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 Nadia Essex, 40, a TV personality and entrepreneur, living in London with her son
Children:
1 two-year-old son
Set up:
Nadia, a single mum, works a three days a week and rents a home in London
Childcare:
Son at a nursery three days a week
I send my son to nursery three times a week as that’s all I can afford at the moment. It’s just under £600 a month, and my rent is £2,000. Apart from rent, it’s the biggest of my outgoings by a long way but I have to do it because I need those days to work. He’s been in childcare for a year now. I’d like to send him to nursery at least one more day, but I can’t, so I’ve got three days to make a full-time wage in a three-day working week and to do it alone. It’s very difficult, and I’m having to be entrepreneurial and think of ways to make money in a shorter space of time.
In those three days, not only do I have to work, I have to dust and vacuum, do the food shop and change the sheets and do the washing and do the drying and clean the fridge and do everything else too.
If I had affordable chidlcare it would mean that I could work more, and therefore earn more, which means that life would be easier and we’d be able to go on holidays and have fun and and do fun things that having excess money brings you.
As well as childcare being crucial so I can work, I also appreciate having some time to myself. We started off with a childminder for four hours, twice a week, in the mornings, and the first day I dropped him off I got home and I sat in silence for an hour feeling joyous.
I love my child more than life itself and would jump infront of a bus in a heartbeat for him, but I was so happy to get home and have a cup of tea in peace and get on with work.
I have struggled with feeling like a bad person for not wanting to be with my child 24 hours a day, seven days a week and I do have a lot of guilt about that. I’ve been on my own for so many years that I need to be able to work and have adult conversations, do my business, and have my career. It makes me a better mum but I also do feel awful about that sometimes.
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In October, my son was very poorly for about 10 days and was too ill to go to nursery but not ill enough to lie in bed – he still wanted to play and for me to be with him. I had big meetings and opportunities I had to cancel, and I worked out I must have lost a potential earning of £3,000 over that period. During one of my meetings that I did manage to have, he was sitting drawing in highlighters across my bed the entire time.
When I got off the phone, I cried. Everything just stops when he’s ill and I can’t make any money. I knew it would be difficult to pay my bills at the end of the month. Next time he’s ill I’m hoping I’ll be more prepared. People say “oh, just get some help” but it’s not that easy to get people to come and help. Everyone is working, and why would someone want to come and look after my unwell child? I wouldn’t be able to afford more help from professionals, either.
Childcare is so expensive, but it’s not the nurseries’ fault, it’s down to the Government. The childcare providers get a lot of stick and everyone beats down on them, unfairly. For example, with the 15 free hours scheme which gives parents a discount, the money the Government gives the nursery doesn’t properly subsidise those free hours. My poor nursery has to spend time playing Jenga with money to cover those discounted hours. There’s not much honesty from the Government about what 15 free hours means for nurseries or for parents. The costs and logistics of childcare are a punch in the gut.
The bottom line is, is if women just turned around and went, “Right, we are not having any more children, life is just not good enough for us,” the world would be on its knees. We need to support mums. Whether it’s in our pregnancy or during birth or after we’ve had our children, mums get screwed over from start to finish, so often not getting the help we need.