Childcare Is Supposed to Help Families Work. So Why Are Mothers Still Paying the Price?👶🏽💼

Thirty funded hours should make it easier for parents to return to work and manage the cost of childcare. For many families, the expanded support has made a genuine difference. But for others, the reality remains far more complicated.

The hours may not cover the full working day or the school holidays. A suitable place may not be available, and additional charges can leave parents paying more than they expected. When childcare cannot be made to work, it is still usually the mother who reduces her hours, delays her return or steps away from an opportunity. Those decisions are often described as family choices, yet when the available options do not fit a family’s working life, the word “choice” does not tell the whole story.

This is the gap at the centre of Pregnant Then Screwed’s State of the Nation 2026 report. Produced with Women in Data, the research draws on responses from 5,245 women and looks at pregnancy, parental leave, childcare and workplace culture across the UK. Its findings show how quickly a childcare problem can become a work problem, an income problem and, over time, a pension problem.

FROW spoke to Rachel Grocott, chief executive of Pregnant Then Screwed, and George Gabriel, co-founder of The Dad Shift, ahead of the Parent Strike on Thursday 27th August. Their work approaches the issue from different directions, but both return to the same point: families cannot share care fairly when the systems around them make that almost impossible.

Thirty Hours, but Not Always When Parents Need Them

In England, eligible working parents can access up to 30 hours of funded childcare a week from the term after their child turns nine months old. The entitlement covers 38 weeks of the year. Some providers allow parents to stretch the same annual hours over more weeks, but that means using fewer hours each week.

The expansion matters. Government research published in March said funded childcare had cut participating families’ costs by half, with an average saving of £8,000 a year. For a household that can find a suitable place, use the hours it needs and manage the remaining costs, that support can be life-changing.

But a national average cannot show how every family experiences the scheme. Pregnant Then Screwed found that 29% of mothers had reduced their working hours because of childcare costs, while 24% had been unable to return to work full-time. “On paper, 30 funded hours of childcare looks and sounds great,” Rachel told FROW. “But the way it plays out in reality can often be very different.”

For a parent working shifts, nights, weekends or irregular hours, a term-time offer may not match the job they actually have. The same is true for someone whose commute extends beyond a nursery’s opening hours, or whose employer expects fixed office days that do not match the days a provider can offer. The support exists, but that does not automatically make it usable.

When ‘Funded’ Childcare Still Comes With a Bill

The language around childcare can be confusing. The 30 hours themselves should be available free of charge, but government funding does not cover meals, nappies, additional hours or optional activities. Providers may charge for those extras, although Department for Education guidance says the charges must be voluntary and cannot be a condition of accessing a funded place.

That distinction may be clear in policy, but it is not always how the bill feels when it reaches a parent. In May, the Education Secretary asked the Competition and Markets Authority to examine the childcare market after families reported compulsory add-ons, deposits and extra hours being attached to funded places.

Providers are under pressure too. Research by the National Day Nurseries Association found that 87% of nurseries surveyed said funding for three and four-year-olds did not cover the cost of delivering those places. Rachel was careful not to turn this into a fight between parents and providers. Nurseries still have to pay staff, rent, energy bills and other running costs, while parents are trying to understand why an offer described as funded has not removed as much of their bill as expected.

“It certainly shouldn’t be about parents versus providers,” she said. “It’s about what’s in the overall pot.” Many early-years workers are women too, and a system cannot claim to support women’s employment while relying on another largely female workforce being stretched, undervalued and underpaid.

A Funded Place Only Helps If Families Can Find One

Cost is only part of the problem. More than a quarter of parents in the State of the Nation survey said they had waited over 12 months for a childcare place. That is not a small delay when a return-to-work date is already set. A parent may have spent months planning the hours, checking the finances and negotiating with an employer, only to discover there is no place available when it is time to go back.

“If you are ready to go back to work, or you need to go back to work because you can’t afford not to, and suddenly you don’t have a childcare place, that is a major issue for your household,” Rachel said. She also pointed to the longer consequences for a mother’s career, earnings and pension.

The pressure is even greater for families who need more than an available space. Among parents of disabled children surveyed, 26% said there were no providers within a reasonable distance. A place must be physically accessible, properly staffed and able to meet a child’s needs safely. It must also work with the parent’s job and journey.

When that combination does not exist, mothers can be forced to change roles, reduce their hours or leave paid work altogether. This is not because they lack ambition. It is because care has to happen, and the system has left them to solve it privately.

Flexible Working Is Only Useful When It Actually Works

Childcare does not sit separately from the workplace. A nursery can offer three days while an employer insists on a different two. A flexible working request can be approved, but the same workload may still be expected in fewer paid hours.

