andrewducker | Life with two kids: nursery costs

Having discussed this a few times with people, generally to their amazement, I thought I'd mention it more generally:

Our nursery costs for 2 kids: £2060/month.
That's with discounts for a sibling, it being cheaper for older kids, and Sophia getting free hours because she's over 3. It's £726 for Sophia, £1334 for Gideon

They'll both be in nursery for the next 2 years, after which life will get a lot cheaper as she goes to school and it's just him in nursery.

The government will give us £2k per year for each child towards that, which will drop our total yearly costs from £24,720 to £20,720. Yay!

Not looking for sympathy towards this. It just seems to be a hole in people's knowledge and I thought it was worth mentioning.

It's definitely worth wondering how people *not* in their 40s would manage this without leaving a 5-7 year gap in someone's CV (Almost certainly the woman.)

(And having now been in three nurseries in Edinburgh, the prices are all very similar to each other.)

Crossposts: https://andrewducker.livejournal.com/4090814.html

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mtbc

Yeah,

mst3kmoxie was valedictorian, has an MBA and did everything from sysadmin to cinema management to property appraisal, along with hobbies like script editor for indie flicks, she learns fast which fit well for all the office temping she did too, she works Excel and whatever just fine. After an employment gap of some years while our kids were little, Lidl wouldn't even interview her for a checkout position (though when we got down to that kind of thing, I think she was omitting some stuff from her CV so as not to look outrageously overqualified). She's now gone back to university instead in hopes that a recently minted degree will help.

From:

snippy

When mine were that young, a neighbor ran an unlicensed in-home care; I still paid about half my take-home pay for 2 under 5 full time. I get it.

From:

altamira16

I ended up with a ten-year gap on my resume. I was very fortunate because some really excellent and super competent women helped me go back to an interesting tech career. I took the slow road back instead of a faster and more expensive road, but I was so fortunate.

From:

channelpenguin

Yup. 'Career gap' is a major cause of the gender pay gap, somehow not obvious to many people. (I have no idea why - optimism maybe). It doesn't have to be be an actual gap - part time work, flexible work or even just sticking to working hours is enough to cause career stagnation.

Apart from environmental and pessimism (societal collapse / apocalypse reasons) and my family history of EXTREMELY hard and destructive births, it's one of my reasons I never had kids. As I say - I'm too vain, too selfish, too mean.

I bet nursery was another thing more affordable in the 70s.

From:

andrewducker

The fact that it doesn't just set you back but can make jobs impossible seems so ridiculous. See MTBC's comment above, for instance.

Edited Date: 2021-09-26 06:57 am (UTC)

From:

andrewducker

It's just ridiculous. Do employers think that you just forget how to do everything?

From:

andrewducker

I'm glad you got the help.

From:

andrewducker

The fact that people end up resorting to this is just awful.

I'm glad you had a neighbor running one!

From:

0olong

Holy shit.

Yeah, I was vaguely aware it's pretty expensive, but that's a ridiculous amount of money!

From:

anna_wing

Someone I know incorporated a company and put that on her CV to fill the gap, explaining it as a desire to be her own boss/follow her dream etc.

From:

andrewducker

That's smart thinking

From:

andrewducker

Yup!

Although that covers 50 hours of care each, which isn't cheap to provide. So I don't feel it's the nursery's fault.

Edited (typo) Date: 2021-09-27 08:24 pm (UTC)

From:

greenwoodside

With cost of housing and insecure employment contracts being such a problem, I'm amazed that anyone my age (mid thirties) had managed to have kids at all. It sucks that after overcoming/adjusting to those hurdles, there's still another price - financial and personal - left to be paid. :(

From:

andrewducker

Yeah, we're really not set up well for it as a nation.

From:

cmcmck

This is an area where government simply doesn't have a clue.

What is the value of (as you say, almost certainly a woman) our labour, I ask myself?
I never had kids as you know, but I did a shedload of babysitting for family and neighbours when their kids were younger...............

Edited Date: 2021-09-26 10:16 am (UTC)

From:

mtbc

Quite. It's irrational prejudice. I wonder what opportunities there might be for employers who are willing to employ mothers with grown children who have professional education and experience but a gap in employment. (Or indeed for such mothers to band together and go into business themselves.)

From:

aldabra

That's brilliant.

