Muddling: How ad hoc childcare became the new normal for stressed parents like me

Last week, during lunch with a mum friend, a deal was proposed to me. If my friend dropped my two children at school every day, could she leave her newborn son at mine three mornings a week? Just until she’s done at the office at around 11am? I nearly spat out my coffee. She then suggested that she’d happily pick up my kids from school if, say, she suddenly had a work lunch she couldn’t get out of, which would mean she wouldn’t be around until 2pm rather than 11. “He’s no trouble, I promise,” she said, with slight desperation in her eyes. “He just sits in his bouncer cooing.”

I told my friend I couldn’t do it – “I have to work, too,” I said. An unusual request, though, this isn’t. More and more middle-class parents are opting for “muddling” – meaning to forgo expensive nannies or nursery school, and just hoping for the best with friends or family stepping in to help when need be. On the surface, this sounds ideal – it’s totally free of charge, after all. But rarely mentioned is the mental cost of it all. That, surely, is priceless.

According to the government’s latest Childcare and Early Years Survey of Parents, the number of parents using formal childcare has dropped to 47 per cent from 55 per cent in 2017 – something that highlights the new trend of juggling flexi-working and DIY childcare. The statistics are hardly surprising when spiralling costs are factored in – according to the Coram’s Childcare Survey 2024, the average cost of a full-time 50-hour-a-week nursery place for under-twos is £430 a week in London and £308 in the South East of England.

But some parents, like me, have also found themselves muddling when a childminder leaves suddenly and before you can find a replacement. It means you have to be resourceful. Childcare becomes ad hoc, reliant on whoever might be around. In my case, it was my dog walker. For others, it could be in-laws or neighbours. A mum I know, with three young children, has even drafted in her lodger. “She actually pays us to be the childminder!” she told me with glee. “We charge her £400 a month to rent our spare room and in return we get unlimited babysitting and one-and-a-half hours of help in the morning from 6.30am to get the kids up and ready for school.”

While these kinds of arrangements might ease the pressure on your outgoings, in reality they’re hell to maintain. All parents have on occasion stuck their children in front of an episode of Paw Patrol if they’re on a work Zoom call – but imagine doing that all the time? That’s what it feels like in these scenarios. When schedules and arrangements are so unpredictable, and can go awry at the drop of a hat, you feel perpetually on edge.

Once, when I had to collect a busload of kids from school and take them to a ballet class, I accidentally left one of my friends’ four-year-olds behind. She had just started reception that week, and I forgot she wasn’t still at nursery. I can barely remember what my own children are doing, let alone somebody else’s! But the poor mum had to dash from work and race to the school to get her. She was perfectly safe, I should say, and happily waiting in the school office, but her mum was rightly worried about the emotional impact of being abandoned at the school gate.

I can’t help but wonder whether this kind of thing is even worth it. Yes, an arrangement like that might give a parent an hour or two of peace and quiet to work, but there’s an enormous trade-off. If one child gets ill and their parent can’t help another parent with their child, it throws off the whole chain of ad hoc help. It’s like a domino effect, and we all end up crashing.

Dr Amanda Gummer, a research psychologist specialising in child development and play and the founder of goodplayguide.com, says “muddling” isn’t something to immediately reject. “It’s quite refreshing to see that childcare doesn’t have to be commodified,” she says. She points out that there is no “right or wrong” way to arrange childcare – no “one size fits all”. All that matters is that both the parent and the child are “comfortable and safe” with whoever is looking after them.

The advantage of community-based childcare is that “it’s a natural support network” and that “enduring friendships” can blossom as a result. Professional childcare, meanwhile, offers little room for flexibility and freedom. “There is more scope to build a den in the living room or go to the park,” she says. “If you have a very supervised schedule in childhood, you don’t get the opportunities to develop important skills such as taking initiative, decision-making, compromising and negotiating – they are really important transferable skills.” There are, though, red flags to be aware of if you’re considering an informal childcare arrangement, she says. “The team of community minders need to have agreed rules on nutrition, sleep times, safety and discipline. Otherwise, a child will get confused.”

Meanwhile, Marina Byrne – the founder of Educate Private, an international education consultancy based in London’s Holland Park – disagrees with “muddling” as a form of childcare. She says that for her own children, boys now aged 14 and 17, she often relied on tutors while she was working, who provided “educational play”. “It involved arts and crafts, timetables while doing football, researching something for a school project, or role play,” she explains. “Once when I came home, they’d made tiny clay creatures to reinforce what they were learning at school.”

Byrne is against a “laissez-faire” approach to childcare. “You can have children run amok [but] childcare shouldn’t be a permanent playdate. There needs to be a formal structure and boundaries – or it doesn’t work. When [it’s] lots of children doing whatever they want, there is a risk of an accident, not getting their homework done and not sitting down to mealtimes and eating properly.”

For me – and many other parents – the pandemic was when the seismic shift from formal to informal childcare took root. Lots of us began working from home rather than in the office. But it wasn’t until my long-term nanny left us that I really began experiencing the hardships of muddling. I’m a single parent without a husband to share the childcare duties, and I was lucky my dad stepped in to help me pay the childcare costs so I could keep my job. But when my nanny didn’t turn up at 8.30am on a Monday morning, my heart sank.

This was an abrupt departure – there was no gentle ease into muddling but a plunge. My eldest child Lola, then four, was heading to her first day at school, while I had Liberty, two, at home. After a few weeks of madness, something had to give. It was my mental health. I felt overwhelmed, and my rock bottom was when I had a deadline and put Liberty in front of her iPad in bed for six hours – she had her headphones in and a bag of Pom Bear crisps to munch on.

It’s an image I can never forget. I’d got my dog walker to take her to the park the next day, but that meant my dog Muggles had to stay at home – she couldn’t manage both. Muggles was confused and anxious, as was I. At one point I even asked a builder, who was putting up a fence at mine, if he’d mind watching my child while I did a phone interview. I knew this was inappropriate. I felt desperate. I didn’t have any relatives who were local and could be called upon. No amount of WhatsApp messaging to my parent friends, offering a playdate here and there in exchange, could alleviate the pressure.

I, like many others, ended up with insufferable “mum guilt”. I couldn’t work while also being present emotionally for my children. I’m not alone in finding muddling a nightmare: a mum friend told me just last week that her son took his first steps while she was on a Zoom call for work. “For me, it’s out of sight, out of mind when I’m in the office,” she said. “But this was even more frustrating because I was in the same room as him.”

I can understand wanting to save the £90-a-day fees for nursery, but the sad truth is that until children can go to school full-time, childcare is unaffordable for many parents. It’s a logistical nightmare even after school when you’re working. It is up to individual parents to decide which route they go down when it comes to childcare, but one thing is for sure: constantly relying on the unreliable and unpaid kindness of friends or family just isn’t worth it.