Childminder vs Nursery

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Lil, I was just joking, because I am certainly not afraid of driving with my husband! As I just said below, I think anybody is justified in not taking a risk if they feel it's statistically too great.

Tigger - I don't say that male nurses or doctors are less good than female ones. My preference for a female doctor/nurse for myself has nothing to do with the quality of the care offered.
As for care for my children, I or someone else is always present when they go to the surgery anyway, so of course I wouldn't refuse an eye exam by a male nurse.

Thanks Croppy, you should be in politics!

How utterly hideous for you Marina. Reminds me of an ill fated trip to Marrakech with 2 female friends 6 years ago. After undergoing constant harassment in the souk, we made our way back to our Hotel only to be followed by 6 rather threatening looking men. As we made our way into the Hotel reception, the (male) manager on duty took one look at us and the blokes and hastily locked himself away in his office.

I just hadn't bargained on it in a country where we were all "foreign" together. I'd be the first to respect dress customs/cultural differences visiting anywhere outside the UK as I think it's wise and safe, not to mention courteous to do so.

I was a bit surprised about the posting about 'there is NO problem of child abuse amongst care workers across Scandinavia'. I asked a child protection officer today what he thought of that and he said 'I don't think I'd take a bet on it'.

Croppy, yes the trade off for time with the kids is less time with my wife without the kids. We have to work on this. One thing we did was move closer to our parents who let us go out together for days or evenings. But this is definitely the downside of the equation! It’s really a choice between downsides. We were together for 13 years before having children during which we did loads of things together. But we have a second chance with that. We don’t have a second chance with our kids, though.

The point about this is that everybody is free to choose their own pattern. I just question the paradigm that we discuss these things in. Whenever I see a discussion about improving childcare, it is framed as getting badly paid women to look after the children of better paid women. This is not exactly progressive! And when men are discussed in relation to childcare, it is whether or not they are abusers! The extent to which fathers look after their kids while their partners work is quite great – fathers look after the kids more hours than childminder/nannies/nurseries in 36% of dual earner households (Lancaster University research). The public debate about parenting and the private reality of parenting are quite different. What fathers really do is largely invisible (though there are some great descriptions on this website!) and comes out only when abuse is involved, thereby creating a grossly distorted picture of reality.

Kia, I meant male nursery workers - I think care workers here has a different meaning.

Duncan, spot on with the childcare paradigm. Do other people think we need state nurseries, just like we have state schools? If these were available locally, just like schools, then they would be a viable option for many people.

Marina, Gracie
I am very sorry to hear about your experiences.
Gracie, if you underwent constant harrassment in Morocco, why didn't you simply ask the police for help?

Marina, ironically, if you had been studying in Algeria, you would have been extremely unlikely to have such problems, as sexual harassment is taken very seriously there, and a man who annoyed you would risk getting into a big problem. I can't believe you put up with it for a whole year without complaining about it! My experience of sexual harassment in the UK is that usually the perpetrators blithely assume that their attentions are welcome until they are informed otherwise in no uncertain terms, which is usually, though not always, enough to stop it. In this case, your best bet for a start would probably have been to have cornered the culprits in public, in front of as many of their fellow countrymen as possible, and told them that their attentions were unwelcome and that they were a disgrace to their country and their religion, and no real man would behave like that. And for good measure, insulted the others as well for standing by and not doing anything to help you.
Having said that, aged 20 I wouldn't have had a clue how to deal with that sort of problem. As a general point, that is one of aspects of life in the UK that I dislike the most, the fact that we have sex pushed at us constantly by the media, yet so many British girls grow up totally naive and unrealistic about how to deal with many aspects of it in reality.
Must add that in all my travels round the Med, I've only been approached twice by strange men, both times in European countries, and both times they melted away when I indicated that I wasn't interested.

Err.. Duncan, so you think we should have moral qualms about paying carers less than we earn to look after our children! Should the builders I use feel guilty about charging me more than I earn an hour to do something they know I could do if I put my mind to it!
Should I feel guilty about paying a cleaner less than I earn, because I haven't time to clean the house?