From:

aldabra

Watch out for that assumption that it gets cheaper when she goes to school. You have to send her to after-school club in order to get on the priority list for holiday club, so you're still paying for wrap-around care even if you could in principle flex your hours so one of you does the school run in the mornings and the other one does the afternoons.

From:

aldabra

(Also you have to be on-the-ball enough to do this in Term #1, because there aren't enough after-school club places for everyone and after that you basically have to wait for people to move away.)

From:

andrewducker

Oh yeah, it'll still cost, but I'm hoping a fair chunk less.

From:

andrewducker

Oh yes, I've already been in contact to see when I have to sign up for her first term, in just under two years.

From:

azdak

I live in Austria. Because I've just helped a refugee family apply to the the local council for help with after school club costs, I can report that here it costs €203 a month (that's for a whole afternoon as primary school here never finishes later the 1pm and often earlier for the younger kids).

Edited to add: my husband knew someone in England who ran a chain of nursery schools and he said they basically set their prices at the level of the average second parental income for the area. It is, frankly, a disgrace.

Edited Date: 2021-09-26 05:54 pm (UTC)

From:

matgb

Yup--13yrs ago there was a study that showed that, when trying to eliminate other factors and just looking at like-for-like employees, each child set a woman's pay back by about 1.5yrs in pay rises/promotions compared to men, but men with kids got slightly more

Like for like women at aged ~40 were on roughly men at ~39, except, weirdly, out lesbians, who got more

It was one of the reports that led to shared parental leave, although the authors recommended scrapping maternity because economists...

From:

danieldwilliam

There's a definate benefit. I'm specifically designing the roles for a couple of potential future hires in my team to suit parents (women in practice) returning to paid work from the childcare they've been doing for 5 or so years.

I need some clever, specialist people, but not necessarily full time, yet. I'd like the person to stay in the role for a long time so they build up organisational knowledge and have the potential to take on more hours or responsbility as the company grows. A returning parent looking for school hours work during term time as their kids transition from nursery to primary school strikes me as ideal.

It seems like there is money on the table, particuarly when working from home or hybrid working is easier and more acceptable now.

From:

danieldwilliam

Book earlier to avoid disappointment.

From:

andrewducker

When I got in contact they told me that you can't book earlier. Everyone puts their name down and then they run a lottery.

From:

danieldwilliam

A lottery is a bit unhelpful.

From:

anna_wing

I thought so too. An eminently logical solution.

From:

anna_wing

Indeed!

From:

andrewducker

It does make planning in advance tricky to say the least!

From:

danieldwilliam

Aye - it has the appearance of fairness whilst actually making everyone worse off.

From:

stormclouds

Wow! That's more money than I'm expected to live on. And is probably why my mum did illegal childminding when my brother and I were at school.

From:

andrewducker

Minimum wage would just about cover Gideon's time in nursery.

But I'm not actually surprised by that. They need one carer per three children - so with 7 kids (for example) they'd need three carers. And then they have to pay for the building, the toys, an accountant, someone to manage the place, etc. I can't actually see how they could do it for much less.

The main difference between us and other European countries is the lack of subsidies.

From:

mindstalk

"just sticking to working hours" -- what do you mean?

From:

mindstalk

Male, but I struggled hard to find a job as a programmer after a long grad school + meh gap, despite past record, degree, and good references if anyone called them. Then struggled again after a several month gap, though the pandemic didn't help there.

From:

mindstalk

"after-school club in order to get on the priority list for holiday club"

What does that mean? (I'm American.)

From:

andrewducker

School finishes at 3:30. If you both have jobs then you need to arrange an after school club to look after the kids until you get home. And a holiday club to cover the holidays.

From:

mindstalk

It's unavoidable if paying out of pocket. I've been researching this recently myself. In US terms:

4 infants per adult, at $10,000 per infant, bring in $40,000 per adult. That has to pay for building, insurance, and food, as well as salary and payroll taxes. Even if 75% goes directly to the carers, that's a salary of about $27,000 (with the rest to payroll tax.) At 3 infants per adult, there's only $30,000 to go around, with a salary of about $20,000.

Preschool allows 6-10 kids per adult, and seems correspondingly either cheaper or better paid, though even cheaper means $5000/child-year.

European free/cheap childcare is probably a significant portion of all taxes/public spending, and/or relies on more kids per adult than the US "high quality" standard.

From:

azurelunatic

Unless I mistake things greatly, a worker who is not available for extra work that spills outside of assigned working hours might be discriminated against.