There’s no such thing as ‘free’ granny daycare
With millions of children at the nursery of Mum and Dad, Angela Buttolph discovers that, for some, it comes at a heavy cost
More grandparents than ever before are stepping in to look after grandchildren, but is there a downside to all this “free” childcare? A study out this week certainly suggests there could be. Researchers from the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that, after studying 1,428 children, those who were looked after by their parents or grandparents were worse behaved than those at nursery.
Granny daycare has long been hailed as a silver bullet for timeand cash-strapped parents. The “nursery of Mum and Dad” is now the daycare-provider of choice, as 9.1 million grandparents – an increase of 49 per cent since 2009 – look after their grandchildren; with two thirds providing childcare two or three times a week.
With the cost of childcare in Britain skyrocketing to double the rate of inflation, you can see why. Gransnet claims grandparents are estimated to be saving parents £17 billion a year in childcare.
Previous evidence has suggested this relationship can be mutually beneficial; children who had “high” contact with their grandparents were thought to have improved language skills and fewer emotional needs, while benefits to grandparents range from decreasing the risk of dementia to improving cognitive function and mobility.
But, of course, this new transgenerational arrangement is not without its complications.
As this latest study shows, there can be downsides, too; researchers have found that children who attend a nursery staffed by professionals were less likely to have poor social skills, difficult relationships with peers or behavioural issues.
There can also be significant tension between parents and their “free” childcare providers. “People always say how lucky I am to have family close by,” says Lucy Smith*, whose in-laws look after her two children, aged three and four, enabling her to return to work at a charity three days a week. “They’re right, and I’m very grateful – but free childcare is not the magical panacea it’s seen to be.” Smith can recite a list of jawdropping childcare disasters that reads like the script of a horror movie, for which modern parents would be the perfect target audience; “[my in-laws] have a small river at the bottom of their garden and have refused to fence it off and both my children have fallen in. Yes, they were pulled out, but I still have nightmares.”
Despite this, Smith says: “I don’t feel I can ever complain, ‘beggars can’t be choosers’.”
She isn’t alone. “The way we work is creating a massive childcare problem for which there are no easy answers,” says Christine Armstrong, author of The Mother of All Jobs: How to Have Children and a Career and Stay Sane(ish). “Grandparents are often not a straightforward solution, as different attitudes to parenting can create extra tensions.”
“My father is amazing and does long hours of childcare,” says legal secretary Kirstin Leary*, 43, “the kids [ages seven and five] love him, he does school pick-ups, takes them to swimming lessons, etc. But he always has sweets in his pocket, gives chocolate chip brioche after school, which often means reduced dinner eating. I don’t approve, but what can I say?”
It is an added stress that free childcare may need to take place in the working parents’ home, either because the children have to be readied for bed before the parents get home, or because the grandparents live far away, which may also mean they need to stay over, creating further issues. Pity the poor mother whose parents regularly “destroy” the house during their childcare shift with her threeyear-old son, walking out and leaving “two hours-plus” of cleaning and tidying for both parents after a long, tiring day at work.
“A lack of understanding of the stresses that modern working parents are under can fuel resentment on both sides,” says Armstrong. “The grandparents may not have worked in the same ‘always on’, time-pressured way their children do now.”
“My parents would frequently turn up 20 to 30 minutes late, but I was always in too much of a rush to say anything,” says Lorna*, who works in PR and has a four-year-old daughter.
“They also went on a last-minute bargain holiday for a fortnight and I had to take time off work as I couldn’t get any childcare. It went down really
Pity the poor mother whose parents regularly destroy the house on their shift
badly as I had only just gone back to work.” Communicating concerns isn’t always easy either. “You’re held hostage,” says mother-of-two Sarah, 38, “and I don’t ever raise any issues, as if I do, I worry I might lose the childcare.” She is struggling as “my father… basically leaves my 18-monthold son to cry himself to sleep. But it’s hard to criticise if I am relying so heavily on him. I also don’t want to damage my relationship with Dad.”
It should also come as no surprise to learn that grandparents are also struggling. When I ask Gransnet editor Cari Rosen how often the subject comes up on the site, she says “very often… it would be fair to say [it’s] one of the most talked-about subjects on the forum”.
But until childcare costs are reduced or flexible hours are made more available to working parents, free childcare is still the only option for many. A Grandparents Plus survey claims one in four working mothers (roughly one million women) would give up work if they didn’t have grandparents available to help, while a further 1.7 million (38 per cent) would need to reduce their hours.
However, for others, the free childcare experiment has already run its course; “I haven’t gone back to work after my second child,” says Nadine Abbott, 38, who previously worked in advertising. “I used to have a big career, but I was finding the childcare more stressful than my job!”
*Names have been changed