I left the UK because I didn’t want my son to grow up in nursery

As I am writing this, on the tropical island of Mauritius, I am watching two of my chickens take a dust bath under an avocado tree outside my home office. Yesterday, I made spinach pasta for my toddler from scratch. Later, I will take him and our golden retriever to the beach. It is a life so ludicrously wholesome I can hardly believe it’s mine.

Not so long ago, I led a chaotic existence in London as a single, mid-30s, hard-working, heavy-drinking full-time journalist and very nearly ended up as a statistic – one of the many millennial women who are either postponing or avoiding motherhood altogether. Thus, I narrowly avoided contributing to our nation’s fast-declining birth rate. Official data published in October showed the fertility rate in England and Wales collapsed to a record low in 2023, a problem with real ramifications in the near future.

Happily, despite once writing for this very paper that I would never get married (a meaningless, old-fashioned construct, I thought) or have kids (I have always preferred animals), I met the man in 2020 who would change my mind. He is now my husband and the father of my child.

Soon after that, however, I was staring down the barrel of another all-too-common situation I didn’t want to be in: the role of an exhausted mother working like a maniac just to pay an assortment of strangers at a nursery to raise my son.

The UK has long been among the most expensive, when it comes to childcare, of all rich countries, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Ludicrously, it’s more costly than owning a house – even despite soaring interest rates, the monthly cost of putting a child through nursery now exceeds mortgage repayments in many areas of the country. This is a national disaster, as far as I’m concerned, with no solution in sight.

I know this is going to make me sound anti-feminist, but let’s not delude ourselves, a great number of mothers in the workforce are not there because they enjoy it but because they have to be. The same goes for fathers, of course. According to a study by LinkedIn, 85 per cent of people in general dislike their job. But due to the nature of biology, mothers forced to be apart from their children when they’re miserable at work feels particularly cruel.

So while I’m all for women having the opportunity to develop careers, I don’t think society benefits from the majority of them being expected and required to. Especially given that raising children at home is an admirable and demanding job in itself – albeit unpaid.

I’m lucky in that I genuinely like my job as a writer. I loved the career I had carved out, working on staff for this publication, and left it with a heavy heart before Jasper, now two and a half, was even born. I had to quit because, thanks to our country’s mad immigration laws, my husband, a German helicopter pilot, doesn’t qualify for a visa to live with us in the UK, so we had to move temporarily to Iceland. But even if I’d stayed in London, kept my job and taken maternity leave, I doubt I would have had the emotional steel to return to the office and leave Jasper, during the most formative months of his life, in the hands of a nursery.

It’s impossible to say this without enraging a whole legion of mothers, but having combed through the research, it simply does not appear to be beneficial for a child under the age of two or even three to be in a nursery environment – and can often be detrimental. Countless long-term studies have indicated that extensive time spent in non-maternal care in early life has negative effects that persist into adulthood.

An oft-quoted landmark study from Oxford University’s department of child and adolescent psychiatry found that: “Children who spent more time in daycare centres were more likely to be hyperactive”, and “children receiving more care by childminders were more likely to have peer problems”. The study, based on an analysis of infants from almost 1,000 families, showed that the strongest influence on children’s emotional and behavioural outcomes came from within the home itself. For many parents, this notion is common sense, but for most, it’s not a choice.

I watched as the mothers from my English NCT group returned to work one by one, distraught to be leaving their tiny babies because they just couldn’t afford not to. Some of my contemporaries went back part-time and struggled with what looked like the worst of both worlds – trying, all while being chronically sleep-deprived, to sustain a career and be chief executive of their household during their “time off”. Others, like me, couldn’t stand being separated from their infants (and paying extortionate costs for the privilege), gave up their jobs and were forced to downsize, drastically cut back or move away to cheaper areas.

After a year-long stint in Iceland, where we kept our living expenses low and nearly froze to death, a job opportunity arose for my husband in Mauritius. When I assessed the price of expat life on this Indian Ocean island, it was a no-brainer.

For the same price as I would pay to live in a tiny flat in London, we rent a modern, four-bedroom house on the ocean with a pool and a garden large enough for our dog, three cats and four chickens. The local nursery, which is excellent, according to my friends whose children attend, costs £150 per month for five days a week, 8am-noon. In London, by comparison, a part-time nursery place costs up to £872 a month.

When Jasper is old enough, I think he’ll benefit from the socialisation a few hours of regular nursery brings – but for now, I can’t bring myself to do that. Instead, we have a nanny who comes from 9am to 1pm so that I can work as a freelance writer on weekdays – a role that exercises my brain and maintains my sanity. She costs less than £5 an hour, which is high for local standards. In London, an experienced nanny costs triple or quadruple that.

Of course, we’ve had to make sacrifices in fleeing the UK. I miss my mother terribly; and she misses her only grandson. I pine for Tesco, and Amazon Prime, far more than I’d like to admit. Internet shopping doesn’t exist here, and it’s hard to source Marmite. The pace of life in Mauritius is slow, which is all very well when you’re on holiday, but infuriating when you need to get anything done in a hurry. It gets unbearably humid during the summer months. Avoiding mosquitoes and gargantuan cockroaches is impossible. And while there are plenty of English-speaking expats here, I miss the pure-bred British sense of humour.

But on balance, the vast amount of space and sunshine we have, the low cost of childcare when I need it, and the fact that I can work just enough to contribute financially, and to keep my brain ticking over, but not so much that I’m knackered and guilt-ridden are all luxuries we couldn’t dream of affording in the UK, and certainly not in London.

Now that I’m accustomed to this way of life, I doubt I could ever return to my homeland. Not unless we won the lottery, and even then, not under this Government. I’m angry for all the women who are stuck in a system from which they can’t escape. I genuinely fear for the generations of kids who have not been raised by their mothers.

As for us, we won’t stay in Mauritius forever. Our plan next is to buy a cheap, run-down farmhouse to renovate in rural Tuscany where we can grow our own vegetables, and get on the property ladder there. In Italy, there are plenty of schemes which aim to repopulate the countryside by incentivising young families to settle – in some areas, they’ll even pay you tens of thousands of euros to move there.

While this sort of set-up is only possible when one or both parents can work remotely – a huge modern advantage – it does, in another way, encourage families to step back in time. To a period when living costs were such that households weren’t dependent on two incomes, and children could grow up around their mothers. Wherever we end up living, that’s a non-negotiable for me. I’m just sad my own country is in no position to enable it.