Every week during term time, Monday arrives like a slap to the face. One child needs to be at basketball training by 7am, another child has a before school music lesson, another, well the third, bless him, manages to tag along to everything like he’s done since the day he was born without complaint. Well, not that many complaints.

By Tuesday we’re deep into swimming lessons. By Wednesday there’s Scouts. By Thursday someone mentions a “make-up class” we’ve apparently known about for weeks but absolutely haven’t. By Friday, dinner is something that can be eaten in the car. Between our three kids, the extracurricular commitments form something close to a full-time job, which we do on top of our paid full-time jobs.

Sport, music, swimming, Scouts, these are all character-building, all allegedly necessary if you don’t want to raise screen addicts (which, in our country, seems to be the worst thing an under-16 can be). Our calendar looks like a game of Tetris. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. And even if it is written down, there’s still a decent chance someone will announce, too late, “Oh mum, I forgot to tell you I had climbing.”

This, I know, is not a unique problem. Australian parents are famously busy ferrying children from one structured activity to another, often straight from school, often while answering work emails from the sidelines. Research reminds us that extracurricular activities are good for children. It is linked to improved confidence, social skills, physical health and academic outcomes. Participation rates are high, particularly in organised sport, and the pressure to “keep up” is real. No one wants their child to miss out. Least of all the child themselves.

So yes, I brought this upon myself. These are my children’s interests. They enjoy them. We encourage them. We pay for them. We rearrange our lives around them. We nod politely when someone says, “You’ll miss this one day”.

But here is the thing no one tells you loudly enough: there is a particular kind of joy that arrives when you realise it is the last music/swimming/insert “whatever activity your child has obsessively gotten into this term only to not care about it the next” lesson of the year.

The last swimming lesson, for example, means no more wet towels fermenting in the boot. No more panic-buying swimming caps because apparently the child isn’t allowed in the pool without one. No more sitting poolside pretending not to check emails while your child perfects a stroke they will likely forget the next month.

Because, once the activities end, something miraculous happens. Time opens up.

The summer holidays are often, for parents, a logistical nightmare. Six long weeks of childcare juggernauts, screen-time negotiations and desperate Googling “free things to do with kids”. But there is also something else: long, unstructured stretches where no one has to be anywhere at a particular time.

Mornings become slower. Evenings are no longer dictated by whistles and lesson schedules. There is space for boredom, which may involve your child lying on the floor dramatically claiming there is “nothing to do” while surrounded by toys.

There are no uniforms to remember, no bags to pack, no mad dashes across suburbs. Dinner can be eaten at home, at a table, occasionally even while seated. Parents exhale. Children decompress. Everyone becomes, briefly, less managed.

This doesn’t mean we stop valuing extracurricular activities. They matter. They give children confidence, routine and joy. But the end of the year offers a reminder that sometimes the best gift you can give a family is a pause.

So yes, bring on the holidays. Bring on the end-of-year wind-down. Bring on the blessed, activity-free weeks where the calendar is empty and the car stays parked.

It really is the most wonderful time of the year, even if by the end of January we’re desperate for it all to start up again.

• Saman Shad is an author of two books and a mother of three children. Her books, published by Penguin Australia, can be found here