I still remember looking at our first-ever nursery invoice and doing a double-take. Surely there had been a mistake? It looked less like childcare and more like a second mortgage.

We were both working, earning decent money, and there we were at the kitchen table doing the sum every couple with small children knows by heart: what is left of the second salary once the nursery has taken its share?

Jasmine and I hadn’t done that sum before, and the number shocked us. We had to work harder to find the Montessori childcare we wanted, and in the end handed most of one salary straight to the nursery.

We could only do that because we were lucky: two decent jobs and staying in work still made sense – but only once we factored in the lost pension and pay rises that come from one person stopping work.

When we were growing up, my mum never had to do those numbers. That’s not because things were easy (she raised three of us on her own), but because she had a village: neighbours who watched us after school, aunties who weren’t really aunties picking us up, and a front door where we and our friends came and went freely.

But more than any of that, she had something today’s parents do not: a cost of living that allowed a working person to get ahead, and rent or mortgage payments that a wage could actually cover.

The maths of my mum’s life were hard, but at least they added up.

Today the village has largely disappeared and in its place is a very big bill. A full-time nursery place for under-twos is almost £150 a week in England. The cost of raising a child to age 18 is now £250,000 for a couple, and £290,000 for a single parent, according to the Child Poverty Action Group – and that’s before anyone mentions university.

We are asking couples to take on a quarter-of-a-million-pound project with no deposit, often no savings buffer and not enough assistance. Then we wonder why the birth rate has hit a record low. It is not that this generation wants children less, it is that they have done the calculations and don’t like the answers.

There is, at least, one part of the story that has genuinely changed. Since last September, eligible working parents in England can claim 30 funded hours a week from when their child is nine months old.

The cost of a full-time nursery place for an under-two has since fallen by 39 per cent, according to the Coram Family and Childcare survey. That “second mortgage” I remember paying is, for many working families, finally shrinking.

But there are still some families who do not meet the work criteria and are paying more than before, and in some areas places are in fierce demand. At £325 a week, Wales is now the most expensive place in Britain for a full-time nursery spot for under-twos, the same survey shows.

And while the funding covers term time, it does not stretch to the school holidays, and never to a whole day.

We must find a way to solve this for families, because the government needs parents twice over: it needs them working today, and to make sure the taxpayers of 2050 are actually born.

Funded hours have genuinely changed the formula. Claim everything you are entitled to before you decide anything – don’t forget to apply for Child Benefit if you are entitled to it, or to take advantage of the tax-free childcare scheme, which lets parents claim up to £500 every three months towards the cost. The government’s Best Start in Life site sets it all out in one place.

But a warning for anyone doing the nursery bill versus salary sum at your own kitchen table, and wondering whether working still makes sense: please do it properly.

Do not just weigh a month’s nursery bill against this month’s take-home pay. Remember that taking time out of work carries a higher price in the form of lost pension contributions, missed pay rises, and losing out on progression.

Somewhere along the way, children have become the biggest financial decision most people will ever make – bigger even than the house – and yet we still expect couples to fund that decision on goodwill and stretched salaries.

So this is a call to both sides of the payslip. The funded hours prove the government can move the numbers when it chooses to. So finish the job: stretch the help across the school holidays and to the families being missed.

And to employers, meet parents halfway: flexible hours in the holidays, term-time contracts where the job allows, progression that does not punish the parent who leaves at five. Where that flexibility genuinely costs a business, government should help carry it, because it is still cheaper than losing the worker.

None of this is charity; it is arithmetic – every parent kept in work pays tax today, and every child helped into the world becomes the taxpayer of tomorrow.

The state has remembered it needs the village. Employers are part of that village too, and in a village everyone has to pay their share.