TBH, in your situation, you need to either do proper bangernomics, (i.e. buy really cheap and either do DIY repairs, or scrap it when it goes wrong) or buy a cheap, small, year old car, with a warranty, so someone else foots the bill. (And if the kids don't like being squashed up in the back of a supermini, they can catch the bloody bus!)
Anything in between is potentially going to cost you big bucks at some point.
Personally I've the skill and equipment to do most repairs, but no time. So I suck it up and pay someone else to do it.
And as an aside, anything sold within the last ~8 to 10 years, the difference in reliability is pretty much statistical noise. The best and worst are within a couple of points of each other. The killer is the cost of repair.