No grandparents for childcare!

Plan how you and boyfriend will fund childcare and arrange pickups and drop offs from school, who’ll collect kid when sick, who’ll stay home with sick kid, etc. Don’t quit your job to raise a kid without the legal protections of marriage.

Paying for nursery doesn’t work once they’re in school, and you’re lucky if you have wraparound care available in school or through a local childminder. We haven’t had a school breakfast club since January due to staff shortage and there aren’t any childminders who drop off to it. It’s a big primary school in a big city, too.
It’s not easy to be a working parent.

Nursery or childminder
breakfast/after school club
holiday clubs
find a local teenager or 2 who come with references to be evening babysitters

We have absolutely no family help so all of these things have been useful to us over the years.

One good piece of advice OP. Book ahead.

To be able to work properly, you need to have booked care at leat four months ahead and preferably six months.

That just leaves the occasional day of child sickness to cover - and hope you have a healthy child.

Are you for real? You must be either very entitled, very ignorant, very naive or completely devoid of common sense.

They are your children. It is your responsibility to provide childcare or pay someone to provide childcare such as a nanny or childminder etc.

SMH.

I work Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday. DH works Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday/Saturday. We therefore need childcare three days per week and use a nursery. No funded hours yet and costs about £700 a month before the government top up.

I can only assume this is a wind up. Even the people I know who used grandparents for childcare they also paid for nursery alongside if (so GP did one day a week).

Nursery, childminder, preschool for everyday care. We have used someone from the nursery we used as a babysitter as well, but it is £££. I work in a school, so that helps with holidays, but we still need after school care as I don't finish early enough to collect dcs.

Mine are still quite small, so for the first time recently, we drove dcs to dh's parents who had them overnight and we went to a hotel not too far away. It was a special occasion and we can't do that all the time, but it was nice for all of us.

Nursery

While family members (most often grandparents) is, I believe, the most popular childcare option in the UK, it is certainly not the only one.

When our DC were small, we both dropped to four days (four longer days so we only dropped about five hours each, so the pay drop was less) and then we used a childminder for the other three days.

My mum was able to help out on occasional Saturdays with some notice and the kids went to grandma's once or twice in the holidays but that was all.

Nursery is another option (not cheap tho) or a nanny if you have multiple pre-school children. Of course in a lot of cases, one parent temporarily stops work as an alternative. I was very keen to continue working for a number of reasons, but that's not for everyone.

I had to pay for full time Monday to Friday 8-6 nursery then breakfast club and after school to do 8-6 til aged 10. Could only look for 9-5 jobs in commutable distance. Also had to make sure bought house in catchment for school with wrap around- it's crazy that this isn't a given in all schools!

For dc2 we combined free nursery place with childminder but this was actually more complicated.

Ime you can't do shift work without free GP childcare.

Paid £500 a month for nursery.

You’ll get lots of posters being horrible to you for having the audacity to mention grandparents doing childcare. However I know many families who have grandparents doing between a little and a substantial amount of childcare. It’s normal. (I don’t, by the way) People (and yes of course it’s always the mothers) either don’t work, work part time with grandparents or school based wraparound care, or in some cases full time with grandparent help. Many families with two working (including part time) parents organise shifts at different times to each other as well.
And as for planning, you don’t know when thinking about having a baby whether there will be a nursery or childminder space available in the future. You don’t know when school breakfast club might suddenly shut down leaving literally no options for before-school care other than friends or grandparents. You don’t know when your job situation may change or your childminder stops working.

We pay for nursery (costs more than our mortgage) but it has been difficult not having an emergency back up close by for the sending home sick times.

My DD went to a nursery. Her grandparents still worked when she was little, both sides.

You pay for it like everyone else.

Both sets of parents lived nearby but we still paid a childminder. We wanted them to be grandparents and not free labour 😐

Yep, we pay for it. What else?!

🤣🤣 excellent thread 🙈

We have 3 out of 4 parents within 3 miles of us. DS is 2 and I can count on one hand the number of times any of them have ever watched him alone! And the longest of those times was for 2 hours while I was at a hospital appointment and DH was working abroad.

You pay for the childcare OP 🙄

We don't use grandparents for childcare but I thought a lot of people did. People seem to be shocked when I say that we don't, but to us it seems perfectly normal that she would go to nursery and I'm glad to see from other peoples responses that they do the same! Most other people I know have their child looked after by grandparents or a mixture of nursery/grandparents. There are not many childminders around here.

Paid where possible. Even if that means at a loss to maintain career (nursery was more than my salary!)

Also, wraparound care at my DS's school doesn't exist and so I've had to battle and fight for part time hours. Which isn't the norm around here.

Often leaving me unemployable due to circumstances.

Even if you lived nearby, the grandparents may not wish to help out. My parents promised they would help and then backed out. Fair enough, can't complain. But it has made life difficult

I got a term time only job which helped massively when they started school so obviously I'm around in the holidays. Otherwise we just didn't go out without them in the evenings or made the most of them going on playdates/sleepovers. Parents who have family willing to do childcare are so fortunate

Pay for it. Daycare near my work. After second child it cost more than I earned (central London, 9-6pm) so stopped (husband was a high earner).

Grandparents aren't for free childcare! I pay my mum a small amount to cover all costs, and the most important thing is quality time for grandparent with grandchild.

You choose to have a child, accept the cost of childcare

What did those of you who didn't have parents/grandparents/family as an option for free childcare do?!

Are you kidding? Look after your kids yourselves or pay for childcare. How is this not obvious?

We didn’t have any family within a days drive and managed by ourselves with kids. Totally doable. You either make a choice that one goes out and the other does childcare or you both go out and pay a childminder. For work, we worked opposite shifts, different days to make it work but others I know where people were on more usual days/hours used nursery/daycare and organised it so one parent dropped off and the other picked up.