"Childcare In The UK 'Most Expensive In World'" Sky news report

[LittlePickleHead]

news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16064005

The cost of childcare is forcing women to turn down jobs or give up work because they can't afford the cost of childcare.

This is true personally, DH and I are holding off on trying for DC2 until DD is in school as putting two into childcare would cost more than I can earn. Much tougher is on those who already have children who have no lost tax credits or subsidised childcare and are now being forced into poverty.

My cycnical side thinks that taking mothers out of the workplace has many benefits for the government...

I'm really fed up of hearing - mainly women - babble on about how they're being, 'forced,' out of work by the cost of childcare. Some of us would have liked the OPTION!
You have a choice these days, that WASN'T given to women of MY generation who found themselves with children to raise. The choice is clear nowadays: set your sights lower and DON'T go to work, thus struggling to make ends meet.
The alternative is to wait until your child/ren start school full time and take low-paid work cleaning the houses of wealthy women, or in a suopermarket etc, thus allowing you to be at home to see your children off to school and be at home when they return from school. Which is what I and many of my contemporaries had to do.
The first-time mothers of today seem to expect to be able to have it all; produce offspring and still maintain their lifestyle. And when they find that it's expensive to place their offspring in the care of a locum while they try to continue their pre-child/ren lifestyle - and then believing that their little darlings need all manner of activities and gadgets etc to be happy - they bleat about the cost!

Please, dears, get OVER yourselves!

Who let Michael Winner in?

Megfox what a stupid fucking statement.
Surely we should be pleased that things have moved on so women do (in theory) have more options? Why are you assuming that the 'bleating' is about not being able to afford a lavish lifestyle, rather than the fact that some women (shock horror) have careers that they enjoy and are successful in, and resent having, by default, to sacrifice this or damage their future success because there is no other option than to stay at home? It shouldn't be an either/or choice (or purely a female issue)
You seem confused - on the one hand you are bitter about the lack of choice for women of your generation, on the other you are heralding a return to this as the solution to the problem

Megfox, you sound rather jealous. Do you resent women who have young children because they have more opportunities than you had?

Megfox - so I should have been grateful for the opportunity to spend 2 years at home watching my career go down the crapper rather than work for a £500 loss which could have cost us the incredibly modest roof over our heads?

What an odd concept. Feminism, while having achieved a lot, still has a long way to go. Should be stop fighting for equal rights just because things are better than they were?

Heehee at Michael Winner comment.

Megfox - would you ever imagine a man doing what you did? If not, why not?

"rather than the fact that some women (shock horror) have careers that they enjoy and are successful in, and resent having, by default, to sacrifice this or damage their future success because there is no other option than to stay at home? "

There is always the option not to have children and to carry on with the career you enjoy. If there are 2 parents then there is the option for the father to stay home with the children.

Yes I am aware of that juuule (i.e. the father could stay at home), but are you seriously saying it should be a choice between career or kids? Or if both partners have careers they enjoy then they shouldn't consider having children? Because if you have children that automatically means your other passions and interests are no longer relevant?

It doesn't mean that your other passions are irrelevant, just that as with everything else you have to adapt to the situation you are in with the resources you have.

If someone had the choice between a modest house and a holiday every year or a better house and no holiday then that would be the choice they had. It would be unlikely that people would think it okay to expect to go for the better house and then someone else pick up the bill for the holiday.

( I realise that for some people it could come to a choice of no home at all but that's not the situation I'm looking at in this post).

I did give up my career when I had children. I didn't expect that anyone would pay me any or some of the salary that I gave up. We had to tailor our life accordingly.
A friend of mine worked for next to no take-home pay for several years to maintain her place on the career ladder. She didn't expect her childcare to be subsidised. They had to tailor their life accordingly.
Our choice to have children and deal with the impact that they had on our lives.
I'm not saying this as some kind of martyr, just that I can't see why some people are complaining about paying for their children to be cared for by someone else while they go to work. I also don't understand the idea of the mother working for nothing. Surely it's all into the same pot for the family so you could split it whichever way. Pay for the childcare out of dad's salary if it makes a difference psychologically.

juuule, it makes no difference psychologically or otherwise whose salary the childcare 'comes out of' if the family are left hundreds of pounds out of pocket each month because of one parent's salary being lower than childcare costs. Sadly, that lower-paid parent is usually the mother.

