Full time job with young kids

[Calica1]

Current situation is I have a 13 month old little boy who I get to spend a lot of time with as I'm lucky to only have to work 2 nights a week in a supermarket for us to get by.

My partner is really keen for me to go back to full time work in order for us to have more money and improve our lives (bigger house and nice holidays)

Our son is going to nursery 2 part days a week just to get some socialisation but honestly I think he hates it and I'm keen to pull him out which is the opposite of what getting a full time job would entail as he would have to go in full time.

In order to go back to work I'd have to retrain for something else as I can't go back to retail management as the hours don't work with 2 parents in retail management and personally I just think my little boy is just too little to be made to go be with strangers all day and barely see his parents.

I appreciate the fact my partner wants to improve our lives and also that he doesn't like our current arrangement of never seeing each other as I work the 2 nights he doesn't but I feel like our son is the priority. I'll also add I'm keen to have a second baby soon which then means putting 2 young kids in nursery just to earn more money.

So am I being unreasonable to say I just want to focus on my kids until they are a lot older and it's okay if we are getting by on my part time wage?

What an awful thing for your father to have said to you! Has he not met any of the millions of delightful children raised by working parents?

Your son would be very unlikely to enjoy nursery when you only send him two half days a week. You mentioned him being looked after by ‘strangers’. Let him go for longer so that they’re not strangers anymore and soon he will have friends and a whole other situation to thrive in.

We have around 400 left over a month but our house is in need of some serious work (think no ceilings downstairs and not a completed kitchen kind of level work) so a real fixer upper. And we have a significant amount of debt we are slowly trying to clear. We do put £50 a month into DS isa but no personal savings. My partners pension gets 4% put in by him and 4% by his work and mine is the same but obviously for me that's only around 35 a month as I earn so little.

We definitely aren't sitting with spare cash to be able to do lots of things or holidays (we are lucky enough my mum is paying for us to go on holiday with her this year)

My partner isn't an insanely high earner (under 50k)

@Calica1 i work full time 39 hours a week, I’m separated, I have my dc 50:50. I can drop my dc to school, bring them to clubs, see performances. I’m there for them when they need me, regardless of whether they are with me or not. I am available and they come first and they know that. It’s possible to do both. Just because parents work doesn’t mean they are not a constant or an available.

It doesn’t matter what other people think, but you and your DH have to come up with an agreement and compromise. Does he want another child? If you’re expected to go back to work, he’ll have to do half the childcare and housework - would he?

It was a real shame as the first few times he was so happy to go but then he suddenly started to be super unhappy as soon as we got there. I'm not sure if he just misses me 😪

YANBU OP. Your son is very young and it’s fantastic you prioritise your time bonding and caring for him over money. Don’t be pressured into it- you are irreplaceable as a mother to your son, you are all he needs at this tender age 🥰

I can see how this would get a person down, and in fact that was me. Fucking years of my ex dh unable to pull his finger out and build a proper home while I bust my ass retraining to earn as much as I could whilst living in a shithole. I lost my patience, respect and love. And I left…

I think you really need to work more - you’re in debt, your house needs serious money spending (I wouldn’t regard ceilings or a kitchen as a luxury!) and you’ve got no savings. And you’re talking about having another child?!

Plenty of working parents go to kid’s school plays and their kids go to clubs - and in any case that’s years away.

Like I said, I’m a SAHM myself and I’m not knocking it, but it’s a luxury and in circumstances where my kids were living in a half finished house, with household debt and no savings I’d be at work. Especially if my DH, reasonably enough, didn’t think the luxury of me being home all the time was affordable or something he was willing to shoulder.

Maybe you can work more hours as a compromise, but full time when you don’t need to seems like an extreme. I think your DH is thinking purely from a financial perspective, but not really the practicalities of all the extra labour that gets done with you not being at work full time. More money can help you have nicer things but time poverty can lead to misery. If you’re working Monday-Friday then weekends can become about housework and keeping the house in order. Where is that important quality time with DCs? If your husband wants you to work full time and take on the burden of the guilt about leaving your son at nursery knowing he’s unhappy then he needs to be picking up far, far more domestic labour. I’d go as far as say make a full, comprehensive list of his additional duties on his days off and let him really get to grips with the fact that you working full time also means him working full time and taking on more work at home. I would also expect him to do half of the nursery drop offs at least. Let him feel some of the pain of handing over your child when they really don’t want to go, and the rushing around to get them ready to get out the house on time every day.

Your DS will settle at nursery in time, but 13 months is still very young. I think my DD was about 18 - 20 months before she really settled having started at 10 months old two days a week. Yes- your son would get used to full time as children so often do, but my view is that nursery should be a place they look forward to going to and that doesn’t usually happen until they are closer to 2 at least for developmental reasons (separation anxiety, developing fears etc.)

