Leslie-Ann Scorgie
Aug. 3, 2020
If you and your partner (if you have one) didn’t lose any income, and you were prudent with your child-care savings during the pandemic (i.e. it didn’t get spent on non-essentials), you’re probably sitting on a few thousand extra dollars by this point.
Since mid-March, many families have gone without child care, which at the upper end of the spectrum runs $3,200 per month (multiple children under the care of a nanny or in daycare); and, on the lower end, starts around $600 per month for before- and after-school care for the average family with school-aged children (obviously this was happening pre-pandemic when school was normally in session). Quebec is the exception to this range as the province caps the rates for child care, making it one of the most affordable child-care models in North America.
Insert summertime care, camps and activities that have largely been cancelled due to COVID-19 and those additional savings could easily be another few hundred to a thousand dollars.
Wherever you’ve fallen on the range of child care and activities expenses, these costs are a massive component of a family’s normal household budget. So it’s no wonder working parents are feeling financial relief.
The tradeoff, however, is mental health and work performance, which is why some parents are choosing to send their kids back into care. But others are riding it out because the savings are so sweet. Here’s how to tell if you need to get off the savings gravy train and reinvest in child care. Note that there are extremely strict safety guidelines that child-care providers must follow as the economy reopens.
Your kids are young and you are frazzled
This looks like a conference call with your one-year-old baby strapped into the baby carrier (which he is obviously too big for, but it keeps him happy), while he claws at your earbuds and squeals as the neighbours’ dog barks loudly outside. You feed him raisins while trying to take notes … all whilst walking laps inside and outside the house. When your partner finishes their video call, you swap.
The franticness pushes your work back into the evenings (after bedtime) to the wee hours of the morning (before wake-up) and into naptime, if that even happens. And that’s just having one child. Imagine a toddler in the mix, too.
So guess what? Like most parents without formal child care, you fall into bed at night utterly frazzled and worried about your job because your performance isn’t what it used to be. Your fatigue is growing.
From both a mental health and job security standpoint, this isn’t good. It’s time to reintroduce care, even if it’s part-time.
Your savings are growing, but you aren’t keeping up with your work commitments
Missing deadlines? Customer complaints? Work quality suffering? Your creativity is low? Business is picking up, but you don’t have any more time in your calendar? Your boss wants you back in the physical office? Even if your employer is offering you greater flexibility with the way you schedule your day, or your goals have been reduced for the year, you may not be hitting performance targets and that could impact your job security.
If you need to refocus on your work to keep your job, you need to pony up for the cost of child care. The longer term financial impact of losing your job when jobs are already scarce is far greater than the savings you are experiencing right now by not having care.
Your children are not coping well
Quarantine has been so hard on young people: reduced play, fewer programs, limited to no gatherings with friends, steep adjustments to online learning, too much screen time and general Groundhog Day routines at home — which are good in that they allow you, the parent, to work but are a double-edged sword, meaning not great for the social development for your children. If your kids are struggling, it might be a sign that they need greater variety and social interaction in their day through formal child care.
Applying the same pre-pandemic child-care solutions to your household might not make sense anymore from a safety and budget standpoint, but also because the way we work, how much we spend and on what, has changed. In plain speak, our priorities and finances may have shifted, and that’s probably a good thing. Perhaps this means you need to switch your child-care solutions up: go part-time vs. full-time; move to daycare from home care; bring in a nanny; ask for support from your family and so on. The ultimate goal here when reintroducing care is to ensure that you and your family are safe and healthy (mentally and physically) while you work hard to keep your job; and that’s probably worth paying for.
PS: keep your child-care receipts to incorporate these costs into your taxes.
