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Did you discuss in detail how life would look before TTC re. money, free time and childcare?

4 replies

BangFlash · 05/02/2026 23:01

You'd think everyone would do this, but I'm not sure they do.

DH and I did not. He's a reasonable man and whilst inclined to do the minimum has always made sure he pretty much pulled his weight, so I expected no issues. We'd agreed I'd have a year of Mat leave then we'd figure out the childcare.

It went fine! We pooled all income, never any issue over what I spent even when I was out of paid ML. When I finally went back to work we both went PT with a bit of family help to cover childcare. Free time split pretty evenly. Time doing childcare not so even because ND toddler wanted me but it was never left all to me. Housework more me than him but not ridiculous. Mental load nearly all me until I realised after many years that that was wrong.

To me this seemed the obvious way to do it. I'm always surprised when I read about the mother being expected to still pay 50% of bills on reduced salary, or being 100% responsible for organising 24/7 childcare (with dh 'babysitting' his own kids whilst she runs to supermarket on a Saturday) or getting no free time while he plays golf twice a week to unwind from the BIG JOB which pays the mortgage.

So, did you discuss in this level of detail? Or is it unreasonable because nothing ever goes to plan anyway?

OP posts:
DirtyGertiefromno30 · 06/02/2026 03:07

We planned it meticulously but it didn't go to plan . After a horrific second delivery ,which left me with PTSD. l had to take a career break for 4 years .
This impacted hugely on our income of course but we managed like a lot of ppl have to when something like that happens . So ideally yes planning is great but ....

Dagda · 06/02/2026 03:11

No we didn’t. I thought we would have kids and walk into the sunset together happily. Neither of us had any idea.

Luckily we both seemed to have similar ideas about raising kids. Very luckily as we were raised in different world’s really but thank goodness we agree on the fundamentals.

I’m still working on him understanding the mental load.

Imisscoffee2021 · 06/02/2026 03:29

We talked of it a huge amount as we had ivf so lots of time to plan, make lists, do sums, thought we knew what it would be like to have your life change so much. We were still way off on all counts, reality hits hard.

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Ponderingwindow · 06/02/2026 03:53

We planned in detail. Nothing went exactly as planned, but that was ok because our expectations matched. We went into parenting as a team.

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