Daycare costs are exactly what stopped my wife and I from moving to UK, and instead had me accept a significant salary cut in order to negotiate fully remote work.
Parallel reply asks where do you live now with cheap childcare, giving number like $1600/kid. Here in Kraków, Poland, it's more like 1400 PLN (~$325), and most private facilities are enrolled in a program that makes the city cover half of that. At kindergarten level, there's enough good, public facilities available, that you only have to pay if you want some usual/experimental facility.
Of course, there's a cost-of-living difference between Poland and UK/US, but it's not that big - relatively speaking, daycare here seems 2-4x cheaper anyway. It's one of increasingly many things that make me think Poland is the goldilocks zone of Europe - all the benefits of first-world development, with little to no drawbacks.
Yeah, I'm in Prague. Here it's ~$700/child -- but I'm sending the kids to a special English-language daycare, which is more expensive than most others. The quality of care here is just as good, or better, than what I've seen elsewhere at much higher prices.
I spend quite a lot of time in Croatia, and it's just as inexpensive over there.
Central Europe is indeed a good place to be right now.
Parallel reply asks where do you live now with cheap childcare, giving number like $1600/kid. Here in Kraków, Poland, it's more like 1400 PLN (~$325), and most private facilities are enrolled in a program that makes the city cover half of that. At kindergarten level, there's enough good, public facilities available, that you only have to pay if you want some usual/experimental facility.
Of course, there's a cost-of-living difference between Poland and UK/US, but it's not that big - relatively speaking, daycare here seems 2-4x cheaper anyway. It's one of increasingly many things that make me think Poland is the goldilocks zone of Europe - all the benefits of first-world development, with little to no drawbacks.