One in ten children does not go on vacation for financial reasons, and an equivalent proportion has parents who deprive themselves of vacation so that they can go without them, according to an INSEE study published Thursday.
“Within the same household, children suffer less from certain deprivations than their parents”, notes the Institute for Statistical Studies in this study on the “material deprivations” of households with children. Thus, in 2021, in around 10% of households, the children were unable to go on vacation for at least one week. But we must add 9.4% of families where only adults have deprived themselves of holidays.
Because “adults prefer spending on children if they can, even if it means depriving themselves,” observe the authors of the study. Thus among the 11.3% of parents who indicated that they were going without new clothes, three-quarters said they managed to buy clothes for their children despite everything.
Continuous decline in deprivation over the past ten years
However, deprivations have been less for ten years, notes INSEE: in 2009, 17.4% of children under 15 could not go on vacation “at least one week a year”, compared to 11.8 % in 2014 and approximately 10% in 2021. These data come from a vast statistical survey on “resources and living conditions” (SRCV) conducted by INSEE among some 14,000 households, regularly questioned on their “deprivations “.
Beyond the question of holidays alone, a third of minors under the age of 15 lack at least one “common comfort item” on a list of 15, many of which relate specifically to children – such as having games or new clothes, or a suitable place to do homework.
And 10.6% of them accumulate at least three deprivations out of 15. In 2009, they were still 16.7% in this case, then 13.6% in 2004, according to INSEE, which notes however that “the drop between 2014 and 2021 may have been amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic”, because health constraints have “limited the possibilities of consumption and therefore temporarily reduced household spending”. The deprivations are greater in single-parent families: 25% of the children concerned are deprived of at least three elements of comfort, compared to 10% in general.
