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When I began to show that I was pregnant with my second child, I clearly remember on more than one occasion someone patting my arm and saying how happy they were that I was finally expecting again. They said it with an earnestness that suggested they assumed I must have been trying for years, seeing as how there’s a four-and-a-half-year gap between my kids. In reality, I got pregnant the first month we tried. The age gap between my kids was very deliberate.
Why? Because I simply couldn’t afford having two kids in full-time childcare, and I didn’t want to have to give up my career to be permanently at home with them. With only my son, I was already spending just under half of my full-time salary on childcare costs. The only compromise my husband and I could work out was to wait to have our second child until our son would be starting school.
This week in the UK, the Family and Childcare Trust reported that soaring costs of childcare mean many families are better off not working. How has this come to pass, where not working means that you are better off? Isn’t this the opposite of what we should be aiming for?
Turns out that here in the UK, part-time nurseries for children under 2 years old are 33% more expensive than they were five years ago, with parents paying £1,533 ($2,365) more than they did in 2010. Yet have salaries increased in line with this? Of course not. An annual survey on childcare costs revealed that the annual cost of part-time nursery care for children less than 2 years old has broken through the £6,000 ($9,259) barrier for the first time. My childcare costs were easily £15,000 ($23,149) a year. Moreover, parents in Britain pay a higher proportion of their income on childcare than those in most other developed countries. Parents in France have a legal entitlement to childcare and the prices are dictated by the government. Germany recently implemented a legal entitlement to daycare for all children up to the age of 6. I’m so jealous, as by that age I had paid out at least £40,000 ($61,733) in childcare for my kids.
Because of these astronomical costs, I ended up leaving my full-time job for freelance work. What was the point of trying to work and ending up a stressed out mess who never saw her kids? Working at BBC was essentially working for the government, yet they were failing to help me achieve my goal of being a working mom. I wasn’t able to get any free childcare until my daughter was 3, and then I was only given 15 hours a week. It actually made the whole logistics of working even more difficult, as the subsidized nursery hours were only 9 am to 12 pm. I then had to pay a private nursery to collect my daughter and mind her all afternoon until 6 pm, which cost just as much as if she were there for the whole day. So really, the three “free” hours were irrelevant.
I am far from alone in the stress of childcare versus working debate. At least 70% of my friends have had to change jobs, reduce their hours considerably, or leave their careers due to being unable to find suitable childcare that was cost-effective. It astounds me that the government ignores the fact that there is an army of talented women out there who, if given affordable, flexible childcare, would return to the working world immediately. Most moms I know want to work, especially after their kids begin going to school from 9 am to 3 pm every day.
Obviously when you become a mom, you need to make compromises if you want to be available to your children. But after years of busting your butt in college, followed by a slow but steady climb up the career ladder, who wants to give it all up at the age of 32 simply because working becomes a non-option after you have kids? Not the majority of women I know, yet it’s the reality for many.
What is the point of the government encouraging us to stay in education and aspire to earn a good wage when they make it absolutely impossible to find good, inexpensive childcare that’s necessary to stay in those hard-earned jobs, post-kids? What was the point of all that hard work, only to have to slip down the career rungs or remain in a stagnant position because you need to leave work at 5 pm on the dot so you can pick your kids up from daycare on time?
For five years on and off, I languished in a job with no career prospects that paid badly but allowed me at least to leave work in time to collect the kids. I stayed out of fear that nowhere else would be as accommodating. That is, until I eventually decided to become a writer, a job that allows me to work around my kids’ schedules. It’s meant a massive salary drop, but the bonus is I am a much more present mother.
Why do we have to choose a career or kids? Why — with all our education and skills — are we still struggling so much to be moms and workers because of childcare, the bane of every working mother’s life? Isn’t it time the government stepped up and did something about this?