Having spent a week on the beach in Norfolk with children I strongly recommend a few additional pieces of kit, further to my list before. This is if you have been canny enough to secure some UK beach time this year. I now feel so neurotic about UK beach holidays that I have rebooked Norfolk for TWO WEEKS next year and then a further two weeks in Cornwall in August. I mean I feel a bit mad admitting that, but I’m pretty sure next year around June I will be high-fiving myself.
First: neon rashies or hats. My children have the heart-stopping habit of just wandering off miles down the beach and being totally un-findable. Now they have NEON and white rashies so I can spot them at a distance. Neon swimwear also works. I got my kids’ rashies from Sunuva and they were insanely expensive at £42 but I really like them. The colour doesn’t look that bright in the picture but trust me it is crazily bright. If your kids will wear a cap, get them this revolting green one. You won’t improve the view but you also won’t lose your kids.
Second: something bright to mark where you are on the beach so that children, disorientated after drifting with the sea while boogie boarding, can find their way back to you. I quite fancy one of these pop-up colourful tents.
Third: binoculars – see above
I know this all sounds really neurotic, but suddenly when you’re on the beach and you look up and you cannot see either of your children anywhere, suddenly them being instantly findable takes on new urgency
I almost exclusively buy bright neon clothes for my kids for precisely this reason. It is so much easier to spot them at a distance at a playground when they are wearing pink shorts and a luminous yellow t-shirt than in tasteful pastel shades. I just worry other people will catch on and then all children will be similarly attired thus making the system null and void.
Sunuva is bloody good, despite being very expensive. I usually get things a bit on the big side and then get at least two years out of them, as everything’s stretchy. They do (annoyingly) bombard you with emails (how many rashies do you think I can buy for one child? Honestly, emailing me every DAY!) but there’s 20% off just now if you sign up to their newsletter. Also try and buy things in the autumn sale for the following summer, if I can be that organised…
Love love LOVE my beach tent. Not least for the changing-with-some-shred-of-dignity-intact opportunities…
Mortified to admit to this but during peak lockdown when all shops and public loos were shut I discovered the joy of an (opaque) beach tent and the toddler’s port-a-potty. With 3 children, a very weak pelvic floor and terrible squat wee technique it was a bit of a lifesaver, at least when the tide was out….!
On the massive white sandy beaches of Menorca, in the blinding sunshine , My husband and I took turns sitting upright… watching… always watching …
On his watch…. I sat up watching him watching them!
Ha ha…yep!
There’s nothing so sickening as that feeling when you lose sight of them even for an instant. Heart through the floor. Also take a photo of them as soon as you get somewhere in case other people need to help and you forget which thing they were wearing in panic – had to look for a lost child on a beach in Cornwall once and “toddler in stripy top – blue I think” was a like a nightmarish real-life Where’s Wally where you can only find Odlaw.
We have neon winter coats but neon swimwear is inspired. Had never occurred to me, thank you! When my husband was a child, my parents-in-law wandered back to their holiday house in Cornwall unaware they’d left him at the beach drowning. He was saved by an off-duty lifeguard walking his dog who spotted him being dragged out to sea. Obviously doesn’t stop them from judging our parenting.
Best way to mark your spot on a beach/festival/whatever is with a flag and some sort of telescopic pole to fly it from (fishing shops are good sources of these – not even joking!). However be careful in choice oF said flag we selected a Czech Republic 🇨🇿 flag as we liked it and thought it distinctive – you would be amazed at how many Czech folk there are on beaches/festivals etc!
Oh and I also kitted the kids out with military style dog-tags embossed with my phone number!
Tom you sound like my kind of dad
Was going to suggest holiday nametapes with phone number on them but thought it might be a bit ott. Apparently not!
Apols if this posts twice.
A woman after my own heart. Love a plan. Also I think your 3 good ideas for beach equipment would be perfect whatever age your kids are. Could be really handy when trying to spot them in the pub garden or (currently) on our local Common after dark, where they ‘gather’.
