Growing up on benefits

[evenbaddiesgetsaddies]

In case people think it was the life of luxury -

My mum stopped working before I was born, 34 years ago, due to severe and enduring mental illness and very adverse circumstances. She went back to work for about a year when I was 13 then had to stop again. She’s never worked since so was solely reliant on benefits.

In the early 90s, that meant £80 a week for the whole family to include all bills. When my dad was about, we never saw it. We lived off Tesco value - you could get value everything in those days…! Clothes were from neighbours. We had heavy social work involvement - on child protection plans - and I vividly remember the social work once tipping clothes out from black bags at the family centre and the mums there being told to get what they could.

Toys came from a toy library set up, or relatives, or the social. Socialwork once did our Christmas for us, I remember them coming with a car load.

We didn’t have a working sewage system at one point so the whole house smelt of shit. Human waste came back up through water outlets. We had dodgy appliances - one once burst into flames, thankfully it was in the garden shed. The walls were black and spongy due to damp and I’ve got papers saying the house was not fit for human habitation.

I remember not having electric at times, and having to go to bed in the dark. Not being allowed to touch the heaters as we couldn’t pay for them. Hiding from the provident lady under the table. Lying on the floor so the milkman couldn’t see us. I remember people selling electric tokens on the sly. Vouchers so I could get new bedding when I was 16.

Abuse was rife in all circles. I remember knowing half my neighbours kids were being sexually abused or physically, myself included. Neglect by today’s standards was entirely normal and expected. Leave the kids on the street when you got bladdered. Shut the kids in their bedroom or the garden. Even the people meant to help - foster carers, etc etc - were abusing. No one was really bothered in those days. I don’t think DBS checks existed. I once went to a foster house that had 10 children placed there. My best friend from school is in jail, so is another classmate. A handful didn’t see twenty five.

I had to deal with my mum’s illnesses from as young as I can remember - I’ve been told the first awareness I showed was 18 months. I was her carer from six years old. I went through things I would never wish on my worst enemy - suicide attempts etc. I didn’t sleep much and was always extremely anxious.

I got bullied to hell and back. Kids know who’s vulnerable!

My sibling and I both ended up with diagnoses (autism, dyspraxia etc) and mental health issues on both sides. I piled on the weight, she had/has behaviours that challenge.

I worked very hard at school. I even got a special payment from a charity to keep going because I showed aptitude. And when I qualified for an EMA I saved every penny. I went to uni still full time caring for mum. I got a degree with support from a lovely few adults/agencies.

I worked full time for three years and went back to uni. My life went very pear shaoed and since I went back, I lost all my remaining grandparents and my mum effectively to a dementia diagnosis. It took me six years to get my mum diagnosed. I went through hell and back and so did she. I ended up very unwell myself and made an attempt. I got help from external agencies and wider family, now in the position of not having parents I could rely on.

I got help, and I got my second degree. I got a full time job - a proper, qualified job where people respect me and listen to my thoughts. I have a decent rented flat, a steady income and I’m very proud of myself. I very much hope my parents would be too.

But I only got this far because of state benefits given to my mum - and help and support. Kind people and money from the government. I’ve used it to better myself and achieve things. I still awe at the fact that I have radiators I can use, and can buy luxuries. I struggle to know how to budget!!, but I get there.

My mum never could use the money to get better. I so so wish I could and it hurts me incredibly that I can’t use what I have now to help her.

Many, many, many people on benefits will have a similar story to me. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me, at all, because I’m (mostly) OK now and I think I do alright most of the time.

But it hurts and panics when you see hundreds of strangers arguing on a daily basis over whether people like your mum should have been able to do better in life. I’m not ashamed of my parents. They had a rotten luck in life and they did their very best. I don’t think I should walk around bowing to taxpayers for the fact that I had a warm bed. It seems to me that societies should always respect and support the vulnerable as best they can.

I recognise that there is waste, but so there is in all other sectors of public spending too. It just seems to be flavour of the month to attack those of us who can’t always defend ourselves.

I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I don’t tell my colleagues. Even my family don’t know the half.

But I do want people to think before they speak (type!) and consider there are actual human beings reading your words. Our lives are not and should not be your entertainment on a Tuesday night.

Well said.

There are a lot of people who assume that benefits are just for scroungers. Forgetting that not too long ago you could claim benefits and stay at home until your child was 16. It wasn’t the life of luxury at all- hiding from the provvy man, seeing debts build up.
Parents did their best with what they had.
Add a disability to the mix- in a society where it’s just “get on with it” makes things even harder.

