Expensive childcare, low birth rate pose challenges for NZ families – Editorial

In modern times, being able to support a family on one income is a luxury. Photo / 123rf

Editorial

There was once a time when sending young children to daycare was looked down on as “paying someone else to raise your kids”.

It was a time when mothers stayed at home while their children were young, caring for hearth and home while fathers worked a 9-to-5 to pay the bills. Kids went to kindy a few hours a week once they were 3, then went off to school at 5.

In modern times, being able to support a family on one income is a luxury that not everyone can afford.

Many middle-class households, especially (but not limited to) those with mortgages, would struggle to make ends meet on one income, especially if children are added into the mix.

Those households need both parents to work just to afford their living costs, which therefore means “paying someone else to raise your kids” is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

The good thing about daycare is that they have long opening hours, allowing parents to drop their preschoolers off on the way to work and collect them when the working day is done.

But that convenience ends when children reach school age and are locked into set hours of 8.30am to 2.30pm, or thereabouts.

Working parents of 5-year-olds then need to figure out how their kids will get to and from school, what they’ll do when school finishes, and who will look after them when they inevitably fall ill.

Then, of course, there are school holidays. Twelve weeks of them.

Employees in New Zealand are entitled to at least four weeks of paid annual leave, so a family with two working parents will get eight weeks of leave between them, leaving four more weeks (or more, if the parents ever want to holiday together) of childcare to find and pay for.

Paying someone else to raise your kids is inevitable in these circumstances.

Prospective parents have to consider all of this when deciding whether or not they can afford to have children – and it’s among the reasons why some choose to remain childless.

Stats NZ released data last month that showed New Zealand’s birth rate is currently 1.57 births per woman.

The birth rate dropped below the replacement rate of 2.1 in 2013 and has remained that way since, which is a concern when factoring in our ageing population.

As Dr Pushpa Wood and Crayon chief executive and founder Stephanie Pow opined in a Massey University paper in 2023: “A shrinking proportion of working-age people will lead to labour shortages and a smaller tax base to invest in the public services we all rely on, such as infrastructure, education, pensions and healthcare.”

Wood and Pow say lowly-paid parental leave and expensive childcare are barriers to employment for parents. Combine that with the costs of raising a child, and a growing number of people are delaying having children or choosing to remain childfree.

Smaller families mean fewer future taxpayers – and that impacts all of us.

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