Employees have a day one right to request flexible working, but that is not the same as a right to receive the arrangement they need. Employers can still refuse a request on specified business grounds. Pregnant Then Screwed found that more than one in ten parents who asked were told no, and six in ten mothers granted flexible working said their workload stayed the same.

Rachel described mothers being left out of opportunities because meetings repeatedly fell on their non-working day. Others were formally part-time but still carrying a full-time workload. In those circumstances, flexibility becomes a pay cut without a genuine reduction in responsibility. It is part of the same gap FROW examined in The Childcare Conversation We’re Still Not Having: women are told to be visible and present at work without enough consideration of what childcare makes possible, or what that presence costs.

This is where the motherhood penalty can become difficult to see. It may look like one woman moving to four days, declining a promotion or taking a more flexible role. Across thousands of families, those individual adjustments build into lower earnings, slower progression and smaller pensions for women. Care is treated as a private matter until it affects work, and then the mother is often expected to absorb the disruption quietly.

Care Starts Before Childcare

It would be easy to discuss childcare as though it begins when maternity leave ends, but the way care is shared starts much earlier. Eligible employees can currently receive up to two weeks of statutory paternity leave. In the 2026/27 tax year, statutory pay is £194.32 a week or 90% of average weekly earnings, whichever is lower. Self-employed fathers and other self-employed non-birthing parents do not have an equivalent statutory paternity payment.

George told FROW that properly paid leave gave him time to support his wife after a caesarean birth, bond with his children and become confident caring for them alone. “Parenting is like anything else,” he said. “You need to get stuck in, ask questions, make some mistakes and learn how to do it.” Without time away from work, one parent can become the default carer before the family has had a fair chance to establish anything different. That early pattern then follows the family into nursery arrangements, sick days, appointments, school holidays and decisions about whose job can bend.

This is why The Dad Shift argues that better paternity leave is not only about fathers. It affects mothers’ recovery, both parents’ relationships with their children and the way paid and unpaid work is divided over the years that follow.

What the Parent Strike Is Calling For

On Thursday 27th August, parents are expected to join family-friendly demonstrations around the UK as part of the Parent Strike, organised by Mother Pukka and The Dad Shift. The campaign has two central demands: flexible working by default, and at least six weeks of paternity leave paid at 90% of earnings, including provision for self-employed parents. It is asking parents to book time away from work and make visible the pressure that is usually managed behind closed doors.

These are campaign demands, not government policy. The government launched an 18-month review of the parental leave and pay system in July 2025, with findings and a roadmap expected at its conclusion. Changes to flexible working are also due to strengthen the test employers must apply, although the new reasonableness test is not expected to take effect until 2027.

For families dealing with the cost and logistics now, reviews and future reforms can feel distant. But the strike matters because it joins up parts of the conversation that are too often separated. Affordable childcare, meaningful flexibility and properly paid leave are not competing asks. Families need them to work together.

So, What Needs to Change?

The State of the Nation report makes recommendations across childcare, parental leave, flexible working and maternity discrimination. In our conversation, Rachel returned to two foundations: proper funding and cultural change.

The first means funding childcare at a level that allows providers to pay and retain skilled staff, remain open and offer places families can genuinely use. It also means recognising that the picture differs across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, rather than speaking about one UK-wide scheme as though every family receives the same support.

The second is about what happens at work and at home. Flexible working has to alter the job in practice, not simply the wording of a contract. Parental leave has to be affordable enough for families to use. Employers have to stop treating mothers as less committed because they care for children, while fathers and partners need a realistic opportunity to take on care from the beginning.

There must also be provision that works for families most poorly served by the current system, including single parents, disabled parents, parents of disabled children and lower-income households. A childcare policy is not successful if the people with the fewest alternatives are still the least able to use it.

Rachel’s measure of progress was not another announcement, but how a mother would describe her own life a year from now. “I would love them to be able to say, ‘No, I don’t feel torn. I don’t feel like I’m having to make impossible choices every day,’” she said. “I feel genuinely supported and that I can do two really important jobs at the same time in a way that works for me and my family.”

That is the standard that matters. Not simply how many hours appear in a policy, how many requests an employer approves or how many promises are made, but whether families can arrange care without one person’s working life quietly carrying the cost.

For now, too many mothers are still the ones making the job smaller, the day longer and the numbers somehow add up. The system may call those decisions choices, but families living with them know they are often nothing of the sort. The Parent Strike takes place on Thursday 27th August, and you can find your nearest event and check the latest time and meeting point at parentstrike.org.