Child Free By Choice

When I think about being a child-free woman, it's not that I don't want the experience of having a child and being a mother.

It's that I don't feel I live in a society where I'm able to do that and have big career ambitions and a rich life of my own.

It still feels like women have to choose between two identities, the mother or the career woman.

If I wanted childcare, it would cost me on average over £1,000 a month per child, even more if you live in London.

And families across the UK typically spend 30% of their annual paycheck on childcare.

In some extreme cases, and by extreme I mean you live in a city like London and have more than one kid, your entire paycheck can be wiped out by childcare costs.

Which is why more and more parents are choosing to stay at home and not work at all.

And this parent is, you guessed it, usually the woman.

Childcare should be universal.

We should have an NHS for childcare in the UK, but we don't.

It has improved, but access to subsidised childcare is conditional.

And the financial barrier is a huge part of why women globally aren't having kids.

And look, all of this aside, if I had a baby and, like most people, couldn't afford childcare, maybe I could depend on my parents for that instead.

But when we do that, it so often falls on the woman, the grandmother.

And my mum has already spent so much of her life raising kids.

Now I'm all grown up, but this is her time to be free.

When she read this script, she said that if she had the money, she would rather pay for me to get childcare instead because her freedom is protected.

And I completely agree.

Throwing another baby into her arms feels like perpetuating the very same cycle where the state relies on the free labor of women to keep the world spinning instead of improving opportunities for mothers.

When people talk about their grandparents or friends helping out, they're talking about the village, which comes from the saying, it takes a village to raise a baby.

But the village is increasingly becoming a thing of the past, because once you have a kid, you often have to move away to somewhere more affordable where you can get a bigger house, meaning you're far away from your community.

In London, where I live, schools and nurseries are closing down because there just aren't enough pupils to fill them.

Families are leaving the city because they can't afford to raise a child here.

According to a recent article in the Evening Standard, an estimated 90 primary and secondary schools in London have been forced to merge or close in the last five years due to pupil shortages.

So, I know what you're thinking.