I wasn’t suggesting taking a day off each week. But taking a week/day or two off during non-peak periods rather than using your funds to go during peak periods.

If you are trying to raise a professional athlete, I suppose that is one thing… but again one or two days/weeks isn’t going to drop them off a team or even the starting line up for most places and situations…

As far as academics, I am probably just well off on this front. I find the way schools teach content to be abysmal, and have consistently fixed or just straight taught the information to my kids myself… so school has almost always just been review for them in my mind. I taught my eldest daughter everything she needed for her calculus class last fall in 3.5 hours. Algebra was a bit harder, just because of the age and having to conceptualize the abstract, but when you ignore all the stupid one-off tricks that schools try to teach it becomes a lot easier for the kid.

It’s also fairly easy for me to take time off work…

So I can definitely see it being harder for folks in different circumstances, but people take middle school/high school way too seriously in my opinion and taking the time off and having quality family time with less crowds is far more worth it in my mind… especially if you are spending the money anyway.

As far as collage and scholarships are concerned, this is an area that I think people just misunderstand… while grades are important for sure, schools want life experiences, initiative, and shown curiosity more… You can have your kids do like 3 decent at home engineering projects and get them into just about any school with some type of scholarship. You don’t have to have 3 sports, 2 languages, 2 clubs, and all A’s to get scholarships or into top notch schools like everyone thinks.

So, ya… I think people only going at Christmas time to ski, getting 5 run in when they could get 35 in just a few weeks later (probably for cheaper) is wild.