We paid £1,800 a month – the costs have been a blockade to my career


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In our How I Manage My Childcare series we aim to find out how people across the UK handle the logistics and cost of having children.

This week we speak to Anna Whitehouse, a 41-year-old radio presenter on Heart FM, and founder of motherhood blog Mother Pukka, who lives with her husband and two children in London.

Children

One five-year-old daughter, one nine-year-old daughter

Set up

Anna and her husband work freelance

Childcare

Both children at school, parents take turns picking them up depending on work, they go to after-school clubs some afternoons

When both our children were in nursery at the same time for a year, we were paying £1,800 a month. It was like having a second mortgage. These childcare costs have overall been a blockade to my career, and my husband and I have just been papering over the cracks as we go along.

One day I was 12 minutes late to pick my daughter up from nursery, and as if it wasn’t bad enough that my daughter was there with these big brown bambi eyes crying, they charged me £1 for each minute that I was late. I was handed over my crying daughter and I handed them £12. I understand why they charged me, but I’d left on time, there were leaves on the train line and it wasn’t my fault.

For a while my daily routine was just saying sorry to everyone about everything, but then I realised I’m just not sorry anymore. It’s not my fault, it’s not my daughters’ fault, it’s not my husband’s fault. It’s a system that is just set up specifically for mothers to fail.

Our children are now at school and there was a sigh of relief when that stage happened, but it’s not as simple as that, because childcare logistics seem unending. We know schools finish at roughly 3.15pm, we know offices tend to run until 6pm, so how is that meant to work?

I find it astounding that it’s a shock to the working world when a parent needs to pick up their child because a lot of wraparound childcare is extortionate. There isn’t a choice about when you pick your child from school, it’s not like that parent is leaving work to do a recreational side hustle, or go for a nice beer and burger.

We have found ourselves doing the jigsaw puzzle of after school care and school clubs, which our kids don’t really want to go to. It’s an exhausting day for them.

My husband and I work freelance, so he’s in an agency this week working advertising agency hours, I’m doing freelance shifts on the radio, and so there’s no way either of us can pick up calls from school if there are any issues. Freelancing gives us flexibility in a way, but we have lots of moving parts that are constantly changing day to day. I don’t know what childcare looks like tomorrow.

More on How I Manage My Childcare

We fly by the seat of our pants and decide whose job is more important today, who can push back against their employer and do that pick up. The resentment that builds up with couples within relationships is a by-product of a childcare system that is not set up to succeed.

I think the burden of childcare and the management of that childcare still sits firmly on female shoulders. A couple of weeks ago a dad messaged me saying he had asked for flexibility to pick up his child from nursery on a Tuesday and Thursday because childcare costs were getting so expensive they couldn’t pay for the extra time.

His boss said, “can’t your missus do that?”. He said that she couldn’t because his ‘missus’ was a brain surgeon so she was a bit busy with patients at that time of day.

It also tends to be that the natural leaning of childcare centres is to call mum, and a couple of times I’ve told them that I’ll be live on air, but calls and messages still come to me even though my husband very much wants to step up to the plate.

Childcare costs have been a hindrance to my getting and having jobs, and that’s what got me campaigning for flexible working for mums. Like lots of parents, my husband and I are cobbling it together as best we can and feeling, to be honest, like we’re dropping lots of balls.


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