My wife’s birthday is today. She’d been wanting a job for quite a while, but caring for our three young children has been a full-time job. So when an opportunity came, she jumped on it, excitedly lining up an interview.
One problem, though.
Child care.
We live nowhere near our respective families, so we don’t have the benefit of picking up the phone and dialing mom or dad and working out an arrangement. Nope – our only avenue is full-time daycare. Which for three children aged 5 and younger, totals a nifty $360/week ($120 per kid). Let’s do the math. That’s a nice little package of $18,720 per year for child care. Meaning, just to break even, she’d have to make somewhere north of $28,000 per year pre-tax just to justify the expense.
And this is for a retail job.
Not going to happen.
So I got to be the one who, over ice cream birthday cake, tried to put things off until later tonight. My wife, though, is cagey and smart and saw through my deflections. She knew that I had looked over the math and that it wouldn’t work.
And then the inevitable questioning comes: Why didn’t anyone tell us it would be this difficult to have children? Do we have to put our lives on hold until they’re old enough to attend school (and thus reduce the amount needed for childcare?) How do other families do it?