Can I just say how wonderful your talc tip was? We have just had a week in Pembrokeshire and the entire tribe – all teenage boys – are now obsessed with Johnson’s baby bedtime talc
O yes it’s the most fabulous tip!! I am secretly delighted to have influenced teenage boys in this way.
My teenage daughter has neon pink hair. This makes her a doddle to spot in the water and no faffing about with hats etc.
I might dye MY hair pink so that my kids can spot me
Yes take care in Norfolk! The tides can be treacherous there and lots of people run into difficulties on their beaches. I remember me and my brother walking out to sand bank and we went really far. I was 14 and he was 17 I think (so not little kids all). My parents watched us getting smaller and smaller and my mum began freaking out, turned to my dad and told him; “if they drown we’re getting a divorce”. Both still alive today so parents still stuck with each other!
Then a couple of years ago my dad and my two brothers were caught in a riptide in Cornwall (look out for the moon, a full moon the night before is a warning). They were on a very secluded beach called the stranglers, maybe? My eldest brother and dad made it back to the shore, but my profoundly autistic middle brother was still out there so oldest brother and dad had to get back in to rescue him!! Then they all found themselves in the same position as before. Luckily oldest brother managed to reach middle brother and just instructed him to “kick, kick, kick, keep kicking!” with a few pushes also they both made it back to land eventually. Unfortunately whilst this was going on my dad (early 60s) was dragged further out to sea. It was looking bleak. Again my mum was panicking and telling oldest brother “he’s gone and he hasn’t made a will” and he was trying to calm her down. Middle brother was just lying on his front, very pale and extremely quiet trying to get his breath back. The punchline is none of my family had brought their mobile phones with them (I know, wtf?!! My family honestly). The greatest luck my family ever had was a lovely local man who by chance was walking by, registered what was going on and jumped to the rescue. Even more luckily he was somehow connected to the lifeboat service and said; as soon as someone is in trouble every second counts, you have to raise the alarm immediately. He called the life boat service for us. At this point my dad had been in the water a long, long time. He was getting sleepy and confused which is a terrible sign as hypothermia was setting in. The Life Boat service sprang into action and notified all the local fishing vessels that someone was out at sea. A litttle boat got the radio call and was thankfully close by. They found him and he had to be dragged out of the water at the back of their boat where the fish get hauled in, and hilariously (though not for him) it’s where loads of fish guts end up so he was pulled through that detritus onto the deck. By this time a helicopter was dispatched and from the boat he was winched up and brought back to land to be met by an ambulance. Whilst all this was happening I was sitting in a square in Mayfair where I was on my lunch break (my first job following uni) and I got a call from an unknown number. It was my dad! I’m touched he knew my phone number off by heart. Anyway he told me that it was so good to hear my voice and that he was sitting in the back of an ambulance wrapped in a foil blanket and he was on route to hospital to be checked over (and hopefully have a slight clean-up). It was a bit of shock to be honest, but I was lucky I heard about it after the event. My dad is now a dedicated patron of the life boat service.
So any bit of kit that can make beach trips safer is a great investment. You can never be too vigilant!
Bloody HELL
I am generally not into matching for my children, but they do have the same rash vests. Then you are only looking for one colour on the beach, definitely helps
The very best thing you can teach your child to remember at a young age is your mobile phone number. I lost my 5 yr old son at Kew Gardens once for an hour and it was absolutely the very worst hour of my life (he was fine, he was with a bigger friend (6!) who had remembered that his mother had told him to go to the shop and ask to speak to the lady behind the till so lo and behold they were there, having walked miles). Anyway, after that I religiously chanted my number to them and got them to chant it back every time we were in the car and they all knew it by heart like a relfex – even the 3 year old. Any smaller children or if you are unsure then a sharpie with your mobile written down their forearm is always a winner.