For the past three and a half years I’ve been, as Jeremy Hunt would have it, “economically inactive”. Which is to say, I birthed two babies in relatively quick succession, looked at the cost of childcare (£42.5k a year for a baby and a two-year-old in my part of London, towards which the government will contribute up to £2k a child under the tax-free childcare scheme), and decided that staying home made more sense than putting them in nursery and desperately trying to earn enough to break even.
I’m far from alone in that calculation. Current data suggests there’s roughly 1.34 million stay-at-home parents in the UK. Although the percentage of dads is increasing, the vast majority are mothers. According to the Department for Education’s childcare and early years survey of parents, about half would prefer to do some paid work if childcare were more affordable. On the flip side, the thinktank Civitas has estimated there are more than 2 million mums of young children who’d prefer to reduce their hours, but work out of financial necessity. What could better exemplify the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” vibe that seems to characterise every aspect of modern parenting?
