As I am a soon to be dad the talk of crèche fees has suddenly started to appear in my day to day conversations with greater regularity, a part of me thought ‘how will the recession affect crèches?’. One part says ‘people will use a crèche more in order to work more hours so they can get by’ and another is countering with ‘if one person in a couple is made redundant then they may opt to stay at home and mind children rather than work to afford somebody else doing the same for them’. Having talked it through with several colleagues the opinion seems to be that if they, or their partner were to find themselves out of work that the choice of staying at home to mind the children would be a viable option.
The interesting point in modern Ireland is that a homemaker parent is no longer standard middle class in their profile, they tend to be either lower income or higher income, and the middle class are predominantly the ones where …