The best era to be a single mum

[madcatladyforever]

I was thinking about how easy it was to be a single mum when I had my son.
It was 1983, childminding was really cheap if you wanted to work, if you didn't they had single mum hostels that were not luxury but ok and from there you could move straight into a council house which you could buy later on when you went back to work, benefits were (compared to universal credit) pretty good.
I always went out to work and bought my own home which was a lot harder.
But most of my friends chose the council house route, later bought their homes when they went back to work and have lovely homes today worth a lot of money.
It must be gruelling to be a single parent today. What do you think?

It was definitely easier in the late 90s early 00s.

I had £100 pwk after rent. That was plenty for me and one baby. Food was cheap. I couldn’t go on holidays or run a car but I didn’t need to worry about food or staying warm.

Even really poor people got council houses then bought them a few years later. A windfall no one in this generation can hope for.

Suspect @MyhorseMyfreedom may be some kind of name changing goady fucker tory

Agreed.

I got around £314pw in my hand in benefits & still got full housing & council tax benefit which equates to £170pw. Even when I went back to work part time I was still bringing in roughly the same & receiving full HB & CTB with free childcare from my parents.

Really? How many children did you have? Those figures look really suspicious.

In the 80s there was still a massive stigma towards single parents, I know the few kids of single parents were badly bullied at school, I remember a GRange Hill plotline about whether a single mother should be a teacher.

When my parents split up mid 80s there was a lot of shame on the part of my mum, she was too scared to even tell her own family. I don't think the benefits she got were generous at all, obviously I don't know numbers but the electric would often go off and have to be seriously rationed. It took a few months for my mum to get on her feet and get a job, I think there might have been top up benefits and we were ok financially then but still a very modest lifestyle.

Were there mechanisms to collect maintenance? I think the CSA was set up in the 90s, not to get money for single mums but to make dads pay towards the benefit bills.

Whether myhorsemyfreedom Is a troll or not,so many think and have acted like that.
Why do you think there were so many 16 hour a week jobs advertised.
Because that was the golden number for maximum benefits and minimum work.If employers wanted staff those were the hours they had to offer.
On Universal Credit now the basic payments for not working are pretty dismal.Work and you still get benefits but tapers off the more you earn.
Play it right previouly and you could be looking at getting total money into house of 20 30 thousand.
So people would have kid after kid
Now it is changing.
Benefit cap to bring it more in line with what working people earn.
Two child limit.Well you can have as many as you want but you only get paid for two.
Once on Universal Credit,once child hits three,out to work you go.
LHA don’t pay what it used to.It used to be working people would have to compete with those on benefits as LHA was far more generous.
Council housing for single and pregnant is no longer an automatic.
You could be placed in temporary or B and B,and depending on area have to move out to a cheaper area to be housed and more often than not you will have to go into private renting and have to top it up out of your other income or benefits.

And yes there was a lot of benefit money sloshing about.
I think the housing benefit bill alone was up to 25 billion a year.
Know of one woman who had seven kids and husband worked part time shelf stacking.So 16 hours worked between two hours and a large sum going into the house.Enough to enable a two cars.
None of that is going to happen anymore.
Do think this will be felt in the economy,but it should not have got so generous in the first place.

My mother was a single parent for my last 4 years at school. I remember it as being a quite bleak time when we struggled at times for heating and food. It was the Major years.

Definitely the Blair years. A LOT of girls I went to school with were pregnant before they were 16 and have done ok - all have homes for life and have never worked or worked weekend jobs waitressing etc. One of them was in the paper years ago for having three children by the time she was 17 which would be unthinkable now as to how you'd even get through the day to day but she did fine.

@Gingerkittykat that was for 3 kids:

CTC @ £65 per child per week
CB @ £48 per week
IS @ £70 per week (replaced with WTC & wages when working part time)

HB @ £550 per month
CTB @ £140 per month

This was 2010-2013 - Kids were also eligible for free school meals & school clothing grant - looking back it was a ridiculous amount of money & certainly a lot more than I needed to cover the basics. I also received around £350 per month in child maintenance which paid for holidays, activities & days out.

Adding that up gives an annual take home of around £28,000 given that my current take home (wages, benefits & maintenance) is £20,000 working full time it's a big drop. Essentially I've lost the equivalent of the HB & CTB but I now have to cover those costs from my income & although they've decreased as I've moved to a HA property rather than a private let it's a real time drop of around £5,000 in disposable income after housing costs.

Although the eldest isn't eligible for CB etc due to age she's still in education so is still financially reliant on me & in a couple of years DD2 will be the same & my income will drop further due to not receiving CB etc for her.