I think we're talking about women who are genuinely being forced out of work, like I was, because they will not be able to maintain the roof over their heads if they work. We're not talking about a 'lifestyle', or affording holidays or other luxuries. We're talking about a family not being able to pay the bills if the mother goes back to work, which is very common if you have 2 preschoolers.

Of course, the ideal is to space your children out so only one is in nursery at any given time. But that isn't always practical, contraception fails, and besides, 4 years is one heck of a gap if you want your DC to be good friends.

It's odd how some of you think it's perfectly acceptable that our childcare is the most expensive in the world. Do you think this means it's the best? I doubt it - I've seen some very average childcare. So why shouldn't we take issue with paying more than anyone else for such a fundamental service?

But where do you draw the line between what parents should be responsible for paying for, for their children, and what the state should pay for? As in, if parents decide to have children, should they also be responsible for paying for their child's education, and school fees - ie, no state paid education?

I never understood the 'people shouldn't have children if they can't afford them' argument. In principle it's a sound argument and makes sense, but it just doesn't take life and all that comes with it into account - redundancy, splitting up or the death of a partner, unplanned pregnancy and all the emotions involved along with a whole load of other things.

Adding to what Viking said, if it becomes too expensive for people to have children, who will pay taxes and run the country in the future? Or should only the rich and people on benefits have children? Forget all those of us in the middle.

I agree with Juule - surely most people consider the impact that a baby would have on their lives before they decide to conceive? If you know for instance that childcare is going to cost you £800 a month for instance, you have to determine how you're going to fund that. You wouldn't move house for instance if you couldn't afford the mortgage. Yes, life can throw things at you that you don't anticipate - I had twins completely unexpectedly but as my Mum says you 'cut your cloth accordingly'.

There was a very interesting Bank of England report a few years back that argued if middle class, educated women didn't work, it would have an extremely negative effect on national prosperity and economic growth. So this is about more than people being too grand to scrub a loo, MegaFox. It's about the work of one being for the weal of all, and therefore childcare costs and problems have relevance well beyond individual women and their families. It's naive to think otherwise.

Hi I just want to challenge references to ONLY 'poorest families' being unable to afford to work, I earn what is deemed a very good wage (and work 3 days pw) DH ilikewise earns ok - so we are squeezed middle but by no means poor. After paying childcare for both my kids, from my wage only, I am left with about £300 per month, which less my travelcard leaves me with £175 haha 'disposable' income. If you then factor in needing clothes without holes in and other working life expenses, I am only back at work to keep my job, which I love. We will go into debt over the next year keeping this up as well as mortgage and basics. I also have no issue with the wages childcare providers earn, but wish government subsidies were an option - the idea for better tax breaks discussed here sounds good. Oh and BTW can existing bubsidies be more straightforward? For those yet to arrange childcare, please note that the 'free 15 hrs per week' is less than 15 if your 3yo's hours are 'taken' in under 3 days per week, i.e. mine goes 2 days (16 hours) and we get 12.5 hrs free but if she went 3 mornings we would get 15 hours. Also it's term time only, calculated by Local Authority and the actual discount figure varies greatly month on month for complex mathematical reasons beyond my ken....

megfox,
So in your day men who had children were happy to be unemployed? I do not think that is true at all, nearly every man who has a career also has children, so having it all is not new at all.

My husband has a phd I really think his time is better spent trying to find a cure for cancer than scrubbing loos, like you suggest.

I also wonder how many going on about not having children until you can afford it, do not pay for private education, but have no problems sending their children to school as soon as they hit four years of age.

