If you have no parental help, how do you cope with children?

[afternoonitsraining]

Husband and I are thinking about TTC, but we are both careful people and want to work out finances and things before trying.

Everyone we know seems to rely on their parents for childcare help, and help to buy baby things. We would have none of that due to various issues, we would have to do everything ourselves.

I know it may seem as if counting chickens before they've hatched - maybe we can't conceive anyway. But Childcare is around £60 a day in our area and with no parental help, I just wondered how people who don't earn mega salaries manage with childcare. We wouldn't get universal credit or anything, just child benefit and I would not want to give up working.

I have two jobs so can be away for a couple of days and nights for one (air repatriation) but then back for several days, and my other job (ambulance service) allows me to pick and choose shifts so they can be antisocial and fit in around DH.

Childcare is around £70 per day here (SE England) and due to covid we don’t have any help with childcare and are unlikely to for the foreseeable future. It’s a stressful balancing act at times but we both have a lot of flexibility in different ways which allows it to work.

You just cut back on everything else. Or you both ask for flexible working / change your hours to minimise your childcare costs. Don’t do this unless your partner does.

As Pp said, it’s an investment in your child and in both your careers and your pension. That’s worth a bit of short term sacrifice for.

No hope of a job or career for a few years. Having older ones at secondary school it's also easy to assume that once they are at school you'll be freed up to work. But to be honest the children need me more and childcare just doesn't work out long term. Childminders tend to want only full time; breakfast clubs go out of business and of course holiday clubs won't cover school holidays. I have no idea how anyone managesvwithout one parent doing sah. Because kids get ill, you can't take a day off for that etc. Unless you can pay a nanny to cover all of the hours it wouldn't work in our area. I can't imagine family would be reliable enough to cover a full time or even a part time job because things always come up.

No parental help here, all live in different countries.
I used to.wprl part time evings and weekends so no childcare needed. Now with school closures etc I work full time (55hrs) over night, 5 nights a week. And dh worked/s 5 days all along. Again, no childcare needed, even during holidays or school closures. Works for us!

Lots of paid childcare - nursery, holiday clubs, after school club, occassionally days of looking friends’ dc and Vice versa.

Some free hours kick in when your child is 2 or 3 depending on your income. Check out tax free child care payment too. I also found that the cost savings if not going to work for a year of mat leave were pretty significant.

How much do you actually earn between you?

We had an age gap on the larger side to spread out childcare costs. It was manageable with just one DC in paid childcare, we would have struggled with two though.

I'm very envious of people who have help from parents.

You just get on with it and live poor for a few years, either through paying for childcare or one of you reducing hours or stopping work.

Yeah, you just bite the bullet and pay it. We live in the outskirts of London and childcare varies between £50-£75 a day. Use the tax free childcare scheme - it tops up your payments by 20% so you do get some saving on it.

Also if you want more than one, time it carefully - either do it quickly and then one of you stops working for a little while until they start school, or have a bigger gap so you go back to work when no.1 starts school and you're not paying two sets of childcare at once.

Shop around; it makes a difference. Childminders tend to be cheaper than nurseries in my experience.

But basically, yeah. Accept that you're working for more than just your take home pay - pension contributions, industry knowledge, the chance to progress your career. And it doesn't last forever.

Paid for childcare. One set of parents live a couple of hours away, and one of them still works full time. The other side lived in Africa, but both were dead by the time she was two. So childminder, and now school club. Cost me a fortune when she was little but it’s paid off as now ended up in a very good job, and can afford school club easily. Financially way better off which is good, seeing as I also ended up a single mother.

To be honest, I only have one so that makes it easier. I also wouldn’t have used my parents if I lived nearer. They already raised their children, I wouldn’t have even held them to regular childcare to enable me to work. They do occasionally have her when we go to stay for the evening if I go out for tea. That’s about it.

I work the opposite shifts that my other half and pay for nursery 3 days a week. It’s a juggling act

We live very far from both families (due to work) and have basically spent a couple of extra years saving before TTC.

I plan to return to work 4 days pw. We are lucky in that close neighbours have also offered to help if we need it, so do have an emergency option.

We will basically just decimate our savings for a couple of years.

Can’t be helped, but it is hard when our siblings get free childcare multiple times a week & still complain about how tight things are!

Moved from London to the Midlands to make housing costs affordable; both work part time to minimise childcare; never go out 😂 it's a thrilling life and no mistake, but we manage.

We both get paid (slightly) above nat avg though, not sure how we'd manage onin wage.

Tax free childcare can help. Also some parents work condensed hours e.g. 5 days over 4. If about parents do this then only 3 days childcare is needed.

*both

Anti depressants for the last 12yrs due to having to put my dreams and aspirations to one side

We’ve had zero help from family, our DD’s are now 14 and 17. My divorced parents emigrated to different countries after our first was born and DP’s father is elderly and lives a 6 hr journey away.
I worked full time And had no one other than DP, it was hard juggling but we managed and so will you!
Good luck OP

We had some help for the first year from MIL one day a week, but then she had an operation and couldn’t help, and we haven’t asked her since. We have 3 dc now and just take the hit on the childcare costs. Now ds1 is in school we are super creative using annual leave, TOIL etc in school holidays.
But yeah, we wouldn’t have been able to do it without paying for nursery. If your daily salary is less than the daily nursery fees and you can’t afford to live on one salary, then it probably isn’t the right time for you to have kids.

2 dc, not 3, defo couldn’t afford childcare for 3!

I waited until I was 32 to have my first. Then we had a four year gap until we could afford nursery and childminder fees.

Just got on with it really. We had elderly ill parents and small children. Hardly ever went out.

Now all parents have died and I'd quite like them back even though they were an additional thing to think about.

We have no help at all, but we are lucky that both our jobs are flexible so between us and a few mornings a nursery we manage just fine.

Check around your area. Where I live, childcare is also about £60 a day, but we found a not for profit, locally funded centre that was close to half of that (and was also really lovely).

Both our parents live over 100 miles away so no support. My DH works from home and my job is extremely flexible and family friendly (one of the main reasons I stayed in it). We use a nursery but my little one goes in for half days and DH picks her up and has her for a couple of hours before I’m back. If she is poorly I can cancel my appointments and work with from home to be with her. It did take us 4 years TTC so we saved up a lot during that time and could afford for me to go back part time (I worked hard for pay rises so my part time salary wasn’t a huge drop). It is doable and we do everything as a family so while we don’t have date nights I’m happy to trade those in for family days out instead

No family living local. Have always had to pay for childcare. Crippling in the early years, but has been worth it now they are all at school.

For the first few years we worked part time around each other. So I would work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. DH would work Wednesday Thursday and Friday. And we would pay for a childminder for the Wednesday where we overlapped.

Now they're both at school DH works full time and I'm part time, school hours.
We could also have chosen to both go full time at that point as childcare gets much cheaper once they're at school.

We wouldn't get universal credit or anything, just child benefit

You may not be entitled to anything on the incomes you have now....but have you tried playing about with a benefits calculator, putting in different scenarios (different working patterns, incomes, childcare amounts)?

This is how I decided to go part time after maternity leave. I worked out that with tax credits and childcare costs factored in..I would have the same disposable income on three days or five. It was a no brainer to negotiate a job share.

I'm a single parent with no family support. I worked part time until she started school. Tax free childcare helps (you pay 80% and government pays 20%). The costs went down when she was 3 when you get the free hours. Now I use a childminder before and after school and clubs in the holidays. Some people I know stagger annual leave with their partner. It's not ideal but it's OK and it works.