night shifts?do they work?

[ecobabble]

I'm starting to look for jobs with an 8 month-old at home, and I'm considering a job that is full time night shifts at a supermarket. My husband's not convinced as I also applied for an assistant manager role at a bar (min wage against 28k), but I showed him that the supermarket job will leave us with a much higher net income because I can stay home in the daytime and potentially not pay for any childcare. My husband is half office based, half WFH, the night shift job would leave our handovers easy (I'd come home before he has to go to work in the morning and I'd leave for work after baby's bedtime)

Ladies doing night shifts, does it work for you? do you break up your sleep in the daytime? Have you tried it but went back to normal hours because it was too much? What are your experiences? Thank you.

This is a ludicrously bad idea OP.

When do you plan on sleeping OP?

I work runs of night shifts relatively frequently. It works because my child is either with DH, my inlaws, or nursery in between shifts, so I can sleep There is no way I could work nights and look after him in the day without sleeping. It’s ludicrous and dangerous to consider to be honest. He might be easy enough now at 8 months, but it won’t be like that forever.

Your 8 month old will be dropping daytime naps from around 1 yr old, so you'll have 1 x approx 2 Hr nap in the day. Will you be able to work full time on 2 hrs sleep a day?

Night shift with older kids work because you can sleep while they're at school. No way will you be able to stay up all night then be able to look after a baby all day.

Exactly when would you sleep?

I hated them made me miserable

You can work 6pm to 2am or something like that, any longer and you won’t get enough sleep to function.

My DH has worked nights in a supermarket for 30+ years and gets really fed up with new people coming in who think they can do the job and look after children or work a second job in the day. You can't.

When he was young we used to work round the children, so he would sleep from 7am to midday then get up when I worked in the afternoons, but it isn't sustainable for long.

Another thing to consider is that they won't allow you to set your nights, so you will do a random 4 or 5 out of 7, which will inevitably include all or nearly all Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. If your DH works Mon to Fri it might be possible for you to manage if you are working every Friday and Saturday night regularly and sleeping all weekend, but as you can imagine that doesn't do much for family life.

The pay is good for a reason. It's a shit job. 🙂

What hours are supermarket night shifts?
I know 6pm-6am, and 10pm-6am shifts in other businesses, and there is no way I could look after a baby (soon to be toddler) after one of those shifts.

If it's "only" til 2am or similar, it would be possible, especially if you could get a morning preschool place soon, so have cheap childcare 9-12.

When would you sleep op?
This is recipe for burn out, specially with a baby.

They work if you can get in solid sleep during the day and maintain your relationships.

I don't yet have the experience, but my husband works nights for several years and trains people for nights. Some who can get in solid sleep take to it like a duck to water, some can just never acclimatize to it even if they have the time to sleep even after years of trying, they're regularly shattered and miserable until they get out of it, but the ones who crash and burn badly are those who don't get in sleep because they're trying to live 'normal' & rely on broken sleep and/or those who end up feeling really disconnected from other people.

There are difficulties to be on a different wake-sleep cycle to your spouse. Many of us do it, but the idea handover time will automatically be easy, that's not always the case - what if you've had a bad night and need a shoulder? what if something has happened with the baby or house that needs an in-depth discussion? It adds levels of complications that's hard to explain unless you're in it but while most couples with a wee one have limited time, you then add in things like the amount of times one of us have said 'you need sleep' to the other because whether I feel a need to discuss X or either of us want us to do Y together, we have to keep each other's sleep in mind in a very different way than before.

Thank you everyone. I'm not counting on the 2-ish hours baby is asleep at the moment in the daytime solely for my sleep haha, my husband can look after them in the day 2-3 days a week for a couple hours even if it's a workday for him as his work is quite flexible so for those days I think it'd be fine to work nights. For the other days it's a little bit more ropey, and could only work if I broke by sleep into 2, but since it would save us so much money and I have been running on broken sleep anyways for almost 2 years, I think it could work. Thanks for your input so far, it's nice to know that it does work for some people. It's a living nightmare trying to go back to work..If I took the managerial job, my net income per week after childcare is £60..ugh

With the managerial role, your net pay at first would be crap agreed but, and this is important, it would be temporary.

When DD was born I was in a Team leader role, I was on about £25k, nursery fulltime was over £1k a month and was double my mortgage. It was very very hard. But I was able to keep progressing my career, applying for or being offered more senior roles.

At 3 yrs old the free hours kicked in and reduced the monthly childcare bill to about £300 a month and I'd had a salary bump due to a promotion, so in a much better place financially.

Then she started reception at primary school, breakfast club was £1 a day and after school club £10 a day so childcare costs stayed about the same but I'd had further promotions, so in a much better place financially.

Now DD is 8yo, Covid has led to permanent WFH and she can entertain herself for a couple of hours after school. My salary is now nearly 4 times what it was when I went back after may leave.

You have to consider the long game, does the night shift role give opportunities for development like the managerial role would?

Personally after struggling with work and earning hardly anything after child care I wished I just taken a couple of years off enjoyed the small years and worked when they in nursery

I did it for ten years (nursing) starting when ds1 was 12 weeks, maternity leave for ds2 and back when he was 12 weeks. I was an expert at synchronised napping 💤. Twenty years later I still haven’t recovered. I did day shift and payed a childminder with ds3.