I'm sure others can come up with even better parallels, because this isn't a communist country where we all earn exactly the same for what we do. And I refuse to let you (and those Daily Mail readers!) come up with another smug reason to make me feel guilty for being a working mum!

Yes Lil, I too had some qualms about Duncan's statement on badly paid women in childcare. Women in childcare are not necesarily badly paid and certainly often enjoy better conditions than many women of a similar age and experience in other fields. The average wage for a nanny in central London is around £22,000 - well above the national average for women. Wages for nursery workers need to be compared against those for female care workers, junior hospital staff, teachers and so on.

Affordable childcare IS the top priority for many of us. I agree that there needs to be a much greater focus on flexbility from employers but quite frankly, I want to sit down with my husband every night and enjoy a glass of wine over a leisurely meal, not take it in turns to be out working. My priority is to maintain a cohesive family and to my mind, the health of my relationship with my husband must be at the core of that.

There are a huge range of fields such as banking, insurance, retailing and so on which employ huge numbers of women and for obvious reasons are not suited to shiftwork. Don't get me wrong, I fully support your general sentiments but just don't want you to downplay the importance of affordable childcare to women. Woman's hour on Friday had a feature on how so very few women can justify working after a second child - it was intensely depressing.

Lil, Croppy, hear hear. Not everyone's working patterns are suitable for flexi-working. I've spent 15 years building up a career in a service-based industry where the opportunities for working from home are minimal - I could do about 1 half day a week from home tops and even then it would impinge on my colleagues. Affordable childcare for those of us who don't have the flexible option, particularly in the public sector where wages are not that hot, should still be a big priority.

Duncan, in the light of your comment about badly paid women etc etc. How do we get around the fact that when I go on maternity leave I will be 'paid' £60 a week whilst my nanny, who we have to keep on so that I can return to work, will get that per day

Bugsy, there are state nurseries, just not very many!

Croppy et al., I take your points about communism! It made me think about what I would really like to see in childcare. I suppose it’s this. In an ideal world there would be equal pay and opportunities for men and women at work and a culture of work flexibility for everybody. That would have two consequences: parents would be freer to choose how childcare is shared between the parents, because economic factors would be taken out of the equation – at the moment, for many families, the cost of a mother stopping work is less than the cost of the father doing so. It would also mean women, in general, would be better paid. These would result in some parents (mothers and fathers) doing more childcare themselves – i.e. those who really want to, but can’t because of money.

At the same time, the childcare profession should have a higher status, with more attractive career opportunities within it. That would result in some (but not all) childcare being of higher quality and being more expensive.

So, for some parents, flexibility and higher salaries would be counterbalanced by higher childcare costs, but also higher quality childcare.

Finally, because being in work is a key pathway out of poverty for low income parents (mothers in particular), government subsidy to allow them access to good quality childcare is important – and it would appear that this is the Government’s current view.

These are rather experimental thoughts – will be interested to see the reactions.

The cost of nursery provision would be considerably reduced if more nurseries were state sector or run as not-for-profit trusts. We looked at a private nursery whose proprietor was so rich on the profits of charging £1100 per month for babies and paying the staff a pittance that he lived in Grand Cayman.
If so many of the employers in the sector were not profit-making companies the staff could be paid more, and probably also enjoy fairer terms and conditions than at present. Our son attends a university nursery where all the staff are qualified and enjoy HE terms and conditions including proper sick and holiday pay, a pension scheme and a reasonable salary. Moreover, the university acts as an additional quality check on top of Social Services and OFSTED. And the fees are pretty much half what the other nursery charged, although the hours are not so long.
And, finally, they have a training/recruitment role whereby students at local schools can do supervised work placements, which they and the children all seem to greatly enjoy. Plus the psychology undergraduates come and do supervised observations for their child development module.
No nursery is perfect but we like the idea that ours is not only a moderately priced community facility (we are nothing to do with the university and neither are about 25% of the parents) but it also puts a bit back into the childcare educational process.
NB the students and university staff have first refusal on places each year of course.