Talk to any working mother about their child care arrangements and you’ll get the long, sad groans of resigned complaint in return. In order to ‘have it all’, it seems that working mothers are willing to compromise just about everything – including their sanity – in order to have their children safely cared for AND to get to work on time each day.
Whether they’re paying through the nose for permanent child care, or juggling a myriad of make-do child-minding arrangements of the “If it’s Tuesday, we’re off to Grandma’s” variety, most mothers will quickly agree that it is really hard putting in a full day’s work when you have small children at home.
Could pay-by-the-hour child care be the answer?
So with the recent news that the Turnbull government is planning to provide more flexible daycare options on the agenda – where child care can be paid for by the hour rather than by the day – is thrilling news indeed to this rather battle-weary mother of three.
The idea of being able to lock in and only pay for the child care that I need is so novel and unusual, is so far removed from my reality that I keep wondering where the hidden trap is.
Living in an area where demand for long daycare far, far outstrips supply, and where the daily cost of this daycare is usually more than $100 a day per child, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that when you have three kids, you are going to spend an awful lot of your income paying other people to spend time with your precious children.
My child care reality
I returned to work three days a week after each of my three children was born, mostly motivated by the idea of protecting my very sweet three-day-a-week job. Everyone I knew who had returned to work after maternity leave dreamed of having a part-time job. I had one of those coveted positions so I knew what I had was precious. So I returned to work each time very quickly; three months after my first, two months after my second and five months after my third.
And each time, it got more challenging to manage.
With one baby, I had multiple grandparents begging to take turns. They drove to my house and I left for work. It was so easy and happy. It was bliss.
With a baby and a toddler, I was down to one grandparent signing up for babysitting duty. So we did one day of Grandma duty, followed by one day of daycare for both kids, and then because I couldn’t secure a second day of daycare for my baby under 12 months, we had a nanny one day a week.
With a baby, a preschooler and a kinder kid, it was a whole new ballgame. At this point, child care got so complicated and so expensive that I spent the first year earning just $10 a week after childcare costs. The baby went to occasional care one day a week – where we live, you can’t have more than one day a week of occasional care – and then one day with Grandma and one day with a nanny. The preschooler went to long daycare three days a week and the newly minted kinder kid went to before and after school care two days a week.
That is a lot of child care to buy. And a lot of child care to organise. Dropping three small children off at three different locations (just think of the parking, the walking, the school bags, the little bodies, the endless sign-in sheets!) all before I could head to work and be at my desk by 8.30am, was exhausting and expensive and yes, there were times when it just seemed so much easier to pack it all in and stay at home with my babies.
But year on year, it got a little easier and it got a little cheaper. And I kept myself in the workforce and that (mostly) was valuable too. By not stepping out of my career at all, I didn’t have to fight to find a way back to it when the kids had finally reached a stage when our child care costs were no longer larger than our mortgage each month.
