The cost of childcare, especially if you have more than one child, can suck up one parent's pay.
The girl I know with the iPhone? She is one of my babysitters.
I am not the only mum weighing up the irony - and the accounts - of working to earn money to pay someone to look after your kids while you work.
Senior writer Ellen Irvine today reports that the cost of childcare and the loss of tax credits due to increased income mean some Western Bay parents are better off working part-time or not at all.
The previous Labour government left us the legacy of the Working for Families package.
Some families do well on this. Families who fall out of the income threshold and who still work, effectively become the working poor.
A mother in the report has two children under 5.
Her partner is in fulltime work and they get no government support.
If she went to work fulltime as a nurse, her weekly childcare bill would be $500.
In Tauranga, there is no evening or flexible daycare for mothers whose job involves shift work or is sporadic.
When women do the maths, they may find they are actually paying to go to work, with expenses not covered by the income they earn.
Finances are not the only reason for going to work.
Woman may want to continue careers and their contribution in the form of work.
This Government has pledged to reduce the cost to taxpayers of its $8 billion-a-year benefit bill.
It wants people to get out of long-term benefit dependency and trapped in a cycle of limited choices.
In other words, make benefit a less-cushy option for people compared with work.
Although Working for Families is handled by the IRD, so not strictly a benefit, effectively it has trapped working mothers into the same cycle: if you work and lose your credits, you are no better off, even worse.
There is another part of this equation, the most vital part: the children.
A mother who chooses to get Working for Families credits and stays at home is not a bludger on the sofa watching the Kardashians.
She is doing her most important job of raising her children.
Not only do some working mums earn little after paying childcare, they also pay the terrible cost of not being fully available for their children.
In other countries, governments have put the onus on employers.
The UK has flexible working legislation under which employees who care for someone have the legal right to ask for flexible work hours.
Solutions companies have come up with include job sharing, working from home, flexitime or compressed hours (working full-time hours but during fewer days), annualised hours, or staggered hours to accommodate school drop-offs.
Some large international companies such as Westpac have even tried workplace creches.
In New Zealand, the right to flexible working is not law.
In Tauranga, where there are a large number of small employers, such measures may be hard to accommodate.
However, it is something the Government and private sector need to engage in.
In the meantime, women can at least ask their employer the question.
