The depressing cost of childcare

[Juicylychee]

I’ve been reading about March of the Mummies yesterday, I didn’t know about it in advance to go. I have an almost 2 year old and pay £1k a month for three days of nursery. Really wanted another baby close together but we just cannot afford it. It’s maddening.

@AndSoFinally ours is 41 a day, also Wales. Feel very lucky reading this.

I’ll be doing this too and so will my DH, saves us 2 days. We haven’t started yet because I’m on annual leave but I’m not looking forward to it!

@MayFlower22

Or Stay home with Dad?

I went to the March of the Mummies protest yesterday and a lady on the train said she was Danish and that in Denmark the government both ensure that a space is available for every child and she said they subsidise the cost to around £400 a month.

I thought that seemed reasonable.

It should all pay for itself, more women in work = more tax income and more disposable income for people to spend.

There is already significant help though. Thirty free hours at age 3, tax free childcare, up to 85% of childcare paid if on Universal credit - and the threshold for claiming can really be quite high when childcare costs are taken into consideration. What exactly do people want - the whole lot paid for? I think employers do need to be more flexible with allowing condensed hours - if both parents did that then that would only leave 3 days to cover.

30 hours during term time only

It works out to be sod all

All good and valid points.

Those in London paying huge amounts, would it genuinely not be worthwhile considering moving to a different part of London. I pay £6 an hour for my childminder in London. We are able to arrange drop offs and pickups so we only pay for around 8 hours a day but even if you needed more hours it’s nowhere near £2200 a month.

@Babyroobs So mothers are forced to stop working if they don’t earn enough to cover childcare for 2.25 years until the free hours kick in at 3 and then re-enter the workforce at a disadvantage?

No. Stamp duty would be £150,000 to move. The children will be in University Kong before that would be recouped.

Would we actually though? Or would the massive increase In Economic activity among parents not bring in enough revenue to cancel it out..?

Or fathers. Each family can decide which parent does what.

@Intru

Is your house worth two mil?

Tax free childcare is sod all, we barely notice it. I don’t think it’s right that being in work doesn’t pay for some.

@Intru On average men earn more so in reality it’s less likely that a man will become a stay at home dad. A contributing factor to men earning more will be that they don’t take maternity leave/ time out for childcare. It’s a vicious circle.

@cimena i work in the oil industry and some companies have built a crèche. Not mine though. For those of you talking about London I’m in north Scotland it’s not just London

If you're planning on paying £2 million for a house, yes. But you could buy a lovely one for a lot lot less than that.

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/624461

I think it depends on where you live though. I was a childminder a few years ago, and charged £85 per child per day, and would have 3 children per day, plus after school children charged at an hourly rate of £9. The average rates in London were between £70 - £100 per child, per day.

You’re looking at that he wrong way round. It’s the maternity leave and childcare that causes the discrepancy, we out-earn men up until that becomes a factor, so going by your earnings argument it’s our husbands who should be the ones more likely to take the career break.

How much does your childcare work out at per hour?

So I should downgrade my home to save a bit of money on nursery?

No thanks.

This.

I'm a childcare worker. Op says it cost 1k a month to send her child in 3 days a week. I work 3 days a week and don't even earn 1k a month.

I am so exhausted, overworked and unappreciated. There is a reason the industry is absolutely crying out for workers. (None of this is to do with the parents obviously, who are lovely).

Parents are charged an arm and a leg just so they can put food on the table and staff are earning the lowest wage in the country for this very important job.

Greedy nursery owners are the problem, along with a government who doesn't give a fuck about it's own people.

Working parents need more help and nursery staff need a decent wage.

This will not happen though, sadly.

I feel so so sorry for mums today. I had mine in the mid 2000s. House prices had started to rise quickly but we were lucky and had a large deposit after moving from London when we moved back up north and bought here so mortgage was fine (house was £140k, mortgage was only 75k). Because we’d moved (for DH’s job), I only had a low paid job. So I weighed things up and decided that the childcare thing wasn’t doable when I had my first. BUT, BUT, BUT……

... We COULD get by on just DH’s salary. It wasn’t great, we just lived very basically. But it WAS doable. i have an interest in child developmental I actually really enjoyed providing “enrichment” for both my children, so definitely didn’t feel they were deprived of anything in that respect and actually think they got a lot out of the attention they had from me. Both attended for 15 funded hours per week at nursery from aged 3, but we scrimped and saved to send them from 2.5 yrs, paying ourselves.

and by the time my second was in PT nursery, I was back doing some work, and by the time he started school I was doing nearly FT. I was in a low paid job and the hours he attended after school basically took my pay for that time period each day . But it was worth it, and doable.

what is so apparent to me now is that it just doesn’t add up. Any of it. Mortgages are too expensive. Childcare is too expensive. If you send your child to nursery you Are almost worse off financially. But if you don’t, you can’t afford the roof over your head. It’s fucking WRONG.

it needs sorting. But there is no way any government will be able to subsidise childcare with the state of things at the moment. They can’t even fund education properly. The only thing that could help in anyway, in a general long term sense, is for either house prices and rental prices to really come down, OR a standard system of mortgage holidays for the pre-school childcare years, so at least they could have a roof over their head till parents could afford to pay for it again.

the more I think about it the more I become almost apoplectic with rage, at the absolute shit that parents now hAve to cope with. I’ve said this in other threads but why there are not crowds descending on Downing Street and rattling the gates there I will never know. It feels like we are on the brink of the “let them eat cake/bread” period of Marie Antoinette.

I would love to know what the nursery is being paid per hour. Please do answer OP.

Many complain about it but wouldn’t work for that per hour or for what a nursery worker is paid.

If you can’t afford £10 per hour childcare for children for 3 days a week, don’t have them.