Paige Connell is an organizational queen. She has spreadsheets on spreadsheets, dedicated to mapping out and strategizing care — and costs — for her four children.

Connell learned quickly that expenses for child care can add up, making it necessary at times for her and her husband to calculate exactly how much extra work they each need to take on to pay for day care, summer camp and after-school programs. In 2020, for instance, Connell picked up a second job, doing remote sales for a bridal expo company. While holding down her corporate job remotely, she’d work on sales during her lunch breaks or her precious few hours of free time in the evenings. “That year, I solely used that money for day care,” she tells Yahoo.

When offices reopened, Connell pivoted to making social media content on the side. What little money she earned from her posts “would all go to summer camp because you have to pay up front,” she says. “That’s a killer for a lot of families.” And it still wasn’t enough: She and her husband would calculate how many hours of overtime he needed to work as an electrical power lineman to cover the additional costs.

By juggling different forms of child care and planning way ahead, the Connells make it work. But it hasn’t always been easy — and that’s for a family earning more than 93% of U.S. households.

Child care in the United States is infamously an exorbitant expense. But what about in other similarly wealthy nations? Is raising children any easier (or cheaper) elsewhere? We spoke to three moms — one each in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. — to find out.

The U.K. mom working part-time to offset child care costs 

As is the case for many parents around the world, the first few years of Jacinda Spenceley’s son’s life were the toughest financially for her family. She didn’t qualify for maternity leave through her employer, but Spenceley was able to stay home for a year after her son, now 5, was born, and received a statutory payment from the U.K. government for the first nine months after she gave birth. The payments — about $800 a month — stopped before Spenceley’s son was enrolled in nursery school, “and that was a bit of a struggle,” she says.

It’s a common problem in the U.K. The country provides 15 hours a week of free government-funded child care, and up to 30 hours for children of working parents, but eligibility begins at age 3. U.K. maternity leave is capped at one year.

When Spenceley’s maternity leave was over, she enrolled her son in an international nursery school chain, to the tune of about $100 for each of the three days a week he attended. Spenceley considered going back to work full-time as an occupational therapist, but neither the finances nor the timing added up. “Because of the cost of child care, we weren’t really gaining anything by me going full-time,” she says.

She was doing an analysis that many parents — disproportionately mothers — have to run: Will they earn more at their jobs than child care will cost? For Spenceley, the answer was ultimately no. Working four days a week, mostly from home, she makes about $40,000 a year. Day care cost her between $13,000 and $21,000 a year. Adding a few more hours a week just didn’t seem worth it.

Free child care starting when their son was 3 eased child care costs a bit for the family — from about $1,700 to $1,065 a month — “but not as much as I’d hoped,” she says. That’s in part because the nursery school still charged an extra $260 a month to cover things like outings and lunches.

Now that their son is 5 and enrolled in public school, Spenceley’s family has more slack in their budget. Their main child care expenses now cover after-school clubs (about $20 a day) to fill the gap between when school lets out and when their workdays end, as well as summer or holiday camps when school is out. Spenceley once again contemplated picking up more hours at work — but was foiled by timing and the competitive after-care field: There were only 20 spots available in the program that would have fit her adjusted schedule, and 60 kids who needed them. “You have to get in quick,” she says.

And she’s still figuring out what to do about the six-week summer break. Unlike many families she knows, neither Spenceley nor her husband has family who live near enough to rely on in a pinch. Her mother-in-law can occasionally help, but is still an hour away. Spenceley is hoping her mother will come visit from New Zealand this summer and help look after her son. But he’ll still need to be enrolled in summer camps, and she and her husband are saving up vacation days to cover the gaps. “We get about 31 days [off] a year each, which is very generous — but it still won’t cover all the school holidays,” she says.

During the first five years of her son’s life, Spenceley says that using vacation time for an actual vacation was out of the question; it was just one of the adjustments the family had to make to afford child care. With the lower costs of a school-age child, a trip might be on the horizon, but financial constraints still loom. They’ve thought about having another child but are worried about being older parents and the cost. “It’s very costly for families if they have more than one child, so that’s something we’ve considered,” says Spenceley. “Now he’s at school, and we have a little extra income again and freedom to go on holiday … I felt like I didn't want to go back to that baby stage.”

The Canadian family going from a stay-at-home dad to day care waitlists 

Jana Matteau loves the flexibility and earning potential she has as a self-employed realtor. But the downside is that she was entitled to no maternity leave. Her husband, on the other hand, works in operations for a home building company. Thanks to Canada’s paternity leave policy, he could take time off work while still earning 40% of his regular income. So, following the birth of the couple’s first child in 2021, she went back to work after just four weeks, while her husband took a full year of parental leave. Matteau’s business was going well, so her husband spent an additional year as a stay-at-home dad. That likely saved the family thousands of dollars in child care, though it cost them his income.

