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That holiday hold on kids

That holiday hold on kids

Whatever happens to Greece in the next few months it seems unlikely to lose its allure as a holiday haven.

For teenagers especially, its islands offer a heady cocktail of sunshine, abandon, other teenagers and, if they are really lucky, no parents.

Zante in particular has become a magnet for certain types of school leaver, a staging post between home and university, and their first real taste of freedom.

Pity the older tourists who boarded package flights recently with 40 local school boys.

Pity the islanders, though they probably need the euros right now.

But the location, however lovely, is not the main lure for liberated youth; they would be happy in any reasonably hot, cheap and rowdy resort, as long as they board that plane without parental escorts.

I feel fortunate that my own nearly 18-year-old is coming away with us this summer, as is her younger sister, but I wonder how long we can continue to count on their company.

I remember friends with slightly older offspring saying they could always persuade their children, then impoverished students, to join them for skiing jaunts because these were beyond the budgets of the young.

At the time I couldn’t imagine the day I’d have to bribe my daughters to go on holiday but tempus fugit and here we almost are.

We are not a skiing family so that won’t work but I fear I will have to come up with something before next summer looms and the girls make other arrangements.

There are plenty of guides to help but they speak to more intrepid tourists than us, as we head off to the same sleepy hollow we’ve visited for 14 years running.

They also seem to assume money is no object.

“However embarrassing it is to be seen with parents, teenagers will risk it in California, Barbados, Hong Kong and other exotic long-haul destinations,” suggested travel writer Joanna Symons.

Then there are Costa Rica and Belize, both of which offer “challenge and variety” for the world-weary child.

“Surf centres” such as San Sebastian or Biarritz “superb beaches and a humming nightlife” were another tip to tempt teenagers.

Trying to picture my husband on a surfboard is entertainment enough and I doubt we’d be allowed to enjoy the nightlife, however humming, if the girls had their way.

Other tips purpose-built villages with sports themes or clubs with ‘activities’ defeat the object, which is to do as little as possible.

They also overlook the fact that the people paying us have to want to go there too.

This doesn’t put off some parents, though.

Being dragged to fashionable (for teenagers) spots by the princess of the house is a small price to pay for her presence, said one long suffering mother just back from Magaluf.

“It’s the only way we can keep her close,” said another as she remortgaged the house to fund a fortnight in Florida.

Sharing a holiday with family friends could be a potential boredom-busting solution but whose friends, yours or your children’s?

They are not necessarily the same, as years of school events will prove.

Anyway, going halves on a villa appeals even less to our teenagers than it does to us because, as they sweetly put it, they’d spend the whole break worrying we’d embarrass them.

A neighbour, recently returned from 10 days in Kent, seemed to have cracked it though.

After weeks discussing possible options with their two teenagers, she and her husband decided they would devise a trip which “had something for everyone”.

It would only work, they all agreed, if no one was allowed to complain. So, finding herself in Margate, thanks to her kids’ desire to go to something called Dreamland, my neighbour had no option but to grin and bear the English seaside clich.

Dreamland turned out to be nothing of the kind, a retro amusement park, as if the modern ones were not bad enough.

But queuing for the dodgems beside a tattooed couple feeding their baby beer, she strangely lost her inhibitions and confessed that she enjoyed, though would not wish to repeat, the experience.

Perhaps her fun was heightened by the knowledge that she would soon wreak her revenge.

The next day she carted the boy and girl off to the Turner Contemporary, described as a “simply cutting edge arts space”, to see the Grayson Perry exhibition.

Her son started to whine but she gave him a look and, wouldn’t you know it, he had a marvellous day (her words, not his).

I very much liked listening to this holiday snapshot, so quaintly unspoilt beside Miami Beach or Belize, but doubt I could dupe my daughters that way.

One more year, then, to hatch a plan or face the alternative: two weeks alone with their father.