Here we go. The long summer holidays have begun. Gone are the days when children spun on their heads, rode round the garden on their bikes and counted making putrid perfume from dead rose petals as the highlight of the week.

This is the era of summer ‘maxxing’ and, boy, is it competitive.

‘Oh, us? We’ve got no plans,’ is the usual line you’ll hear from the worst offenders but that’s just to throw you off the scent. In fact, they’ve booked six weeks of solid action, kicking off with netball and football camp, followed by work experience at the godparent’s City bank, a fortnight in a five-star hotel in Greece plus a week in Cornwall for good measure.

Woven around all that are the playdates, swim meets and the days out: Thorpe Park, Legoland, Alton Towers, the cinema, the bowling alley, the climbing wall, the bike track – with a slushie at every stop. The summer wasteland of yesteryear has died a death. But, looking back, those were the good old days.

We were bored witless at times, which gave our imagination chance to run riot.

My mother will tell you I was a strange child who played make-believe in my bedroom for hours, running a post office (I was customer and postmaster) and marrying off a Sindy doll to handsome Ken for the 700th time, while my older sister tried to sabotage the wedding by cutting up the bride’s clothes and dyeing her hair.

This slow forensic torture of me was, in fact, my sister’s main summer hobby.

Did we have days out? Sometimes. But our natural stomping ground in the Eighties was home-grown fun and it was blissful even if laced with doll drama and sibling warfare.

Fast-forward to today and my children are 19, 17 and 14, which means I’ve done 19 of these summers – and still find myself made to feel a failure by my lack of summer activities.

Exposure to your shortcomings is only sharpened by social media. There they all are, the ‘we’re not really doing much’ brigade: ‘Day 18 of the summer holidays!’ reads the caption beneath a photo of the children having surfing lessons in Croyde. She’s not bragging, you understand. She’s social-maxxing.

I did once take my children on a proper day out, coasteering in Devon with family friends. One of the mothers couldn’t cope with the fact that the moment wasn’t being documented for Bragg-ram as we had to leave our phones at the shore.

She swam to a neighbouring boat, hailed a stranger clutching an iPhone ,and persuaded her to take the snaps and send them to her. Our collective dive was then ‘spontaneously’ captured on film, while we all beamed on cue.

But it’s not enough to have days out, they must have an educational bent or be a way to craft a skill. Forest school, to learn names of edible plants. Pottery, for ‘mindfulness’, and Baby Mandarin because it’s never too early. Even a trip to the beach must yield a ‘marine ecology project’, the child made to catalogue rock pool crabs when all he wants is a ham sandwich full of sand.

And it doesn’t stop when they hit the teenage years, as mine have. The restorative, Kevin-like coma – sleeping until midday, then gaming until dark – has been abolished.

These teens must be at work experience at a law firm with Daddy’s friend of a friend of a friend, who owed him a favour. They’re there at 6am in a suit, experiencing work – or work is experiencing them. 

After that their phone is confiscated as they’re made to stomp round the Lake District with a rucksack and a map for a week, with not a day’s grace between the mountains and office – Mummy hasn’t scheduled a gap because a gap would be wasteful.

Then it’s a lightning tour to see Marissa and Henry in north Cornwall, followed by south Devon, followed by south Suffolk, followed by north Norfolk for regatta week. Beach cricket is obligatory; school-branded hoodie non-negotiable as you leap into a boat clutching your freshly-made crab sandwich.

Back home, the younger sibling is working through Mummy’s summer timetable, colour-coded by day and activity.

Monday is French, Tuesday junior triathlon. These are the filler weeks before the en famille fortnight in Greece with two other families, where there are kids’ clubs at the hotel – because heaven forbid children spend two weeks underwater pretending to be mermaids.

Ideally, they’ll emerge with a certificate of some description, proof that they maxxed their stay and were both the most popular and the most accomplished child by the pool.

In these households, they never, ever say they are ‘bored’ – the word isn’t in the family vocabulary. Their CVs are ‘grad-scheme-ready’ by puberty.

As for my own, I don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. I’ve told them they need summer jobs – not for advancement but to fund their lives. If they walk the dog that’s a bonus, but they’re too busy with their priorities: sleeping, floordrobe-building and professional fridge-foraging.

If they’re doing none of the above, they’ll be found, as I once was, drifting through a glorious stretch of nothingness, eating an ancient ice cream from the bottom of the freezer and pairing up odd socks for one glinting moment of ‘household duties’.

That’s the only maxxing they’ll be doing this vacay. Feral. Free. And joyfully so.