AIBU to be annoyed by this headline stating that a mother only earns £2 per shift after childcare when the article mentions the childrens' father who lives with them

[ASandwichNamedKevin]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-63904607

I know childcare is expensive but surely it ought to be a shared expense when parents are living together?
Is there any way to challenge this perception that it's the sole responsibility of mothers?

I'm not intending this as a criticism of this individual family but of the reporting.

If you don't want to click the link, it says the mum earns £73 and pays out £71 so only 'makes' £2. AIBU to think she 'makes' £37.50 (please let my maths be right!)

If we start down that road where do we stop? If we're only paying for things that make money let's do away with pensions, disability benefits, cancer treatment? Why don't we just import young people and deport anyone over the age of 65?
Because clearly nobody benefits from a happy well rounded society...

Working isn't always 'investing' in your career, it depends on the job. Things like cleaning and retail you could stay in the same job for years and never progress. With the rise of zero hours contracts this is going to be even harder.

If a couple share their resources to bring up their shared children then they make the difference of whatever the lower earns after childcare. What the other earner makes is irrelevant as the lower earner is only making £2 per hour extra for them by going to work. There are other benefits such as pension and career and other drawbacks such as stress and time constraints and everything needs to be taken into account. But there is nothing wrong with pointing out that only £2 an hour is being made after childcare when it is.

This is true, but the point is that the language the BBC are using paint it as a mother’s responsibility.

It’s unconscious bias. Which we should all fight against.

My pension was pathetic anyway, as i imagine it is for most low earners. I do realise that logically it might be sensible to work at a loss, but it just doesn't seem worth it.
Once we've only got one at nursery it will make sense for me to work and I can up my pension contributions.

I don’t really understand the subsidising bit, I believe people should look at rhe cost of children before having children and then deciding, and already people get a lot of help from tax to free hours.

I also see plenty of folks who use those free hours the tax payer pays when they don’t actually work.

I do believe it should be reworked though, only those whose parents are both in full time employment, or the single parent is, and earn below x should get support to childcare to get them back in work .

i really dislike the fact that so many people want others to pay for their choices. Having a child is a choice. Not a right.

This "dad pays half" is not the gotcha moment some people think it is.
Reducing it to basic numbers.

A brings in £2000 a month, household costs £1900. Everything covered with a bit extra. B brings in £1500 a month. Nursery as an added cost is £1500 . It doesn't matter how much either of them pays for the nursery, they're still only £100 better off as a family. If there are any associated costs with working ,unpaid days off looking after children while still paying for nursery, etc they could even operate at a loss. It does make sense for B to be a SAHP for a few years if that's what everyone is happy with.

While long term it's obviously better to keep working, while you're scrimping and saving, exhausted,running around all over the place and stressed for no immediate benefit,or worse a loss, it's hard to see the woods from the trees.

OP this was the first thing I thought when I read it. They might as well have said she has pin money FFS

I agree, a basic rate job is very different to a well paid career. However, if the cost of childcare negates two parents working at the same time, then whats to stop them working at different times and sharing childcare?

Lots of us did that years ago. DH often worked away, but when he was home, it was often just evenings and weekends, so I got temp work through an agency for several years. A friend worked evenings in a chippy, and another did weekend work in a hospital. The sacrifice there was family time but we needed the extra money. Eventually we all went back to full time work.

All my DGC went to nurseries, and the families have benefited, certainly long term. Of course that equality has to be supported by both parents.

And your thinking betrays a huge lack of understanding of child development. Do you honestly believe a child is better brought up hy a nursery than its own parents?

Anytime I've seen one of those big international surveys about childrens and teens mental health, the UK tends to score amongst the lowest in Western Europe (e.g. lower than France/Italy/Spain etc who all have subsidised childcare)

This.

Agreed.

A lot don't realise just what they are sacrificing until they are in their latter half of life.

@sweeneytoddsrazor No, she wants the article to say the Mum is left with £37.50 per day, which is the amount earned (£73.00) minus half of the childcare cost (£35.50).
Deducting the full £71 from the mother's wage perpetuates the idea that childcare costs fall solely to the mother and aren't a joint expense.

But if the father was paying half the childcare, I assume the mother would have to take on half the household bills. It doesn't change the household finances however you split it.

It was like that a few years back when I first returned to work with two DC in nursery (their was no thirty "free" hours then and childcare vouchers kicked in later). I think I was worse off working for a year until the elder DC started school (DH worked full time so paid for most things) I had to look in the longer term and kept my career going and as a family we had a decent lifestyle once they were teenagers.
Why should now I pay extra tax now so couple in the news article can spoil their DC over Christmas.

