When kids start school, childcare gets harder

Everyone says work and family life will get easier once your child starts school. But for many working parents, school creates a new childcare problem.

August 12, 2026 · 6 min read

When you have a baby, every parent who’s been there tells you the same thing: hang on, it gets easier once they start school. So you hang on. Through the night feeds, the toddler years and the nursery drop-offs. You tell yourself the structure will arrive in September of that magic year. It doesn’t. Not the way they promised.

Nobody prepares you for the planning. The impossible planning. Two working parents. School starts at 8.30 and ends at 15.30. Wednesday afternoons finish at 12. Our child goes to school for 2.5 hours on a Wednesday. That’s not even enough time to clean the house properly. And that’s before you get to study days, school holidays and eight weeks of summer holiday.

I’m not arguing for longer school hours. By June, the kids are exhausted and they need that long break. The problem isn’t the school calendar. The problem is that nobody tells you how hard that calendar is going to collide with your working life.

What is the childcare cliff for working parents?

The childcare cliff happens when full-day nursery is replaced by a patchwork of before-school care, after-school care, Wednesday afternoons, study days and school holidays. Here is the uncomfortable truth: for parents with babies now, it may not get easier when school starts. It gets difficult in a different way.

When your child starts school, the full-day crèche disappears. What replaces it is a patchwork. Before-school care. After-school care. Wednesday afternoons. Study days. Weeks of school holidays. Often in different locations, run by different organisations. The structure that held your working day together quietly falls apart in the year your child turns three.

The Flemish data is blunt about this. The Gezinsbond Gezinsbarometer found that half of parents struggle to bridge the long summer holiday. A third struggle with the other school holidays. Summer is the biggest pressure point of the year. And the hidden infrastructure that has been holding the school year together? Grandparents. Three in four parents who don’t cover Wednesday themselves rely on grandparents. Four in ten rely on them for after-school care. One in three for the morning school run.

But that infrastructure is becoming less reliable. There are more dual-earner households. More single-parent households. More grandparents still working. I remember my niece, now 12, going back to nursery during summer because that was the crazy period when the nursery still had space. I know people who took parental leave at 80 or 90% so they could be there for school pick-ups. The other days, grandparents covered.

Now I mostly hear different versions of the same problem. Women who have already used parental leave and unpaid leave before nursery even properly starts because there was no place. Grandparents still working full time. Or grandparents living in a different country entirely. We cannot sit around waiting for politics to solve this. Not anytime soon.

Why could school-age childcare in Flanders become harder from 2026?

From 2026, funding for school-age childcare in Flanders moves to municipalities, and many local authorities have warned that the change could mean fewer places, higher costs or both. Funding for school-age childcare is shifting under the decreet Buitenschoolse Opvang en Activiteiten.

The VVSG, the umbrella organisation for Flemish municipalities, has warned that four in five municipalities fear the change will make combining work and family harder, not easier. Three in ten expect to operate with up to 40% less budget. That creates an obvious risk: fewer places, more expensive care, or different provision depending on where you live.

We’re lucky. Our three village schools are connected to a childcare service that offers after-school and holiday cover. But plenty of parents are sitting behind their laptops at the exact minute registration opens because the places can be gone five minutes later. Our village childcare has been compared to scoring a Tomorrowland ticket. You’ve got to laugh, right?

How does school-age childcare affect parents’ careers?

The school years often arrive just when parents are expected to step up at work, take on more responsibility or move towards leadership. Here’s the part nobody really puts on the table. The pressure at home and the opportunity at work often arrive in the same decade.

The Gezinsenquête 2021 from Departement Zorg shows some of that pressure. Twenty-four percent of parents often come home emotionally exhausted from work. One in three misses family activities because of the hours work demands. More than one in five has had to refuse a child an extracurricular activity because they couldn’t organise the transport around work.

The longer-term research on the motherhood penalty shows something even more uncomfortable: children can affect women’s career outcomes long after the period of reduced working hours has passed, particularly among highly educated women. That is the part I worry about. Not simply that someone works 80 or 90% for a few years. But that a temporary childcare solution quietly becomes a long-term career consequence.

We can have a long discussion about working hours, but it won’t solve anything tomorrow. We can look for jobs with more flexibility, but those roles are not always easy to find. What I refuse to accept is that someone’s career should go down the drain because school starts at 8.30 and ends at 15.30. Working 80 or 90% can absolutely still support a career. But staying visible and keeping career progression in the conversation becomes much more important when your working pattern changes.

What can working parents do about school-age childcare?

You cannot fix the school calendar alone, but you can reduce some of the pressure by planning earlier, sharing the load more deliberately and using the support that already exists. You need practical moves.

Plan the year backwards from the school holidays

Summer holidays and study days are often known months in advance. Treat them as fixed planning points rather than surprises that arrive in June. Start with the difficult periods: the eight-week summer holiday, autumn break, Christmas, Easter, study days and Wednesdays. Then work backwards.

Make Wednesdays and school holidays a household decision

The childcare load should not automatically land with one person. Who takes which Wednesday? Who adapts their work schedule? Who checks registrations? Who books camps? Who takes leave? If it quietly lands on the same person every time, that is not only logistics. It is a pattern.

Build a small group of parents you can swap with

I heard a great story about a single mum who set up a rotation with five other parents who occasionally covered each other’s kids. One parent picking up three children on a Monday can save another parent 40 minutes. The same applies to sport and hobbies. Carpooling may mean you drive once every four weeks instead of every week.

Yes, trusting other people with your children can be hard. It is still an option.

Use what already exists

After-school care. Holiday care. Dienstencheques. Employer contributions towards holiday camps, where available. Activities organised by the school or municipality. Boring, perhaps. But practical. And sometimes practical is exactly what you need.

Talk to the school

Our school runs Multimove twice a week from 4 to 5pm for kindergarten children. Small groups. Sport with a teacher. No extra driving for me. That hour makes a real difference. Most working parents I speak to would happily pay for more activities like this. If it doesn’t exist at your school, it may be worth asking the ouderraad what could realistically be organised.

Keep your career in the conversation

If childcare logistics are at their heaviest during the exact years promotions and bigger opportunities appear, do not let your career quietly disappear from the conversation. Do not assume your manager knows you still want progression. Do not let reduced hours automatically become reduced ambition.

Sometimes the solution is very practical: block 15.30 to 17.30 for the kids, switch with your partner and finish your work later. Sometimes it means being much clearer about your availability. Sometimes it means explicitly saying that you still want the project, the responsibility or the promotion even if your working pattern looks different. Is it easy? No. Is it sometimes workable? Yes.

Why using after-school care is not a parenting failure

Using after-school care, holiday care or longer school days does not mean you are failing your child. A mum told me recently that, as a single parent, she had to keep her children at school longer from day one. She was the only financial contributor and had limited support. She felt guilty about it for years.

Then Covid hit. She was working from home. The kids were home. They watched TV while she worked. That’s when the guilt cracked. Was that really the better alternative? Were her kids better off at home staring at a screen while she finished her to-do list, instead of at school with their peers?

You will not have it all every day. Being a working parent means making choices. Some days your career moves more slowly. Some days your child stays at school an hour longer. Both can be fine. What isn’t useful is letting guilt consume a decision your family needed in order to function.

This is a known, predictable squeeze. Not a personal failure to cope. Naming it is the first move.

Sources

• Gezinsbond, Gezinsbarometer.
• Departement Zorg, Gezinsenquête 2021.
• VVSG, reporting on the decreet Buitenschoolse Opvang en Activiteiten.
• Research on the motherhood penalty and long-term career outcomes.

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