I was having a chat recently with the couple that ran my son’s school breakfast and after-school clubs and they were highlighting the fact that they have got their hands so full with over 50 kids now compared to what it was a couple of years back when they barely had 10 kids to manage. Times have changed and there are now more working mothers than ever before. The truth is that in many societies, families can no longer depend on only one source of income. Mothers are obliged to return to work at the end of their maternity, which in turn means that parents have to rely on childcare services more than before. What the couple and I didn’t discuss though is the struggle of the parents of those 50 kids to keep up with the increasing cost of childcare.
Every year, you get a letter from your childcare provider informing you that the fees have been increased. Whether it is a nanny, a childminder, term time nursery or the 51 weeks nursery, you have to cough out a lot of money to be able to use any of these services. Of course, there is the breakfast and after-school clubs to be included in the categories aforementioned. The case of working mothers returning to work after maternity is quite a tough one.
In England, a mother is compelled to make a well-informed decision before the end of her maternity leave. She has to decide whether she will be returning to work at all, returning to her old job or whether she will be returning to work full time or part-time. Whatever the decision is, it is a life-changing one. If you decide to be a stay at home mom, it is cost effective but mentally and physically draining. You love your children to bits but just playing mummy all day long makes the day seem longer than twenty-four hours. You hardly get a minute to yourself and it does feel like you are watching the world go by. Above all, you are not financially buoyant.
if the decision is to be a working mother and to return to the old job, you have to consider whether the old working hours suit your new status of being a mother. If it is a job with an irregular shift pattern, you will need a flexible childcare provider to sort the child out when you are at work or better still, you have to take your partner’s shift pattern into consideration to determine who keeps the child when and how. If you choose to look for another job before the end of maternity, your search options have been automatically impacted as you have to consider the perimeter of the distance you are willing to commute when you have kids, the shift you can do, the salary that you cannot even consider, etc.
Let’s just say you decide to go part-time or on a condensed shift pattern, it has to suit the business needs before it can be approved, as employers are not obliged to grant every flexible working requests. The impact of it on the business, your colleagues and some other factors has to be put into consideration. Assuming that your request is granted, part-time hours’ means reduced pay and reduced holiday allowance. Let’s not forget that you still need money to afford the childcare costs and holiday to stay with the children during school holidays. Whatever decision is made, you simply cannot win.
The increasing cost of childcare remains the main problem here. How did childcare become this expensive? Although, the UK government introduced the 30 hours free childcare funding from 3 years old to encourage women to return to work and indeed there is sufficient evidence of an increase in the percentage of mothers who have returned to work, nevertheless, a lot of women still cannot afford to have two or more children in nursery at the same time.
I understand that the childcare providers are business owners who need to attain a certain standard to obtain their licenses, but the government could do much more by also giving some free childcare hours to younger children as well as monitoring the increasing costs of the childcare services. There ought to be a cap of some sort on the maximum they can charge or even a timing limit to the frequency of how the charges are increased.
Research has shown that the cost of childcare for children less than three is higher in the UK than in most of the other countries in Europe and in many other developed countries. We hopefully look forward to when the government will introduce policies that will ensure that every mother is better off working and that there is enough high-quality childcare available for every child regardless of their age. The solution here is free or heavily funded childcare, workplace flexibility and better support for families. Otherwise, the workplaces will be filled with exhausted, broke and guilt-ridden working mothers.
