You seriously need to step back and take a long hard look at yourself and why you are justifying some things unless you want to use what's left of your life to become part of the problem!
It’s the law. Schools cannot charge for anything related to the curriculum, including cookery ingredients. Including school trips. Including text books Including any other materials required for the curriculum. That has never stopped them, especially if it’s a ‘niace’ school that some WC parent has the audacity to think is good enough for their child too!
At best you seem to think if schools you have known do X this means all schools do, and for all children. Wrong and if you're a teacher making that claim, you're already part of the problem.
How exactly am I ‘responsible’ for lack of heating and hot water if I couldn’t afford to replace the boiler and had to save up for a couple of years? Because you’re their bloody parent!
We’ve lived without heating and hot water on tap on and off for years, along with lots of other things. Who's responsible for the conditions my kids get to live in? I am, whether it's my 'fault' or not!
I’ve done my best to lower the impact and keep things as light as possible in the worst of it, but I’d say one clear measure of deprivation is when your parent says they aren’t responsible for whatever they can’t manage to do, not do, fix, or put right.
That view is formed from growing up in truly utter squalor with no one taking responsibility. I was six when I understood I was on my own with everything. I still remember the day it dawned on me where I stood and how alone I felt. It was a good lesson for later street sleeping.
I flitted from that to in and out of so called ‘care’ and straight to street homeless as preferable. I know what rough is, I know what deprivation is. I’m still suffering the cumulative effects of it donkeys years later.
I'm a cliche with too many children and abandoned step-children. I didn’t have much choice, but I had the choice to keep them, and with that comes the responsibility to meet their needs. I’ve never had more than one meal a day, and not always that. There’s never been enough money to go around, but there’s been enough love to mainly soften the edges of it all.
My children have been raised with as much love and ingenuity as I could find for them, and next to my background have never been deprived, because I shoved their cold pillows up my jumper to warm them while they giggled, and used precious electricity on hot water bottles, and morning washes. I got clever with ‘one to swim’ at the baths and everyone sneak into the showers to keep the whole family clean and some washing there and in every public toilet hand basin, until I found a job that I could sneak it into. I bleached the mold constantly and put the kitchen out of bounds when the floorboards started giving out.
I’ve turned them out with nit free hair, clean clothes, polished shoes, homework completed and read to every school day and buoyed up to deal with attitudes of their peers and teachers if need be. It seems to have pissed of a lot of people in our path.
If it was culture and free, we went, even if we didn’t belong, and got what we could from things. I taught them a cat can look at a king, and we were eco aware a long time ago, so how to fix so much, and how to turn others out casts into useful items and how to budget with SFA. That’s all the good side, the rest I can only be grateful that they accept I did what I could as I best I could, but it did impact on them, especially socially. Too well looked after for the slummy mummies, and too deprived for the yummy mummies, we fitted nowhere.
Our biggest problems always came from those who thought their job was to report us to someone, anyone, so a mythical 'someone else' would make things better! Except they never did. They exhausted me, signposting us round in circles, tried to force me into writing begging letters to charities that couldn't help us, because most of it was down to poor SH. They interfered, inquired, and did SFA to actually improve anything and added so much stress and misery.
They clucked, tutted, head tilted, pearl clutched, and asked if I'd like to take time of to do parenting classes while admitting my parenting wasn't the issue, wrote easily ignored letters to everyone, and teachers started to do stupid things like search my children's lunchboxes and tell them 'home made houmous wasn't acceptable because how would the school know much sugar or salt was in it and wouldn't they just love potato Twizzlers etc instead? When they said no, it was suggested I must be behind it. ( I was, we're veggie and I'd taught them nutrition!) Then they started trying to get the kids to see some of their food (Kale and spinach in particular) as not 'normal' for them to like. Thanks!
School also suggested that we were too poor to follow a vegetarian diet based on the nutritional content of their poor quality school dinners!
Having failed to change anything but our trust, SS tried to get the kids into voluntary care, so I could 'have some time to myself' to magically sort out everything that they couldn't and hadn't.
They taught my lot not to trust others, I never had to.
I also know that next to much of MN they are deprived, and I failed them. I’m responsible for every single bit of it, regardless of how ‘unfair’ the circumstances or the world may have been to me.
So stop kidding yourself and take ownership instead of saying it’s alright for children to have to live like that because yours did! Because while we may have to, it isn't OK in a 1st world nation..
I’ve raised resilient, reasonably ambitious, (some just is out of our reach) youngsters, and I take full responsibility for the good and the bad, and the end result is they’re notably responsible amongst their peers.
Having had to teach myself if I wanted to learn, and in traffic, and understanding what a life changing skill it can be, the biggest most life changing skill I gave each of them as soon as their feet would touch the pedals, was to take them to safe off road places and teach them how to drive!
If you have few other skills or education, being able to drive anything will carry you a long way in this world.
I don’t actually disagree with you over school meals but we only ever had ones that really weren’t nutritious, but my kids got good packed lunches, lots of their peers would have been left with nothing if their mothers had had to step up.
As to housing, I agree, but reality nowadays is many SH housing is appalling standards and just another contracts money making scheme for those at the top so you end up maintaining their boiler and gas supply that you can't afford to use, while it hangs off a soaking wall, because the overflow pipes been cut off to stop it putting itself out for the Landlord's gas cert!
Our backgrounds sound like they have some similarities, the difference seems to be you did ok later in life and I haven’t really, and somehow you seem to have blocked yourself from recognizing the reality of your children’s lived experiences and seem to be looking to use it in a questionable way.