There will always be lines drawn and those who fall just below it will feel most aggrieved. Unfortunately there are certain issues that just bring on wars - working/not working; breastfeeding/not breastfeeding and religion. All guaranteed to work us up into a steam

Annie's right, while all the discussion about the bits and bobs is very interesting, the key point is UK childcare is the most expensive in the world. That's outrageous!

The local SureStart centre here has switched from offering full daycare (because it was too viewed as too heavily subsidised against private nurseries) to term-time care (which collapsed because the full-timers weren't paying) to free sessions (which are useless for work); Tax Credits no longer contain a childcare element, assessments of income for the reduction in universal child benefit made no assessment of childcare (so a single Mum in top income bracket in London gets nowt and a family of two with a man earning 40k gets the benefit). It isn't just details, there is a picture building up of a government which models its policy unthinkingly on a family unit of the earning man and SAHM, and which exacerbates the costs of childcare to produce that.

Which is fine for the Mail, but goes directly against the other thrust of government policy which remains to get people back into work, not just those on benefits, but all those with skills to offer to drag growth up and the deficit down.

And, yeah, it looks like middle-class whining to many, but it is precisely the middle-class nature of it which is why people are whining. Many couples buying a family home at the end of the biggest housing boom on record and then having kids find themselves having done all their parents and they had hoped to do in escaping the constraints of their upbringing, yet still essentially worse off. And it rankles....

Same as you LittlePickleHead I would have to give up work if we had DC2 as childcare would be more than I earn. As it happens we only want one child. If I did have a choice however I would be a SAHM but unfortunaly at the moment we cannot afford that option.

Spot on Adela.

I'm currently on maternity leave with DS2.

I went back after DS1 maternity leave 3 days per week and DH and I have just been doing the sums to work out how much childcare will cost etc when I go back this time.

It transpires that working 2 days per week would be worthwhile, but to work the extra day to make it 3 would actually lose me £5 per week because of the cost of childcare.

I have a relatively well paid job and our childcare costs are average for where we live (£50 per child per day for a childminder).

The problem for me living in a very rural area is not only childcare but petrol on top. The fact that the only way to get to childcare is by car and a 6 mile round trip adds to the cost. It also mounts up for the child care workers who even at low wages still need to run a car so they sometimes take a factory job in town over a Nursery Assistant in the countryside because it doesn't pay them to run the car.

I pay £24 per day + £10 in petrol as I work in nearest large town, which is over a third of my Gross Pay, so after tax and National Insurance and general car costs after petrol I'm really left with a third of my salary. I work 2 days per week so have spending money of about £3300 per year. If I worked full time without children I would earn £30000 and have two thirds to "spend". When it's written down in black and white like this it all looks pretty grim.

Ok, we might be able to get by if I gave up work to look after 2 DC (in fact, we would love more DC but would never afford them). But it would be a struggle - especially as I earn more than DH. PUtting both Dc in nursery effectively means that we are on one wage so why don't I or DH give up work for a few years?

Because I'm not sure it would be a few years. Dh is the wrong side of 40 and has no formal qualifications; chances of his career recovering would be slim to none.

I teach and last year there were redundancies where I work, not to mention the glut of trainees who were unable to get a job. I am terrifed that all those years of education (which I 'm still paying for) and pretty much the last decade of my life building my career would all be for nothing if I give up work now. I'm sure there are many of us who would love to give up work for a couple of years, or at least go part-time, but actually keeping your job is becoming more important that earning money from it.

Childcare is very expensive. We're in London and are paying £975 a month for a full time place for our 15month old DS. We might be able to get away with cheaper but not by much.

DH was made redundant some time back and struggled to find work. He's now changing career and studying full time. We don't have much of a choice. I have to work or we'd have no money coming in. We initially planned to start trying for another one right now but simply couldn't afford to pay double childcare.

There seem to be a lot of people who think it's about not wanting to give up luxuries but with childcare, and mortgage all going on one salary, we're only just making enough to cover our food every month.

A second child would cripple us. I find that most of the people I know in the area who have more than one child are those who have grandparents close by who do a few days for free.