daycare behind.
In the sweet summer days of January, I was looking forward to a predictable, super local, $0 per day (except for school fees, of course) existence at the public school up the road.
It started strong – my delighted child came home from the first day, a crown proclaiming him king of kindergarten atop his head. The novelty of making a lunchbox stuck around for at least a week.
Then I became a full-time content creator for a stuffed toy from Temu.
My child’s class pet, Sammy the Sloth, came home one Thursday afternoon. The reason for Sammy gracing our house, my child told me, was for the sloth to become a beloved member of our family. He was to be photographed enjoying his week with us, then the pictures were to be printed and scrapbooked for the rest of the class’s enjoyment on his triumphant return.
Flummoxed by Sammy’s week at another family’s home that featured him catching a bass in a local dam, I asked the kid’s dad how he had managed such an impressive week for the sloth.
The answer? AI! Sammy had never caught a fish! But try explaining that to a five-year-old, so off I trundled to the soccer match, on a bike ride and meeting a new baby cousin, Sammy and my phone in tow.
Where, I wonder as I stand in line for a printing machine at Officeworks at 9pm, have the cute pictures of them playing in the sandpit and eating nutritious meals prepared by a daycare chef, gone? Where is the 7am drop-off so you can get to work at a reasonable hour? Was long daycare really so bad?
The term started with an athletics carnival. The first few attempts at the 70-metre dash were hilarious and pretty cute. The subsequent “field events” – included a shot put with a plastic ball weighing about100 grams and a relay race with beanbags on the kids’ heads – started to wear thin as a spectator sport.
The week after involved five-year-olds giving speeches about what animal they’d be if they were one. Cue hours of soul-searching about which animal was the best one to be, reference books from the library – please do not just copy and paste information from the internet, the note from school scolded parents in advance – attempts to explain palm cards and endless changes from a wolf to a wombat to a monkey.
Yet another day was “open day”. Deceptively named, open day is not for families considering signing up to this parental endurance test – it’s for current parents. So another half day off work to enjoy a picnic lunch with your child, then a quick visit to the classroom to see how they spend their days.
Before leaving for the day, the flyers for the next day requiring leave from work – the school fundraiser, of course! – were plastering the walls.
And now it’s the bane of the contemporary parent’s existence – Book Week.
Take a peek at #bookweek on social media and you’ll be transported to a kaleidoscopic world of home-made butterflies from The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Aussie animals from Wombat Stew or, in perhaps the most egregiously creative example, a child dressed as the tree from Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree.
Having first exhausted your creative energies as a costumier (it must be noted that my child went as Batman and we already had the costume so it was a suspiciously easy task at my place), you must then take half a day off work to watch your child parade your hard work around a damp quadrangle filled with hundreds of children, many of whom are inexplicably dressed as footballer Lionel Messi.
Obviously, all of this is undertaken in the name of enriching these lucky kids. But surely some of that enrichment could involve a little less from me?
This intense program of parental involvement comes against the backdrop of declining numeracy and literacy in Australia.
NAPLAN results continue to underwhelm, with one in three year 3 students failing to meet expected numeracy benchmarks and more than one-third of year 9 NSW students not meeting expected standards in reading, writing or grammar and punctuation.
Nationally, the average reading scores in year 5, 7 and 9 were lower than in 2025. Have the policy boffins at the NSW Department of Education considered outlawing class “pets” and doing more maths? Fewer ludicrous costumes, more literacy? Or is Book Week, with its unique potential to bring books to life, the key to a lifelong love of literacy, a special way to get kids thrilled about reading?
Is Sammy the Sloth yet another a task for already overscheduled kids and their overscheduled parents or a novel way to get you thinking deeply about how you spend your time as a family? Maybe it’s both, but I don’t have time to work it out. I have a fundraiser to attend.
Sally Rawsthorne is The Sydney Morning Herald’s higher education reporter.
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