Am I Being Entitled to Think I am Owed Granny Daycare?
On my family and a broken childcare system
Entitled is a loaded word. I know my parents threw it around a fair bit when we were kids and in a house where we didn’t have much, it wasn’t used to make us feel good.
entitled (adj): believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.
Entitled, spoilt, privileged, pampered: nobody wants to be any of these things, yet I am starting to think I am behaving as if I am entitled when it comes to my views on Granny Daycare.
“One recent debate in the House of Commons highlighted that in the past two generations, the number of children being at least partially cared for by grandparents has jumped from 33% to 82%.”
Anna Whitehouse, Divide and Conquer (2023)
Four out of five grandparents look after their grandchildren in some way, but not in our family. My partner and I are isolated, struggling to make ends meet financially and drowning in overwhelm because we do not have sufficient childcare but the grandparents are nowhere to be seen. We could get more childcare, hire a babysitter or a nanny or some other form of house help; I could go back to work, but it isn’t possible. We simply cannot afford it - childcare is too expensive.
In Divide and Conquer1, Anna Whitehouse & her ex-husband Matt Farquharson make the case that the average salary in a double income household is simply not enough to cover the costs of two children in childcare and a mortgage. I am not the only parent to have been forced out of their career.
Some parents are able to both continue working and maintain their sanity with the help of their own parents. We do have some childcare. The 30 free hours2 childcare funding available to children in the UK over 3 years old has been accepted and is used by us, but it still isn’t enough for me to go back to work full-time. For that to happen we would have to rely, as lots of parents do, on some form of free childcare.
My partner and I do not have that privilege.
It seems that the government has created a childcare system that relies on grandparent help so that the only real beneficiaries of the system are those whose families fulfil seemingly specific criteria.
A fifth of families don’t have access to Granny Daycare and I speak for them when I say we are struggling, but is it actually something we are owed in the first place?
Am I entitled thinking that I am owed Granny Daycare?
And what is the implication for those of us who don’t have that help?
There’s that classic comment “If you can’t afford kids, don’t have them, then,” and whilst this may be great advice, if no one had kids, as a society we may well find ourselves in a pickle in thirty years time when we wonder why we don’t have enough people to look after our elderly, drive our ambulances or sweep our streets. Children are our future and the collective is important here. Grandparents should help out because they stand to benefit from these children later on. The government recognise that we are already in a dangerously low birth rate3, yet have done little to encourage anyone to have more children other than hint at a childcare reform, which has recently announced will be open to applications from early January to start in April 2024, yet Pregnant then Screwed have warned that childcare settings will simply not be ready or equipped to commit to it by then.
It could be argued that if our own parents received help from their parents is it then expected that they help out in return. A pay it forward model, if you will, whereby if we all help out our loved ones in this time of need, we will all thrive. This could also be said of when children are expected to help out with their younger siblings, is it then assumed that the favour will be returned in the future when they have their own children? (cough cough)
Anna Whitehouse, Mother Pukka, admits that she is “incredibly fortunate to be in a situation where [her] parents were geographically close enough, financially free enough and personally inclined to take on that level of caring commitment.”
Geographically Close
Financially Free
Personally Inclined
These are three significant points that stood out for me in thinking about why it is that we don’t have access to Granny Daycare.
Geographically Close
My parents live 100 miles away, which isn’t much help when it comes to long term childcare solutions, and my partner’s parents are across the Irish Sea. The reasons for our distance from family in both cases is our line of work - there are simply more jobs in and around London, yet we weren’t from here originally. Even if they were closer, I am certain the second point ensures my parents in particular wouldn’t be in a position to help anyway.
Financially Free
Whilst my parents are grandparents they are also quite young. My Dad won’t retire for another five years - he still works 12 hours a day in a factory. Even if he lived closer, he simply wouldn’t have the time to look after his grandchildren - he still has his own rent to pay. Significantly, my parents are far from mortgage-free having never been financially able to get a mortgage in the first place. My mother doesn’t work and isn’t physically able to contribute to a significant amount of childcare due to chronic illness, her reliance on disability benefits compounds both my father’s need to work and their lack of financial freedom.
Then there is the complication of other grandchildren. If we all rely on grandparents for childcare, can they really juggle multiple children from their own multiple children. My parents have eight grandchildren, three of which are under 5 years old. If they were to look after all three during the day and manage multiple school pick ups, that would surely be too much for anyone to ask.
Personally Inclined
Then there is the consideration that grandparents may not want to help. If my parents told me this, I would probably understand it. I can imagine my parents have had enough of young children. They had four while they were young (they were 19 and 24 when I was born) and they didn’t have much of a life until we left home when they were in their fourties. They didn’t have that decade of exploration and fun that many of us had between our late teens and before children. They are having it now and understandably, they don’t want grandchildren spoiling it.
