We're very lucky to be able to get by with a combination of family, daddy working from home and mommy changing hours.
It's true that we didn't help our case by moving AWAY from the family. I do work from home a lot of the time, but I must be on the phone for meetings which wouldn't make looking after the baby possible. Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
My brother and his partner can only afford the childcare because he works days and she works nights so it minimises the time my niece is in nursery. Ad astra per aspera
To be fair, the attitude is a reasonable effect of trickle-down socialism [writ large, real estate].
and
To be precise, I also engaged a sitter half day who I sourced from the local library bulletin board @ GBP 10.00/hr.
Lesson: Bundled convenience does not come CHEAP. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
All that aggro.
Just to live in London. The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
Ah. There goes the Migeru idea then. Oh well... Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
Oh yes -although I may still object to the word accessoires, meaning something you can easily dispense with.
The thing is, a few years ago I made an estimate on how much it would cost us to have a baby, in order to know how much we may want to save prior to that. I came up with 1300€/month, which people reckoned was extremely high. I explained that I came to this high number because we were rather well off, so that, for example, an extra room would be extra surface in a not too cheap part of the town, ditto holidays, food and even clothes, where we'd probably want to have quality stuff... This was based on some serious studies by INSEE, and used a ratio of parental income to come up with the costs, expressed as how much you'd need to maintain the very same standard of living for you and your child as you had before.
So, it appears that even in Paris 1300€ per month is easily enough to do so.
Now in London, ALL of it and maybe more is likely to go into being able to leave the house to go to work -and that is not proportional to income, it's something anyone working is likely to need.
Of course, in France you get tax reduction when you have children, and a lot of state help, and there are more public creches (although not enough of them)... You also get a lot of help if you want to employ someone at home. You know, socialism ;-) Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
Israel has a particularly unusual way of computing child allowances: if you have n children, you get x*n sheqel when n<4, and x*n+y*(n-3) for n>=4, where y is approximately equal to x. It used to be n>=5, with y approximately equal to 4x. (Specific values for x and y can be found here).
