How to have both parents working?

Hi all, my wife quit her well paying job to follow me to Zurich for my work and she is itching to look for a new job. She has managed to attain fide German B1 after cramming lessons, but it's nowhere near adequate for a German speaking workplace. At the same time, we have a kid that we're currently sending to daycare but not for all 5 weekdays.

Our Swiss neighbour went right back to work shortly after giving birth by bringing her baby along to office. At 7 months old the baby was sent to daycare 5 days a week. She told us this is normal for working parents in Switzerland.

Do we send our kid to daycare 5 days a week? It doesn't seem to solve the problem of dinner if both parents are working.

Do we hire a nanny to take care of the kid instead and prepare meals?

We're trying to figure out how to make this work for my wife, so I would appreciate any other working parents' experience here.

well , it depends what your wife will earn on her job.

The swiss tax system prefers singles before families.

A place in the daycare for kids can be up to 4000 sfr per month

Swiss school system is not very friendly for working parents, but if your child isn’t even at school yet then probably in most countries day care or a nanny are your only options.

My sister in the U.K. went back to work 4 days a week, 3 of those the baby went to day care 8am - 5pm (parents staggered work start and finish times so one dropped off and one picked up), one day a grandparent looked after them. So you could do a combo of day care and child minder at home too.

I would advise to find a balance between investing your time in the kids and investing your time in work:

- if you invest time only in work, your kid will be miserable in the future and therefore you will be miserable too

- if you invest time only in kid (meaning one of you is not working at all) the stay-at-home partner can become miserable and therefore make the family miserable. The bonus disadvantage is that it will be extremely hard getting back to the employment market after a break of couple years.

You need to maintain being up-to-date with your profession and getting experience. That can be done quite easily working only on 60%.

How we do that:

My kids are 5 (kindergarten and daycare) and 3 (daycare) now. I work 100%, wife 80%. So the kids are 3 days with parent. From August I will switch to 80%, so the younger one will have parents (parent) for 4 days a week (we are clearly feeling she needs that time with us). That will last for one year, until she starts going to kindergarten (smaller costs for daycare).

Then we both will switch to 90%. But that missing 10% will not be for kids. We plan to do a full-day wandering every two weeks while kids will be in kindergarten and later in daycare. This is actually the third ingredient - maintaining your physical and mental health.

My daughter is a teenager and she has “survived” being rised in Switzerland by two full time working parents. She is not miserable.

How did it work? Full time daycare and lunch/afternoon program once in primary school. One parent to accompany her in the morning, the other to pick her up in the afternoon. Meals? A bit of planning and she had a home cooked dinner on the table every evening. Sport, activities? We were lucky to find things nearby where she could go by herself. A fantastic cleaning lady to take care of the house.

No hikes for us parents, little time for us and at times exhaustion. I don’t regret any moment. We have given to our daughter a model of independent woman and we have both progressed in our careers.

The money we spent in a daycare could have been enough for a nice chalet in the mountains.

How is one of you not able to prepare dinner on an evening, even when both are working? This is about as first-world as problems get, especially as working from home is now common and you could take turns to do so. I know of few professional desk-based jobs that are so inflexible where you cannot take an hour out here and there to do important things like make food and pick up kids... it's normal for people to do that kind of stuff here.

And obviously your wife needs to be looking at English-speaking roles for multinational companies, there are many such companies in Zurich and the surrounding Kantons. With B1 she has almost no chance of functioning in a purely German-speaking company.

Many posts on this subject so I suggest you do a search.

First of all, don't be put off by people who tell you that two working parents will damage a child. There is excellent parents who work and crappy parents who stay at home. Working or not does not make one a good parent. This kind of stigma your wife especially will encounter everywhere - she will be asked if she is working and what % followed by sighs etc. You will need to help her not feel the guilt.

As to practical stuff.

1) When the kids are not yet I the mandatory school years, I.e. before kindergarten which starts around 4.5 yrs, then it's the Krippe. A full time spot is likely to cost about 3k and they have long opening hrs. When my children where that age I worked part time 80% spread over 5 days and a lot from home. Even though it was an additional cost it worked better for me to drop them.off at 8:45 and pick them up at 16:15 versus 4 long days. Personal choice.

2) When they started KG my kids went to Hort for lunch and afternoon. This was actually harder to manage as the window of child care got smaller and by then I had changed job and was out of the house more. At this point both husband and I worked 90% alternating Fridays off so we could do lunch and afternoon with the children.

The other days, we alternated who left early and came home early and who left late and came home late. Late was never later than 19 (except from travel or business dinners etc). The parent who came home early picked up the kids from home and did dinner. At that time, our kids had dinner early and went to bed about 19:30. We then did our own dinner later. Again it worked for us as dinner for the kids was uncomplicated and then we had some adult time.

3) When they got in the first years of primary and started extra activities, we got a babysitter 3 or 4 afternoons a week - I forgot now. She would alternate between the kids and the other kid would be in Hort. She would take the child with that was with her to whatever activity and back and prepare kids dinner.

4) As they got older (4th grade and up) they started taking themselves to activities so then only went to Hort at lunchtime.