But eventually Matteau’s husband wanted to start easing back into work, meaning they needed an alternative child care option. Like the U.K., Canada provides some limited child care subsidies. Its government is in the process of implementing a so-called $10 a day day care policy, which provides funds to licensed day care facilities to lighten the load on parents. In Ontario, where Matteau lives, there are already day cares offering discounted rates, but finding one is easier said than done. “There was such a day care shortage,” for all facilities, but especially lower-cost ones, she says. “If you’re not on the waiting list when you find out you're pregnant, you’re unlikely to get in.”

Matteau put her daughter on the waitlist and, in the meantime, enrolled her in an unlicensed home day care. Her daughter loved it there, but it cost twice as much as a licensed center would. There were other drawbacks too: If the woman who ran the day care was sick or suddenly unavailable on short notice, Matteau had to scramble to find an alternative solution.

She paid about US$40 a day for two days a week of care there for a year, until her daughter was admitted into a licensed, church-based center in a nearby small town. “It felt like a steal,” says Matteau. For $16 a day, her daughter got a hot lunch and two snacks that all followed strict nutritional guidelines, and had required daily outdoor time (weather permitting). “I knew the school would make two attempts a day to go outside, and there were no iPads, so when I came home from work and I needed to make dinner, I could pop on 30 minutes of TV or make her chicken nuggets and not feel guilty,” Matteau says. “It just removed some of that mom mental load.” Best of all, the center was staffed by three teachers — meaning no more scrambles for last-minute care if one got sick.

It wasn’t perfect, though. The day care center’s calendar started in September, but it only accepted children once they were 24 months old. Matteau’s daughter turned 2 in November, so she had to pay to hold her spot for two months before she could actually attend.

When Matteau and her husband welcomed their second daughter, they were a bit better prepared. The couple immediately put her on the waitlist for the same licensed day care center their older child attended. “When I got the call she was accepted from the waitlist, I didn’t even know what her name was going to be,” Matteau admits. “She was in their system as #2 Matteau.”

Now that Matteau’s older daughter is 4, she’s in her first year of public school. That’s crossed another line item off of the family’s budget sheet but comes with its own challenges. “No one prepared me,” says Matteau, pointing to the thousands of dollars she’ll likely have to pay for summer break. “It’s a huge learning curve. Where do these kids go for 12 weeks?”

And that doesn’t account for the inevitable sick days, snow days and unexpected days off. Her husband is more than willing to help, but he’s not self-employed like Matteau is. The question becomes, “Is he taking a sick day, or am I putting my business on hold?” she says. “I have a more flexible job. I am my own boss, so I’m just the default.” It’s a microcosm of a wider problem for women around the world, who have to decide between finding and budgeting for child care and putting their careers on hold.

“To me, this is the dumbest move,” she says, referring to the gaps in child care options and funding. “When you provide child care, women go into the workforce and make money that they then spend in the economy,” Matteau says. “And mothers are the ones driving that: We’re buying groceries; we’re putting kids in extracurricular activities.”

The American mom who set aside her social media money for summer camps

To figure out child care in the U.S., it takes a village — a group chat village, says Connell, the mom of four in Massachusetts. “We’re all sharing spreadsheets to manage child care, comparing costs, talking about who’s going where for which days of the week,” she says. “We’re all working in a broken system, so the best you can do is arm yourself with information.”

Connell has lots of information to share because, over the course of her four children’s lives, she’s tried virtually every form of child care, from au pairs to home day cares to after-school programs. But one thing was true of them all: Nothing was government subsidized, let alone free.

That’s because there are no universal federal child care subsidies in the U.S. The federal government allocates funding for child care to the states, but each state has different eligibility criteria. In Massachusetts, where Connell lives, a family of six like Connell’s would be eligible for child care assistance (which covers part, but not all, of the cost from early childhood until age 13, in most cases) only if they made $104,069 or less per year.

Connell was laid off from her corporate job a year and a half ago. But between her successful content creation business (which includes travel, speaking engagements and podcast appearances) and her husband’s work as an electrical lineman, her family makes about $300,000 a year. About $62,000 of that goes to child care alone.

Frustrating as the expense of child care is, Connell recognizes that most providers are struggling financially too (she herself has worked in day cares and as a nanny). If any problem arises — broken heating, plumbing issues — “that expense ultimately blows back on parents because there’s no child care subsidy.” The slim profit margins and low pay contribute to the U.S. child care shortage. And the challenge of finding just the perfect mixture of the right job, the right salary and the right child care creates rigidity that affects women, their families and the economy at large.

“It limits women’s career mobility because if they find a job where they’re paid well [and have] flexibility, and they know they can afford the child care that they have, they stay,” says Connell. “It’s like the golden handcuffs of parenting.” And that’s among the best-case scenarios; many Americans don’t have jobs with flexible hours, plenty of paid time off or sufficient salaries to cover their costs, including child care.

But the message Connell gets from U.S. society and policies is: “You chose to have kids, you knew it was expensive — figure it out,” she says. “When in reality it’s a very broken industry, and our economy is propped up by child care. We need to view child care as an infrastructure that we all benefit from — that the economy and society benefit from — but we view it as an individual issue.”