Maybe more hours is a compromise as I say, but your husband does also need to accept that those young years just are brutal financially. You just have to get through it somehow and the time for more disposable income is later.

In your situation then you really should think about working more. You are in debt, you have no savings, your house is in need of work and your pension contributions aren’t nearly enough. I can see your DOs point, you aren’t in a good situation financially and it kust be hard for him to be shouldering most of the financial load. I also wouldn’t be thinking about another baby in your situation, you can’t really afford it and how would you pay for mat leave?

I'm lucky that there isn't a huge difference between my take home pay and statutory maternity pay and I get enhanced pay as long as I stay at my current job so I get 26 weeks full pay and 13 weeks statutory.

You say you rushed having your dc because you'd wanted children for years... Did your dh have much of a say in that? If he's now unable to pay off debts, fix the hole in the ceiling or get the kitchen finished, I wouldn't say he's being particularly demanding if he's expecting you to contribute to that. I don't think he's setting the standards overly high if his goal is to be able to afford ceilings...

Perhaps it's a lesson in not making assumptions. You made it clear you wanted a baby. He didn't think he needed to specify that he wanted ceilings in your house, because that's usually not optional. I think YABU not to have made it clear that having a baby meant you would opt out of contributing towards finishing the work on your home. YABU to assume he would be OK with that.

Tbh, having a safe, functioning home, some basic financial security, and a dad who's not lying awake at night wondering how he'll pay all the bills next month if the car breaks down will benefit your child as much as having you around all the time.

Also, when is this baby going to get made if the two of you are working alternate nights and presumably trying to deal with completely different body clocks on your days off? When do you have time to connect properly? It doesn't seem like there's much space for him in the family, but you're talking about making space for another baby. You get what you've wanted for years, and he gets to work harder under more pressure.

Sorry if that sounds blunt but I'd feel quite resentful in his shoes.

He's 50/50 honestly. I think he's happily stick with 1 but he knows I'm desperate for at least 2.

He wants to get married but I'd rather put it off for now and have another baby so they don't have too much of a big age gap and focus on a wedding further down the line.

He doesn't mind picking up extra duties and stuff he just wants me to earn more so we can do more and have more.

It’s all about what you want really @Calica1, you say it’s for your ds but really that’s a smokescreen you’re hiding behind.

I'm not massively surprised he'd rather stick at 1.
I'm also not surprised he wants you to work more. It sounds like you need to.

Would your full time day job be different and better paid per hour than supermarket shifts?

I don't mind people being blunt. I wouldn't have posted if I wasn't willing to hear people's opinions.

We don't see each other or have any time together currently (although this wouldn't change if i went full time) unless we have time off work. Making a second baby is going to be a challenge which is why I'd rather try sooner than later as we are unlikely to get as quick result as last time.

Honestly I think my partner agreed to having a baby to make me happy. We had only been together a year and it's something I had spoken about since we met.

I appreciate the house not being in a good state is something that really bothers him.

I couldn't go back to retail management as the hours wouldn't work with both of us in retail so the reality is I'd likely have to get a minimum wage office job until I could retrain in something else so personally I don't think we would be better off.

But his opinion is the experience will help me earn more than being at home.

What are the retail management hours?

We knew I couldn't return to my current role (store manager at coop)

Genuine question, but why not? What do you think professionals who do horribly unsociable hours (doctors/nurses/paramedics/police etc) do? Never have kids? Is there no option of reducing hours from full time even a little?

Ive taken a hit on my career by reducing my hours to be at home with the kids more when they are little. But i couldn’t do the bare minimum paid work if we had significant debt, a barely functioning kitchen and I wasn’t married to the child’s dad.

Out of curiosity would people's opinions be different if there wasn't any financial benefit. If say I was working full time for minimum wage which is a bring home of £1571 minus the nursery fees after free hours which would be around £441 after tax free childcare. Plus the cost of paying for and running a second car (let's be generous and say £250 total) so I'd actually be about the same earning afte the extra expenses as I am working 2 nights.

So my partner currently does nights so he's 10-7. If I then want for a daytime management role I'd be looking at hours between 5am- 11pm depending on the role and they are generally not fixed shifts.

I would say you still need to work because it’s only a temporary situation you need to work to build your pension and keep yourself in a job in case everything goes tits up.

You’re not being unreasonable. You’ll never get this time back. No little one should be in nursery full time. There’s plenty of time yet for more money and holidays

Honesty have have no idea what they do if they both work odd hours and have no family help.

Childcare doesn't seem to exist pre 7am and ends by 7pm at the latest (unless you can afford a nanny of course)

We did have the discussion before DS was born about if there was any practical way for us both to work retail hours but after looking at the lack of childcare options for early/late times plus the fact one of us wouldn't have set hours it became clear only 1 of us could do retail management.