They are not tween and teen and do not bear any scar, in fact remember their babysitter fondly and also Hort allowed them to get to know so many local kids etc. So far not seeing any "damage".

Now... We spent A LOT in childcare. A scary amount. I am pretty sure at some point we were in the negative in terms of one salary just covering additional tax burden and childcare. And the amount of organization and relative rigidity in schedule is incredible.

So why do it? For us it was this:

1) None of us saw ourselves as stay at home parent. We both love what we do and do it well. We aspire to retire early and therefore wanted to earn as much as possible to put it aside.

2) We wanted the financial security that 2 jobs bring in case one of us would be laid off

3) We found it hard to spend a whole day with the children entertaining them

4) we looked at the cost of childcare as a long term necessary investment to keep employed, keep investing in our further education and keep putting money in the pension plan.

5) we wanted to show the kids both mom and dad work and help at home - an equal partnership was always important.

So is it possible, yes. Is it hard, hell yes. Is it worth it - who knows, that is a personal answer. I would do it the same all over again, perhaps with a few tweaks.

If you tell us what your wife does perhaps we can help with pointers?

My take on this: constellation very similar to Cinzia's, one child, now teenager, two (100%) working parents, Basel. My kid did a time-intensive sport for a number of years (when she was too young to go on her own, we hired a lady to take her there and bring her back home or to after-school care, depending on the day).

She was in full-time daycare since we came here. Meaning she had one warm meal every day, as did we (at each workplace). We mostly batch-cooked so that there would be leftovers every night, or a cold dinner. I would rather be doing other things - such as talking to my husband and kid and helping with school - than cooking, even just for three or four nights a week. I would shop for fresh fruits and veggies maybe three times a week, after work; getting home at 6:30-7 with shopping in hand, the last thing I wanted to do is cook nightly. We still do this.

Yeah, however you want to do it, daily or batch cooking, I just mean that it's not impossible to prepare food for evening meals when both parents work and I imagine millions of people in CH manage to both work and put some food on the table each day. You can make healthy and tasty meals with comparatively little prep time when you learn how.

you have to look at the specific daycare centre. ours opens only until 7pm so if both parents are working later than the daycare hours, then you'll need another solution. ours also restricts to max 10 hours of care (which is probably anyway the max for a small kid). so anything longer than an 8am - 6pm job needs supplemental

nanny is one option, but for only 1 kid, it will probably be more expensive than the already expensive day care option, but you might have more flexibility and the option to get lunch/dinner done too.

I think OP is referring to the situation where both parents are still at work when the kids need to eat.

Well yes obviously that its what they are referring to. but as I said in my post with modern working practises like home office and flexible working hours, that should not happen and at least one parent should be able to have some availability at evening dinner times for their child(ren). If both parents are working a job that allows zero flexibility for their children to allow for absolute basics like mealtimes then they are imo doing something really, really wrong.

The vast majority of managers in any professional workplace understand what having kids means and allow their staff some flexibility to deal with that.

I mean physically at work and not at home.

Are you actually reading the messages you are responding to? I'm saying that professional workplaces are generally flexible enough nowadays to avoid the situation of both parents not being home at dinner time for their kids happening.

I forgot to mention a key part of the support system - the neighbors!

We have amazing neighbors all around us many also who work and if really once in a while we both had to be out early or be home late, we could ask them for breakfast or dinner for our kids and they would then all go to KG/School together and we returned the favour when they needed it.

I do agree though that if both partners have super long hours and zero flex this is going to be extremely hard and then a choice needs to be made as not to feel in a permanent conflict situation. It's hard enough without this in addition.

Thanks all for the feedback, I think I've gotten the answer I needed from an amalgamation of several of your suggestions. It's very helpful. I think to make this work, we'd have to get a Keller freezer. We already do batch cooking for the toddler (multiple food allergies) which takes up the entire tiny refrigerator for just 2 days worth.

The kid isn't at the age where Hort is needed but I actually didn't know that was a thing. Will keep it in mind for a few years down the road. WFH helps with time management but we aren't sure how long this WFH thing will last. My official working hours are pretty late.

The point about hiring a nanny for just one kid being more expensive than daycare is a good one. I'll save that for the second kid if that ever happens.

Your reasons are pretty similar to mine. My wife and I both grew up with full-time working parents so I'm surprised that there's a stigma against it. The ironic thing is that the daycare teacher was surprised that my wife is jobless, so I had presumed it's the norm for both parents to work in Switzerland.

She was a 3D game animator. It is a very labour-intensive profession with lots of crunch time and long hours. The only viable game studio I have found here is Niantic, which doesn't have an animation department in Zurich. Freelancing may be the solution.

Cool job. That can surely be done from home, no? That would give you much more flexibility.

Does it have to be video games only? A quick google shows several 3D animation studios in Zurich, https://www.google.com/search?q=zuri...hrome&ie=UTF-8

The surprise is most likely because usually families with one jobless parent don't send their children to daycare.

In case you haven't seen some of the other threads related to this, you might like to look at:

https://www.englishforum.ch/educatio...g-parents.html

https://www.englishforum.ch/educatio...itzerland.html

https://www.englishforum.ch/family-m...elp-sites.html