Good for you. You have done so well, but you have such compassion for your mum and how she struggled.
All the discussion about benefits seems to assume most of the people claiming them are cheating, but I've worked helping people on low incomes for a long time. I've met a lot of people who have had rotten luck and incredibly difficult experiences, who muddle through as best they can. I think I've only met one outright scammer, and she was a very complex person in her own right and had considerable needs, just not the ones she was claiming to have.

Well said. Sorry you went through all of that 💐

I survived solely on benefits for a few years as the carer of autistic children, I couldn’t work. There was a huge stigma around it but there was no choice. If anyone found out they tended to say “oh we don’t mean you, you deserve to be looked after”, which meant that there were many other people, including those with children, who presumably didn’t deserve it? Even dysfunctional families likely with undiagnosed issues and generational problems who need support and early intervention for their children deserve help.

Propaganda against those on benefits and those with disabled children is rife at the minute. People would rather blame than look at what’s going on. There’s a lot of jealousy about people on benefits (because there we are, living the life of Riley with our megabucks in the bank - sarcasm obviously!) and resentment around it all.

I saw a video on tiktok the other day explaining how we’re all only an illness or accident away from disability, and many of us an illness or accident away from poverty.

Thank you - yes, I fully agree, none of us know what is coming for us. I work in healthcare and see that every day of the week, we are all one serious illness or accident away from losing everything sadly.

And yes, we should never divide into the deserving and undeserving. All people are human, and all should be treated fairly and with basic respect and dignity.

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone I’d say was cheating the system. Just people who’ve had a truly horrendously shit hand in life.

Lovely post OP. Good for you, you sound like a capable determined woman.

What often bothers me about a story like this is the child who is exceptionally bright gets help to break the cycle, however the average kid does not.

Thank you.

Which is why we need to focus support towards our youngest, improving schools, building support networks, picking up problems early and dealing with them. Too many generations have just been left to get on with it leading to situations such as we have now.

Although I wouldn’t say I’m very bright, just lucky that I like reading I guess - school was an escape route - I had a very good school nursing team, teachers, an excellent GP, incredible student support teams at uni.

It’s not always pain sailing, I often struggle with social situations and feel totally out of my depth a lot - I’ve never had a relationship, never been abroad at 33, no passport, I don’t know how to handle money because I’ve never had it, etc. There’s always going to be difficulties and differences.

Yes and I always find it fascinating that people always back-pedal and say ‘o no, of course I didn’t mean you!’ After they’ve spent a good 10 minutes slagging off anyone on benefits, and talking about them like they’re subhuman; before they realise that that’s your background/current situation etc

I often read the benefit bashing threads on mumsnet and the vitriol/hatred that is often spouted towards people on benefits is actually extremely frightening. Talking about people as if they’re subhuman scum who should be eliminated, the lack of empathy is staggering.

I have a very similar background to you OP. Even as a kid I thought my mum should've got a job to ease our poverty. Though now as an adult I realise with her various disabilities she would have been a liability in any basic job. Some people just can't function in the way this current society is set up and no amount of government policies will change it.

On paper I've done very well for myself. But the anxiety and worry of getting stuck in poverty with ailing health has never left me.

All these disability / benefits bashing threads this week have made me absolutely sick to the stomach to read.

It’s hellish, I ended up in floods of tears and panicked reading some posts last night. People can be genuinely really horrible when they’re behind a screen, sadly.

It's obvious just reading through threads that the worry of the proposed benefits changes has had a devastating effect on some very vulnerable people.

Whether people are cheating the system or not, people on benefits for years and years is not good for society or good for them. There are a ridiculous amount of people on benefits in this country and it has to stop. There is nothing unique about this country to mean we have so many people incapable of working. Even in the post WW2 years when there were millions of men returning from war traumatised, injured and disabled, the vast majority of them returned to work.

I’m interested to know what you think the alternative could be for people like my mum? I hold nothing against her for having relied on benefits, there wasn’t the support for mental illness until very recently. There was a mental health hospital but it sounds like a terrifying place, they were still using leather restraints. My mum had electro convulsive therapy; as far as we know she didn’t consent and if she was sectioned it wouldn’t have mattered what she wanted. It went wrong and gave her brain damage; they confirmed that on scans. They had group therapy, but the doctors leading that - at least one was jailed for raping clients (verified by a colleague who worked there later). That was only 38 years ago, scarily enough.

