Why do so many posters hate mothers/children

Usually it's not about the parent and child spaces themselves, which I think most people vaguely support without particularly strong feelings either way. Those threads always go to shit though because inevitably someone comes along and likens them to blue badge spaces, and then someone else says that people with blue badges shouldn't park in P&C, and then someone else says they don't agree with elderly or disabled people without blue badges using P&C either. Basically, the threads descend into ableism that's nothing to do with parenting but doesn't paint parents in a great light.

I have seen many people abuse parent and child spaces - men and women.

Call me unreasonable, but why shouldn't they be? I have watched so many men (it's always single men in flash cars) park in parent and child spaces while I struggled to get the pram and car seat out of a cramped space with fast moving traffic in car parks. Why should something that is designated to make parents lives, especially those with young babies and young children, easier and safer be abused by an entitled few? And why do so many women defend it? People parking in these spots without children are generally entitled cunts.

How surprising, the OP never returned to back up her post

@ABirdsEyeView read up on child development and maternal health. Maternity leave is not just a jolly.

Lol, I actually had 13 months off, so please do roll in the indigation of it.

Lots of reasons but the main one being WOMENS RIGHTS and not reverting to the dark ages!

Why do you think your employer owes it to you to keep a job open and pay you to sah with your 10 month old? Why should that be more important to your employer than say, an employee who wants to stay home and nurse their dying parent? No one would expect that or feel an entitlement to it, even though it would be beneficial to the employee. There are lots of situations where an employee would benefit from sah for an extended period of time. Six months isn't nothing.

@Pigtailsandall I've had 4 kids - I know well enough how babies work I've had all sorts of experience working as a pg woman, going back to work, sah.
Still don't think any of it is the employer's responsibility to pay for - they've hired someone to do a job and it's not unreasonable to expect them to be there to do it.

Well said.

Personally I don't think having 6 months of paid leave would be that hard going or unreasonable to expect a return to work after that point

With due respect, I don't think this poster has much experience in how babies "work". My child had colic until they were 10 months old, and they cried incessantly. I didn't sleep longer than 4 hours a night (apart from few blissful odd nights) until then. There is no way I could have done my job at 6 months. I could barely walk. I also exclusively breastfed, and breastfeeding is proven to give babies the best start in life. Should I have lost my job?

What about single parents who have no shared parental help? Where do they stick their 6m old?

I have just hired a visibly pregnant women for my team. Attitudes only change if you strive for it instead of accepting status quo. We might not be Denmark, but that's not a reason to not strive for better conditions. healthier, happier parents at work benefit everyone; healthier, better educated kids benefit the whole society (including you, when they do your palliative care)

Yes it is noticeable but I also think there are many men on here now with not so honourable agendas or who are very conservative with a small C and have old fashioned views on how women should behave.

Give over @Goldenbear. Thinking that no one owes us a paid year off work every time we have a child, doesn't make me a man. I think 6 months at full pay would be pretty good. Obviously if an employer wants to offer more that's their prerogative, I just don't think they or the state should be compelled to.

Equality legislation is all very well and may protect existing employees, but it didn't stop employers from quietly not hiring young women as new employees, esp in smaller businesses where they just can't absorb the cost of it.

Having children is a societal and economic necessity and the government should be paying parents to be responsible parents and have children.

Raising a lot of children that will not contribute of course does not help the economy all that much.

I do think intolerance of just about every type has increased, but it is strange that mothers can get a tough time, isn't it?!

There does seem to be a lot of disdain and condemnation of mother’s and children on here compared to a few years ago. Cries of “it’s just disagreement” are so disingenuous. The difference is quite noticeable to those who have been on the site a while.

Why will Employer's default to employing men, does the Equality Act no longer apply to women as that very much feels like what you are advocating? Yes, if we want to regress as a society with women’s rights, not acknowledge the contribution they make to the economy when some of these selfish women ‘opt’ to give birth, lets just chip away at maternity rights, whilst all the while suggesting we are doing it for women’s benefit by preventing men from taking their jobs- are you a man by any chance?

That's very decent of you.

FWIW I don't think anyone should get out of working Christmas just because they have DC. If anything, I would have suffered more from working Christmas pre DC as Christmas happened 2.5 hours away at my parents so I would have been fully alone. Now, Christmas happens in my house, commutable to work. I'd just miss a few hours, but you can work around that - we always did the years my dad worked.

To be fair, I read some of my comments on the thread and I was a bit embarrassed - I was having a horrible time at work as someone had reported me to HR for refusing to work Christmas again and "discriminating" against working mothers, so I think I took that out on posters. I'd hope to be a bit less angry and more balanced these days.

Care to expand?

I read through it earlier and I think my description was pretty accurate.

Why, how does an Employer’s package of paternity leave impact you detrimentally? Employers who offer lucrative ones obviously realise the advantages for the company in doing this so why does it bother you?

Your summary wasn't very accurate was it?

Increasingly, employers are offering significant paternity leave - some are offering six months at full pay. Perhaps the answer is to offer generous packages to men and women. Reduces the impact on careers, and if men were engaged in the day-to-day care of their DC from the off that would do more for women than just about anything.

People aren't going to stop having babies because we have them for ourselves, not societal benefit. I'm massively in favour of good childcare provision etc. I'm just not in favour of paying women their salaries to sah for a year at a time, while the employer pays the bill. All that will happen is that employers will be reluctant to hire women where there's a male option. Unless you make men share leave after the first 6 months, so no tiny baby is in childcare. Which again I'd be supportive of, since mothers are disadvantaged by being the default parent at every stage.

If a person wants to be a sahp they can. What they can't do is be a sahp and bill the state or employer for it.

Eh? So you think address the problem of an ageing population with no worries about having any young people around and no taxpayers to fund the huge social care bill. Also, why would you incentivise people with all other options but not people with young families whose much needed skill set and taxes are absent from the workforce due to inadequate maternity and childcare provisions.

Babies are not robots that can align themselves with the capitalist economy they inhabit as said above unfortunately their needs cannot always be neatly wrapped up in six months! Not accommodating that just pushes mostly women out of the workforce longer than is necessary which makes zero economic sense.