To be confused by the two working parent set up

As I said, the only narrative you are interested in is everything is much worse now and every generation before you has had an easy life.
I am not even going to engage with you about the nursery hours other than to say using your definition, nothing is ever free. So buy one get one free eg £5 for one item or £5 for two would mean the second one is not free because you had to pay for the first one.
Did you get a year's maternity leave on full pay? Do you wfh full-time? Did your dp get generous paid paternity leave? Because these are all things that exist now but are by no means commonplace. The same with flexible working. It did exist but was vanishing unusual.
Anyway, you have it worse than any other generation - does that make you feel better?

I don’t know why you keep saying FREE, the definition of free is “without fee or payment”. My updated post clarifies it’s £2,416 for a typical nursery for 2 children to go 5 days a week, £2,416 clearly isn’t free and some people don’t even earn that a month net. Its SUBSIDISED. Thanks to providers cranking up the overall cost with random consumable charges, insisting parents can’t bring their own food and instead charge them a premium for food etc etc.
The problem from my side is people throwing around inaccurate “facts” when they only really understand half the story and then they get irritable when they are told they are wrong! The post started off with someone ventilating about how tricky they find it, other people rock up with the “things were way harder in my day, what are you mosning about” vibe. Claiming there was no childcare in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s -no true. There was no flexible working in the 80’s -also not true

You are splitting hairs here. Regardless how you look at it, you get 30 hours free childcare. That is a fact. That is money you don't have to pay so your bill is lower than it would have been.
I don't know why older posters bother on MN to be honest. The only narrative is it's much harder now, we have no idea how hard you have it, we had it much easier etc and any facts that don't fit this are just brushed aside.

She was amazing and had such a hard life. She is my hero still although she died many years ago

I like that. And good for her !

My gran got married over 100 years ago. A week after the wedding on grandfathers first day back at work he was eating breakfast and told her she could have whatever she wanted, she just had to ask. Later that day as she served him dinner she told him she'd got her job back and she could buy what she wanted without asking anyone.

Social expectations, class, lack of education, lack of childcare

It was a very different time then

What stopped her?

And add in the financial dependence and absence of pension contributions etc …

My MIL had this lifestyle. Coffee, tennis, ladies lunches, swimming

Sociable, stressfree, little responsibility

But she was unfulfilled and would have loved to do paid employment

Actually ignore my calculations: we would only need 3 days for our needs so that’s throws all the numbers out. It’s actually £580 PER WEEK / £2,416 PER MONTH (assuming they close over Christmas / New Year). So yeah, even less “free”. Especially when someone would have to earn around £36,600 or more to just break even. Assuming they don’t drive or get public transport to work, don’t buy any lunch, don’t buy any work clothes, don’t contribute to a pension and have no student loans…

That’s not free! Free means no charge.

A nursery near me had an advert on Facebook the other day providing a calculator of how much they cost. I put in our info and it was £1100 per month, for 5 days a week for 2 children. That’s including the SUBSIDISED hours etc. £1,100 a month / £13,200 year doesn’t feel very free… For clarity it’s not a posh Montessori nursery, just a standard local nursery not in London

What are you talking about? Every working family earning under £100k (is that family or individual income?) Gets 30 hours of free childcare a week for 38 weeks. So not full-time all-year-round but a hello of a lot more than we got (ie nothing)

There isn’t free childcare now either

I know we just so jammy and lucky 🤣

Yes afterschool care was then recognised by most parents as being more difficult than preschool. We were entering an era when 'latchkey' kids were frowned upon but -despite what the pp said - flexible working was not really a thing. I was lucky because my mum could do school drop-offs and pick-ups but I know many of my friends struggled badly.
Just as well we lived in a golden era when EVERYTHING was easier than it is today 😂

I found it really difficult to find after school care in the early 90’s.
I was at university and had one day with a late seminar. I eventually found a service that would pick my DS up for £8 and take him to a local secondary school that was the venue for an after school club. He was the only child that went from
his school and I remember getting a call from the school from the secretary who told me he didn’t seem happy to go and I felt that she was judging me. It would have been so much easier if there was an after school club at my DS’s school.

There was definitely childcare in the 1990s, as most mothers worked. I used a nursery.
What there was not was free childcare. The nursery I used was at a hospital. NHS staff got subsidised fees, but everyone else had to pay the full whack.

Exactly. I don't think anyone disagrees that fewer mothers worked in the 80s and 90s - but it's the implication that none did that gets annoying. We literally had a female Prime Minister who had children in the 80s.

I went to a nursery in the early 80s which I am often told couldn't have existed

My brother and I went to a childminder in the 1970s. Mrs Blake.

These things are always framed as they just didn’t exist at that time at all. Which simply isn’t true

I’m now waiting to be told there was no childcare in the 80’s and 90’s which is always wheeled out on these types of threads. Which is super weird as l had friends at school in the 80’s and 90’s whose mum were childminders. Another friends younger siblings went to nursery in the early 90’s as well

I have just remembered a woman In another office at my then employer did negotiate finishing an hour earlier so she could pick her child up from nursery. She was married to the manager though and there was a lot of resentment around it from her colleagues of both sexes. It was a hit hush-hush though and was certainly not in her contract.
So it's not correct to say it didn't exist. But to imply it was commonplace is just wrong.

Just because things happened for some people doesn’t mean they were the norm for the majority.
Imagine in 40-50 years people saying that back in the 2010s/2020s mothers had enhanced maternity pay for 6-12 months and also fathers had full pay paternity pay for a few months. Now I’m sure there’s a few companies out there that offer these things. But do most people have it? Definitely not.