She’s now dying of dementia at 59 secondary to the brain damage. Before that, she had seizures - up to 4 or 5 a week, she would go unconscious and incontinent. Plus suicide attempts, stuff like that. She tried to work in a care home but she spent most of it on the floor and then I remember at 13, she attempted again and that was the last time she worked.

There was never the help people needed. I’m not entirely sure that there is now! My mum has help NOW, but only because she’s completely incapacitated. Back in the late 80s help just did not exist. Christ if it had, my childhood would have been much easier.

Mum did have a trade, she went to technical college - it’s just thanks to the treatment she got that she never held down a job again after that.

Perhaps the argument is my mum and dad shouldn’t have had children but it is what it is and I’m (mostly) glad I exist. And they could never have predicted how life would have gone.

My mum was/is so funny though. Kind, caring. Warm. Creative and imaginative. Her hugs were amazing. She would do anything to help my sister and I. She always put others first. I miss her so, so very much. I think she must have been very brave to have carried on and coped as long as she did.

I see it all the time at work; people who are left at the very bottom of society and the people on the top who treat them like shit on their shoe. They don’t realise that by further dehumanising, finger pointing, laughing, judging, they are only increasing the divide and driving more people to despair and ultimately; that only serves to increase the level of unemployment. Beating people into submission doesn’t make a happy society.

I care for my child with complex needs who will never work and I claim benefits on his behalf. I fight for him and champion him and others with his condition. I supported both my parents through battles with extreme poor health and little income during the 1990's. Yet I would be called a benefit basher on MN today because I believe the system needs to change and that doesn't make me nasty or deaf to people in real need.

I am guessing you were born around 1992/93, if your mum stopped working before you were born 34 years ago.

That was under John majors government and you’re right, benefits weren’t generous.

However, they did become fairly comparatively so under Blair’s government, which was 97 onwards. Your mum would have been entitled to income support of approximately £60 a week, as well as incapacity benefit (as it was then known) child benefit, around £12 a week then plus tax credits when they were introduced. So would have certainly been more than £80 a week.

Being on benefits on its own isn’t a reason for social work involvement and like many threads like this it will be an unreliable narrative.

I thought the 90’s was when benefits were at there most generous. A single parent didn’t have to work until the child was 16. No cap, council houses were still available and cheap.

Late 90s was when they started to become quite generous (sorry but they were.)

However you are right, you didn’t have to work until your child was 16. Housing much cheaper.

A lot of it is quite interesting really, as a social history.

1991 I was born - and no, that wasn’t the sole reason, but the two are obviously linked - we were living in an utterly shit situation.

I don’t know if she got her full entitlements. I doubt it. Mum couldn’t really read all that well and wasn’t great at filling in forms.

The worst of it was between 1992 and 1998 or so, which you are correct was largely John Major’s government.

But you’ll have been six and under at the time.

What difference does that make?

A lot of it I remember vividly due to a diagnosis of developmental trauma disorder/CPTSD - I get flashbacks a lot during the day and nightmares at night. I’ve done a lot of life story narratives with mental health team in the past and have seen my social work, GP and legal records.

It means your memories are unlikely to be reliable.

I know what my life has been like, and I’m really not prepared to argue the point to someone on the internet. I know that I’m telling a truthful story.

Amen, OP.

I was widowed when I was 30. Apparently that exempted me from being bashed as a feckless single mother. As though I was more worthy than e.g. a woman who'd divorced an irresponsible husband, or an abusive one.

People can be so smug and horrible. My life came crashing down when he got his terminal diagnosis. It could happen to any of those smug people - many just seem to think they are magically protected.

I'm sorry to hear about your mum - she sounds like she's had a very tough life. Kudos to you for doing so well. Can't be easy.

Tax credits were extremely generous. We came back form living abroad in a country where benefits didn't seem to exist and were amazed at home much we got in tax credits even with us both working.
Sorry you had such a difficult childhood op. My mum too spent time in Psychiatric care, had ECT treatment etc although fortunately had only some minor memory loss long term. Fortunately though unlike you my dad did work and we weren't in poverty but I can sympathize with the mental health side of it. It is hard to witness and understand as a child.

I’m not arguing with you, or certainly not trying to anyway.

But unless I’ve misunderstood, your post is about the fact that growing up on benefits isn’t much fun and you’re right of course. That’s one of the reasons that pupil premium was introduced, it was to try to narrow that gap (I don’t think it has particularly.)

But it doesn’t really seem like money was the issue, more a chaotic background with social services intervention. That is largely a separate issue from benefit reliance. Most people from those backgrounds will be reliant on benefits but not all people on benefits will have a chaotic background.