@Nsenene I agree, I think the objection is the fact the article doesn't refer to it as though it's a household cost. If the article said the mother working only increased the family income by £2 a day, that would be accurate (forgetting pension contributions!) without perpetuating the idea that childcare costs are the mother's problem.

I find the idea that the woman is responsible for childcare costs to be outrageous, make no mistake.

But in this particular story I think the point is that the household income only increases by £2 if she works an extra day. Yes maybe it could have been written as “she would make £37.50 whilst he would be down £35.50” but I think viewing it as the household income increases by £2 is a more sensible way of looking at it.

I'm another one who was annoyed by the article.

Yes, affordable childcare is important. Not denying that. But the whole tone of the article made it into the mother's issue, that she is only left with a few quid a day after paying the nursery bill. It's a joint expense- why isn't there any emphasis on what nursery is costing the dad?

Like some pp, when our kids were small, there was no immediate financial advantage to having dh and I both working. Childcare for our 3 children cost the equivalent of one income. If I'd stayed home, or if dh had stayed home and just one of us had worked, we would have been financially just as well off. No free childcare hours and much shorter maternity leave in those days too so the childcare bills went on way longer.

So why did I continue working? In a nutshell, for the same reasons my dh did! I was just as skilled and capable as him, I didn't want to ditch my working life and end up without career progression and a pension. It was our choice to have kids and although it's financially painful when they're young, I certainly didn't resent paying for the most precious beings in my world to be cared for.

This is poor journalism. It undermines women and makes something which is a parent issue into just a mums one.

Oh and btw to the poster near the start of the thread who referred to 'why would anyone want their children brought up by a nursery?' - actually, nurseries don't bring children up. Their parents do. Some parents happen to work as well as being parents. The crap about 'offloading your kids to be raised by someone else' is IME a line trotted out by resentful women who realise later on that children who went to nursery as just as happy and well adjusted as children who don't- and their parents have successful work lives, secure pensions etc to boot!

I think that it's irrelevant who pays for the childcare out of the couple. It boils down that the family is not really better off by both parents working and in many cases they are often worse off and that's before taking into account pension contributions that they probably can't afford to pay anyway.

We should make it so that you are never worse off working regardless of how many children you have or wether or not they have sen. It's not short sighted that people aren't working when their children are young, it's because they can't afford to get into debt BY working.

Of course in principle people should be better off working. However I completely disagree that people should be better off working 'regardless of how many children they have.' What if a couple choose to have 5,6, 8 children? Is it really right that public funds should pay for that choice? Not to mention the fact that the mother might take a whole year out of the workplace each time she has a child!

I'm all for support - it would have made a huge difference to dh and I just to have the free hours that kick in now when the child is 3. Or the longer maternity leave which means you're not paying childcare from 12 weeks old as families used to do.

But there have to be parameters. No one has a right to just keep popping out as many kids as they want and be guaranteed to still be better off working

For the last 8 years I’ve paid for childcare and it’s a massive money maker for the state, why would they subsidise it. I pay tax on my earnings, then I pay a childminder who pays tax on her earnings. They get double the tax from my hourly wage. Not entitled to child benefit or tax free childcare so it’s a win for the government. I earn £300 a month after paying tax, childcare and NI. From this I pay for my travel to work. It’s not actually worth me working financially or for the stress but I do a socially useful job and iIt means in a couple of years I’ll not be paying childcare and will have advanced in my career and added to my pension.
The government have no interest in making society better, just making money off its citizens to waste.

Any subsidies would be immediately swallowed up by the childcare providers. In Australia They have a childcare tax credits type things and you can claim $120 a day which means that the staff get paid well, average is about $25-$30 an hour. The management would be on $40 an hour, what it doesn’t mean as an improve in the quality of food provided, the services are constantly asking for donations of craft, materials, toys, all the things that you would expect a profitable business to provide for itself.
Typically when I was there six years ago, it would cost between 130 and $140 a day.

@freyamay74 15 hours free childcare if both parents work full time would be brilliant. Regardless of how many dc someone has, at least they’d be able to work full time and only pay for part time childcare (as the rest is paid for). Obviously the more dc you have, the more expensive childcare is (unless you don’t work and are still entitled to free childcare which doesn’t make sense).

I doubt most people would have more children even with free childcare. There are lots of reasons people have small families, childcare is just one.
Childcare, like education, should be viewed as an investment in our future and current workforce surely?

Because it pays for itself, as stated above.