We may also forget that grandparents may have their own issues to deal with. They are not all sat at home twiddling their thumbs. As I have mentioned, some, like my dad are still working and still having to earn money in order to survive. Some have health issues and simply do not have the ability to help. Some have their own emotional issues to deal with, the experience of grief or poor mental health may mean they are less likely to take on the responsibility of young children until they are able.
I know logically that relying on my parents for childcare was never going to be an option, but if it is so necessary, it doesn’t seem fair that some people have access to free childcare while others don’t.
I am jealous of those who get date nights, and chances to have impromptu trips away. Even something like looking around a potential primary school ahead of our eldest starting school next September was difficult to organise for us. With one of us needing to look after the kids, only one of us could go to visit the school. Whilst I was there, I found myself infuriated at the couples I saw walking around together, their ability to both wholly take part in this decision and experience was facilitated either by being able to afford childcare or having family help; I was jealous.
Family help is the missing piece no one tells you about when you decide to have a baby (and especially a second/third baby). I saw many women at work able to carry on working after several children and I naively thought nothing of it. Of course they would be able to afford childcare for multiple children, they are on a decent salary but this is rarely the whole story. No one tells you that even a large salary isn’t enough and that the only reason they can afford to stay in work while their children are at school is because they have sent their own parents to pick up their children at 3pm and look after them until tea time.
We are a society that relies on grandparents to look after our children, to make up the shortfall in childcare provision that the government provides, but is it really their responsibility? Is it an unfair assumption that grandparents are even able to help?
Like Anna says in Divide and Conquer it is an incredibly fortunate situation if the grandparents are ready and willing to take on that level of caring responsibility. This simply is not the case for many people.
Granny Daycare is a privilege and to assume we are owed it from our families is to be entitled there are many reasons why grandparents may not be able to or may not want to help out.
But should it be families that we rely on? Should we not have a better system in place whereby childcare can be accessed at an affordable rate? A system where every one benefits?
What is evident is that we aren’t all benefitting from a government scheme that is meant to level the playing field. The system doesn’t work for everyone; it is broken.
The idea of free childcare is to ensure that all children, no matter what background they are from have an introduction to early years learning before starting school, yet from where I am I see a system that favours some families over others.
It seems to me that there are wider implications of the assumption that grandparents can help. Without that help one parent inevitably has to leave their career for a few years or families have been known to take on significant personal debt in order to keep the wheels turning. Families that don’t conform to the ideal 30 year age gap where grandparents should be retiring when their own children have their kids, and families who haven’t been able to stay close together due to a lack of work or affordable housing stand to lose out.
Here we have a class problem
I am one of the lucky ones. My time at grammar school led me on a path of social mobility enabling me to get into a career that is predominantly middle class and has fairly decent salaries available. I have been able to get a mortgage and buy a house when my parents could not. I went to university when my parents did not4, yet any social mobility that I have managed seems to be undone in that as soon as I had children, or at least during the period in which my children are between 1 years old and compulsory school age, I am back at square one.
I am back at square one but it isn’t the grandparents I blame. It is not my own parents who have let me down, but the system.
Perhaps I am behaving as if I am entitled, because I do think we should have equal access to a childcare system that works and I think we all deserve better from our government.
If this resonated with you, I would love you to join me in the comments, I love to hear your experiences.
Divide and Conquer is a pound project publication written by Anna Whitehouse and Matt Farquharson, published November 2023, which acts as a manifesto for reform to the broken system of childcare in the UK.
The 30 Free Hours Funding Scheme is neither 30 hours nor is it free. With nursery places underfunded, parents are seeing increasing minimum attendance as well as additional daily top up fees. As an example, my current 3 year old child has a nursery place for 2 days a week across the full year - it is £30 a month and in the coming months this will rise with an additional daily fee, along with for new children an additional day in the setting which is around £300 a month. For more information here is the government website. Children also don’t qualify for the funding until the term after they turn 3 years old, rather than their actual birthday as is suggested by its name.
Low Birth Rate - “The number of babies born in England and Wales in a year dropped in 2022 to the lowest level in two decades, according to official figures.” Birthrate in England and Wales drops to lowest level in two decades, Guardian, 17 Aug 2023.
My mother would probably like me to mention that she has since been to university graduating a couple of years after I did. So whilst I was the first in my family to graduate from University, she was the second.
it is 100% a class issue, I am in the same position as you. but I didn't realise I had made my decision to have a kid based on assumptions that turned out to not be true. I feel like the main people who are impacted the most are the socially mobile so maybe that's why there's less people talking about it than I would expect - maybe those staying within their classed situations just do whatever their families and predecessors have always done or been able to rely on? but it just traps people/women.
Well said, Kylie. You raise a lot of interesting points. Thank you.