But if I didn't work at all I'd be screwed!

So while it's definitely worse for single parents just now & working full time may make them worse off in the short term I'd definitely recommend it as once the kids money stops you're on your own with UC which for me being unemployed living in my current property would be around £755 per month with £370 of that for my housing costs.

I was a single Mum when my 3 were teenagers, i had no money from their father, my rent was £1150 a month and coucil tax £120 ish i worked from 6 in the morning til midnight most nights i had an hour off to see the kids to school and another when they got home to make their dinner and say hello . I paid the bills, the council offered me £4 a week housing benefit and told me "to go back to where i came from" i told them to shove their £4 up their backside.

I was a single mother for a period in the 90s. I got housing benefit. I decided to go to UNI to better my earning potential and got a full grant.
I had child benefit which you could choose to have weekly from the post office and I would go straight to Tesco with it.
Because there weren't all the qualifications needed (and I'm not saying this is a good thing for child protection) I was able to work as a childminder so I could parent my own kids while earning cash.
It was certainly not easy. I was always watching the pennies (plus I was on my own with 3 LOs!) But I don't remember ever being afraid of not having a roof over my head or food and clothing for my kids.

I became a single mum in 2015 (before UC) I remember it being ok when I was on income support. I didn't have a car to run though, it was tight but manageable.

However, I was a slave to the system. It was the time the awful George Osborne and David Cameron were in government and were trying to slash benefits to its minimum.

I remember being scared shitless, the law to slash tax credits would pass. It didn't. That time made me realise I had to get a good job.

I went to college then university to train in a new career.

I am now on 28k (starting wage) which will go up substantially.

I am better off in my full time wage than on benefits. I feel sorry for the women who stay on benefits instead of using that time to better yourself.

Your children will grow, laws will change so be a independent person with your own income.

I am better off in my full time wage than on benefits. I feel sorry for the women who stay on benefits instead of using that time to better yourself.

You don’t sound sorry, you sound patronising. Most women I know who are without work and in benefits are carers for disabled children, disabled themselves, both, or in one very sad case, terminally ill.

I don’t think there’s even much of a workless underclass out there any more.

Your children will grow, laws will change so be a independent person with your own income.

You also have to bear in mind that those of us who can earn graduate salaries are the lucky ones. Some people will always be on NMW.

@TottieandMarchpane 👏

It was ridiculous that income support was paid to provide a sahp until a child was 16!

But it wasn’t all easy- maintenance got taken off £ for £ so no top ups as pp mentioned.

My Mum was a single parent twice, once in the 80's for 2 or so years when she suffered terrible stigma and isolation. It did not help that we lived in a very rural area, and she had a white child (me) and a mixed race child (my sister). I was too young to remember it back then.

She then became a SP again in the mid 90's, by then she had 4 children. I dont know the ins and outs of her benefits payments, but we were poor. She worked 5 evenings a week in a factory and I watched my brothers who were a baby/toddler then, while I was around 12/13. It was hard work and my schoolwork suffered, but I knew that we needed it to survive, pay the rent and be able to eat. We had an electric meter and it would often go out. I remember hiding from bailiffs.

The fathers rights movement has been a huge impediment to single mothers - both married and (especially) unmarried

The law does not confer "fathers rights". It confers rights upon the child - to have a meaningful relationship with both parents. I find it incredible that, in this day and age, there are still such backwards views around that this is a bad thing. Thank god the rest of the world is a little more enlightened!

There is a wealth of evidence that kids whose fathers are involved in their lives have better life chances across a swathe of indicators - fewer mental health issues, better academic outcomes, fewer addiction issues, fewer teenage pregnancies, healthier relationships of their own. The fact that some women still argue that this is a bad thing is bizarre.

Yes, there is a problem with a minority of men who abuse. Tackle that by tackling the abuser. Not by arguing that the right to a relationship with their father should not be protected for the vast majority of children who do not have abusive parents.

But it wasn’t all easy- maintenance got taken off £ for £ so no top ups as pp mentioned.

Only until 2010 when they realised that maintenance wasn't guaranteed & children were living in poverty & single parents were unable to pay the rent due to this rule.

I've been on my own. For 17 years

I had to go back to work when DD was 4 months old, as I wouldn't have got paid

I'm still on the waiting list for a council house. I have never qualified

I did get access to a council nursery and just had to pay the meals.

I've had child benefit. That's it.

I do think that now the maternity benefits are better but confess to not knowing too much about other benefits now

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