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I’m back at work months and my baby still doesn’t have a full-time childcare place

‘HELP!’ might be the subject line of my next email to the department

'I desperately wanted to avoid drafting retired parents in to help, but it’s either that or start engaging in the risky business of trying to do my paid work while childminding.' Photograph: Zoranm/agency stock
Clare Moriarty
Sat Aug 24 2024 - 06:15

It has been a weird summer. Every day seems to contain every season and now we’re looking down the barrel of September wondering: was this it? My son turns one next week and, despite having returned to work a few months ago, I’m still in a liminal purgatory while I wait for the promised land of a full-time career return. At the root is an insecure childcare situation that I share with many Irish parents, and I find myself back knocking on my own mother’s door for help.

Childcare costs have come down, but unless you are earning an absolute shedload, those costs are still a major part of the budget of families using them. The apparent consequence of reduced costs is that a significant percentage of daycare facilities are either pulling out or threatening to pull out of the public scheme which provides cash in return for not pushing up costs to parents. Impacted families are left with a choice of either paying an increase of up to 40 per cent of current fees or withdrawing their child from that creche. However, as anyone with a young child can tell you, 1) it’s hard to move a child away from carers and peers they’ve known for the majority of their little lives, and 2) there are usually no alternative places in which to enrol them anyway.

So, the choice for lots of families would be to find funds for an unanticipated Mondo-Duplantis-level jump in childcare costs or try to handle the situation at home. “HELP!” might be the subject line of my next email to the department.

In addition to cost and availability, the lack of flexibility in parental leave policy is a compounding factor. Improvements here would help families struggling with both the deficit in childcare availability and a possible jump in costs in the short term.

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There are two main leave options you can pursue to cover childcare in Ireland, after public maternity or adoptive leave end, inventively named parental leave and parent’s leave. Parental leave must be taken in one continuous block, or in blocks of at least six weeks at a time. It’s unpaid, so it’s mostly of use to people in a position where they can manage unwaged for a non-negligible period of time.

Then there’s parent’s leave, which entitles parents to nine weeks’ leave in the first two years of a child’s life. Leave must be taken either in one continuous block of nine weeks or in separate periods of not less than one week. Payment is possible here – those with sufficient PRSI contributions get €274 per week. The policies, however, are simply not fit for the current crisis. Neither one can help those needing one or two days off per week for a longer period of time, either to make childcare more affordable by going part-time or to overcome a childcare shortfall (given the rarity of full-time places for babies under one).

As a painfully familiar example, I currently do not have a five-day place for my 11-month-old until November (he has been on waiting lists since he was a mere blastocyst). We currently have three days in creche and are cobbling together a workable situation for the other two. We’ve eked away most of our holidays to cover the summer. Neither leave scheme helps, since the minimum blocks issue means I have to take a whole week to get one or two days. This is not what most mothers want when trying to restart projects after nine months at home. Welcome back to the workforce – are you sure you can stay?

Good and accessible childcare is indispensable public infrastructure, as necessary to a thriving to society as transport, healthcare and energy

We followed the guidance (the reference to “choosing” childcare in the Citizens Advice now reads as hilariously inapt) and yet we’re still in real difficulty. I desperately wanted to avoid drafting retired parents in to help, but it’s either that or start engaging in the risky business of trying to do my paid work while child-minding. That would be possible only because mine is in the subsection of jobs where the option of working from home is available (though I do somewhat enjoy the idea of unleashing a baby and toddler on philosophy seminars).

I’m lucky. My mother is young and fit, brilliant with children, and willing to help close this gap for a while. How many people pursuing ad hoc childcare arrangements, whether with family, neighbours, unregulated paid carers, are routinely handing children into scenarios where they’re not confident about the standard of care?

Continually scrambling to organise childcare is tiring during an already turbulent time. Feeling confident children are in safe, consistent hands is fundamental to functioning while navigating the return to work outside the home at a time when our sense of our professional and public value may already be at an all-time low. That return is also invariably beset by the heady immunity journey of babies exposed to thrilling new cohorts of germs. Their attendance will be patchy (to say the least...). The functional disorientation that emerges from all of this can make going back to work feel less like returning, and more like staggering back.

Good and accessible childcare is indispensable public infrastructure, as necessary to society and the economy as transport, healthcare and energy. Some in Government are taking this issue seriously, since funding directed towards childcare has increased significantly, but it seems that improvements in one element produce problems elsewhere, and something more radical is needed.

Dr Clare Moriarty is an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin