The True Cost: “We’d love a third child but we don’t feel like we can afford it”

Childcare costs have risen faster than inflation for the tenth year in a row; astoundingly, the average cost of care in the UK for children under two years old is now £159.61 per week (part-time) or £305.11 per week (full-time), according to Coram’s 2024 childcare survey. These figures make the UK childcare system among the most expensive in the world. Aisha, a married mother-of-two who lives and works in London, shares how she makes it work, and the sacrifices she’s made along the way.

What is your childcare set up? “Combined, I need 43 hours of childcare to cover the care of both my kids each week. That’s a mixture of private nursery fees for my youngest and wrap-around care for my school-age child. My parents provide 12 hours of care a week, which I’m grateful for, but I pick up everything else as the ‘organiser’ of our household, so the pressure is high.”

What is the True Cost? “Our household income (my husband and I combined) is £6,000 a month; after paying £1,100 towards our mortgage, £400 towards household bills, £600 towards loans and £1,000 towards our car and public transport, the rest of the money we have goes on extracurricular classes and saving for a rainy day.

“I have coordinated my job around childcare availability, but the true cost of how we manage is spending quality time with the kids. Often when I see them it’s rushing through the bedtime routine or taking them to various childcare providers.

“I wish I could spend more time with them just having fun and being silly, but at the moment we just can’t afford to make that happen.”

Scroll down to read more, in Aisha’s words, about how she makes it work.  

Every day requires rigorous planning: we don’t even have time for breakfast.

I start work early on a Monday (a 7.45am shift start) so I try and sneak out of the house without waking anyone at the crack of dawn. But the rest of the week, we’re all up by about 6.45am. I’ve always been a planner, but having kids has meant taking planning to a whole new level. Because my husband and I both work, we end up juggling money, time and childcare on a daily basis – it’s a real-life jigsaw with school days, nursery timings and two NHS staffing rotas to consider.

I’ll get up and try and encourage my daughter to get ready for school (not always easy!) and get myself and my son ready while my husband gets himself ready. We’ll all try and leave the house together around 7.30am; I head off to the tube station to get to work on time and my husband does the morning drop-off. There isn’t time for us to eat before leaving the house, so my kids have breakfast at their respective childcare settings.

Because I’m the planner of the family, I probably feel more of the stress than my husband does, especially as his work isn’t as flexible as mine; it always ends up being my responsibility to orchestrate the family planning. I’ve negotiated my hours at work to be able to manage the childcare but also to cook meals and spend some time with my children that isn’t shrouded in logistics and planning. I wish I spent more quality time with them, having fun and being silly, but I need to work so that we can pay our mortgage, bills and everything in between.

Around 14% of our monthly household income goes on childcare for my two kids.

My family needs about 43 hours of childcare each week and – even though we do claim the government’s allowance for working parents – we still spend £820 per month on childcare. It’s just about affordable, but our budget’s still a tight squeeze each month.

Our household income is £6,000 per month but after paying £1,100 towards our mortgage, £1,000 towards our car and public transport, £800 (or more) on groceries, £600 towards loans and £400 towards household bills, we only have a buffer of £2,000 to spread across the fees on ad-hoc days at nursery, putting money to one side for unpredictable emergencies (hello, car and boiler breakdowns, and those sneaky dentist appointments) and saving up for an annual holiday.

With that buffer of money, we also like to try and budget for extracurricular activities for the kids. We pay for my daughter to do taekwondo, swimming and Islamic classes, and I like taking my son to baby sensory classes when I can. This all amounts to around £200 per month.

My daughter – who is in year 1 at school – goes to breakfast and afterschool clubs every day to allow us the time to commute to and from work. My son goes to a local nursery three days a week; it used to be two days a week earlier in the year, with my mum helping out more regularly (my parents live 25 minutes’ drive away), but we’d still have to do the post-work pickup, and with all the traffic it wasn’t working out as a viable option, so we now budget for him to be at nursery for three days.  

I had to choose my child’s school based on where I could receive the most help, not on educational merit.

My daughter is at a school we chose based on distance from a tube station and where my friends had placed their kids, rather than on educational merit. This is so I know I can pick her up quickly after shifts and, in an emergency, we can lean on support from our friends with children at the same school (this has happened multiple times when I’ve gotten stuck on my train and have no other childcare cover).

I’ve had to change my working pattern to accommodate our childcare needs.

My husband is self-employed, therefore does not get paid for time off, so any holidays or time off for the kids’ sickness is unpaid and often falls to me, as I have up to three days carers’ leave per year. I reduced my working hours after having my son last year; I now work 28.75 hours each week so I can cover at least some of the childcare and make sure I’m there to do the nursery and school pickups.

I work as a therapy radiographer and have had to discuss with work the limitations that come with having two kids in childcare. I am contracted to cover any shift according to the needs of the service, so I try to put myself forward for early working hours, rather than late shifts, if they crop up. Because of the delicate balance of my childcare arrangements, I have to be really strict with myself to make sure I leave work exactly on time. Even then, I make it with minutes to spare. Everything is a rush.

In an ideal world, I would work three days a week and have two days without the panic and rush of being late for pickup or being charged additional fees. But we can’t afford to lose those additional hours at the moment.

Lower childcare costs would mean we could enjoy proper quality time with the kids.

If childcare costs were lower, I would feel less pressure to work as many hours as I do. There would be more money to take the pressure off monthly expenses, and it would create more opportunities for holidays and days out with the kids.

My daughter loves going out to our local café or to a restaurant and really notices it when that has to stop, especially if we’re cutting back and saving for our yearly summer holiday. She’s also expressed an interest in joining a gymnastics club (alongside her other extracurricular activities), but at this time I just don’t think we can afford to take on another additional regular outgoing bill.

I wish I didn’t have to think so hard and regularly about affordability so that I could take my kids out to do their favourite things or encourage their hobbies and interests. I’d love to do things with them without worrying about our budget first.  

We’d love a third child, as we grew up in big families, but we just can’t afford it.

Living and having children in the UK wasn’t what we had planned, because of the cost and how broken the system is here. We wanted to live in Saudi Arabia (I used to live there), but things didn’t quite work out. They have big families there and my husband and I also grew up in big families, but as much as we’d love a third child, we can’t afford it. When we had our son, we sat down and talked about the practicalities of it and timed it so that when my son was born my daughter was starting primary school. This was strategic, so we didn’t end up paying two lots of nursery fees. It’s a shame that it’s come to this, but it’s our reality right now.

Follow The Village by Stylist on Instagram and sign up to our monthly newsletter here.