Should SAHP be paid for their role by the goverment?

[Cocoflower]

Should SAHP be paid for the role they do by the goverment? If not by the goverment then who?

According to which study you read SAHP work is valued at 30-70k a year. Infact you can now even get life insurance based on being a SAHM which demonstrates a worth surely?

Is it not time we started valuing and recognising one of the hardest jobs out there 24/7 hours of work and no holidays through offical payment as being regarded as a public worker? Is raising future generations and caring for human life worth any less than any other type of work?

Now people may argue; if you have kids you pay for them, why should the tax payer foot the bill?

However if both parents work then the tax payer is footing some of the bill through tax credits anyway to cover childcare. Why not pass this straight onto the parents?

Now, I know many people work for more than just money,and many would stay in employment anyway even if they could be paid to stay at home.

But there would be many people would choose to stay at home if they could afford it and feel valued by getting paid for this? Would this be good if means freeing up thousands of jobs for people who need the jobs in the state the country is in?

Would this system just encourage people to have children they dont really want? Or should we say unlikely as having children is such a big thing to take on and its likely you would get paid more in a job anyway?

imposing external standards,inspection and regulation of sahp for wage,how would that work?
who would do it- nhs? la?
what if parenting below standard- deny payment?
a wage is paid for doing a task to a prescribed standard.so even if self employed still have to undertake the task to approximately same ability as others.or else no work

do working parents get mum/dad payment when home from work?

people arent thinking this out.at all

all very fluffy and rights on,but not thought out
and untenable
morally and finacially untenable

govt pay working tax credit,as ideologically they believe working is good for individuals and families.and will pay to support work ethos and contribution.

Lynehamrose, you don't seem to hear what I am saying.

I am not advocating for a wage at all, so your assertions that I am are just wrong. I am simply considering that for an educated, middle class white female being a SAHM is often seen negatively and referred to perjoratively. If you haven't come across it in real life, good for you but I am NOT a SAHM and I hear a lot of incredibly negative, infantilising things said about SAHM and have done since I was a teenager. I was brought up to think it was an absolutely horrendously retrograde thing to want to stay at home with your child and I have found, since having my own, that it's not quite as straightforward as all that.

In the same way, working full-time, particularly from babyhood, is also referred to in this castigating manner. Part-timers are told they have the best of both worlds, or the worst, depending on who you talk to.

My argument, as you put it, has nothing to do with doling out money to anyone. I don't agree with the idea of any governmental intervention in this respect, and I have said so a few times. I would hate to live in a world where the government "regulated" parenting through tick boxes and whizzy "initiatives" dreamed up by half-baked consultants where anything of substance would be ignored but decent paperwork could cover a multitude of sins.

My argument is actually that it would be nice if there was more value placed on how we parent vs the trivialisation of the importance of the debate into stay at home duck feeder with shit for brains vs high powered career woman with heart of stone.

I think all parenting is pretty valuable but I do think there are differences that are worth discussing. You may think there is no fundamental difference between the quality of the time you spend with your child on a day off vs when you are at work but children really aren't developed enough in their early years to see the two as identical. The fact that your child may experience a day with you at home differently to one where you are at work does not mean you should get you back to the kitchen or forgo your own dreams in order to give your child one type of experience over another. But they are not the same. It's sort of weird to say that it is the same to be with someone all day or just an hour or two a day. They're just different. Not sure why you say they are the same, really.

So yes then lots of parent has had at some point been funded by the tax payer.

If it wasnt for the tax payer many of us could not afford the childcare that affords us to have our jobs!

carer allowance has eligibility criteria to be met
You may be able to get carer's Allowance if you:

are aged 16 or over
spend at least 35 hours a week caring for a person

They should be getting one of the following benefits:

attendance Allowance
Disability Living Allowance (at the middle or highest rate for personal care)
Constant Attendance Allowance at or above the normal maximum rate with an Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit
constant Attendance Allowance at the basic (full day) rate with a War Disablement Pension

would need to demonstrably be carer, liaise with la and nhs eg accompany attend appts, attend relevant meetings, if necessary advicate for the person

can access health and la support and guidance about managing illness eg provide care, lifting and positioning

no,coco.govt pay tax credits to maintain work because they dont want not working. they ideologically value work in preference to non work

Yeah but coco in my instance i claim TCS but I look after all teh children and my own at same time so I am more helpful to the economy than I would at home as I am doin significantly more than I would be at home. I am also facilitating others to work an contribute. Claiming tcs for working is nothing like claiming benefits to stay at home.

The simple fact is you relied on other tax payers at some point though.

Coco - ALL parents work hard- that was my point. Those waged and non waged!!

And for heavens sake, if we're talking about the outcomes for children, there are SO Many influential factors. At the end of the day, children of intelligent we educated parents are likely to do well whether the parents work or stay at home. So what would you be paying them to stay at home for?
Children of uneducated feckless parents have poorer outcomes and will do less well, whether the parents have jobs or stay at home.'

So what would you be paying them to stay at home for?

The argument doesn't stand up on any level!

WELL educated

you are twisting this to suit self.
yes in uk we all depend on shared and redistributed tax
but this in no way equates to pay sahp

A lot of posters have said "pay for your own kids why should the tax payer", or "I as a WOHP am funding SAHP" etc

Yet nearly all parents at some point (even me) have had help from the tax payer. Lots of non-parents may argue that they shouldn't be paying for other people kids to be looked after could they not?

Yes ,the help was to help us become the tax payer but why do people forget they rarely have done it all alone?

coco,would it be universal benefit.payable to all
what if parenting deemed unsuitable-any sanctions
do working parents qualify too

coco your argument bears no inspection
tax is taken from workers and redistributed to where govt wish. so i dont have a skateboard but some percent of my money goes to la who spend on skateboard park.

the tax taken doesnt ahve to directly benefit person it was taken from

i paid ni and tax to for maternity years before i had kids

I am yet to decide if there should be any payment at all! As pointed out a few posts ok I asked a question, not stated a fact.

After reading what people had to say if a payment did ever exsist then I think it would need to include WOHPS or it would be discrimination and devaluing work outside the home

pip, fair point on the laundry and housework. But the parenting contact hours remain fewer for WOHPs than they do for SAHPs.

"But tether what you're ultimately then arguing is that Government should pay SAHPs because they have more contact hours with their children. That's bonkers surely?"

But we as WOHP pay others to look after our children for those very hours. We already place monetary value on that time; why not pay parents?

"imposing external standards,inspection and regulation of sahp for wage,how would that work?"

Again why would there need to be any further inspection of parenting than already happens? Good enough is good enough. The point is not to improve parenting but to recognise the work parents already do. If parenting is inadequate, children must be removed, as they are currently. (And those are the children with the worst outcomes of all)

I havent done it alone but I hope to have given as much as possible back to the economy by doing a job. If I quit my job then my husbands wage would mean I would qualify for all benefits and the government would be giving me 1000s more, but I chose to work so I am not too much of a burden to the state.

It is still in my opinion a much more leisurely option to stay at home and most people dont work for a 'lifestyle choice' they do it to provide for themselves as much as they can. If your husband/partner supports you fair enough but any money that is available I would like ploughed in to the NHS and supporting carers etc.

This thread is really odd.

Everyone is engaged in their own argument

Yes but if the tax payers money was withdrawn from paying for childcare most people would be forced to give up work-i.e we have all had a leg up at some point

Im sure there are childless people, or people with children who dont get any help who may well object to paying for other peoples childcare.

They might argue that your lifestyle choice to have kids and work, you fund them 100%

NOT saying this is what I think, but Im a bit suprised people forget they to take from the tax payers pot

no tether there is no inspection of parenting
only inspection of paid childcare eg cm and nursery
so if you want a sahp paid they too have to be inspected, regulated and adhere to external standards

this currently doesnt happen with sahp parenting ,as its a private individual lifestyle choice. no one checks sahp in the way cm and nursery are cheked

"pip, fair point on the laundry and housework. But the parenting contact hours remain fewer for WOHPs than they do for SAHPs"

Personally, as WOHP, I spend every waking hour while I am not at work, interracting with my DS. I doubt very, very much that a SAHP does the same. So having physically more hours at home does not necessarily equate to interracting with a child. There are very obviously loads of SAHPs on here who spend a good deal of time of MN. I assume they also do a number of various household chores during the day, as well as, for example, doing things such as going to the shops/post office/mundane tasks that a WOHP probably squashes into a lunch hour. If you were to add it all up, it is very likely that the actual interaction time with the child is probably not so different between a WOHP and a SAHM

They won't pay anything as you are taking work away from someone else, a nursery, nanny or CM. It seems that if it's your OWN children that you care for then it's worth nothing .

And the childless will bleat about having to pay out for other people's kids when the rest of the world could come here and work instead.

In a 100yrs we will end up as islands of old people being cared for by the rest of the world as we never thought ahead about our own futures. Shudder..

"It seems that if it's your OWN children that you care for then it's worth nothing "

But similarly, if you clean for someone else, you reasonably expect that person to pay you. However if you clean your own house, you really shouldn't expect the govt to pay [jhmm]

Seriously I cannot understand how anyone can think that intensifying interaction into a few short hours makes it the same as hours and hours of contact throughout the day. Human interaction isn't something you can put into overdrive and arguably you run the risk of hyperstimulating your child by doing so. Kids need to just be around their parents too, it's part of their development to spend time around you but engaged in their own thing.

I say this as someone who works so am not saying it to judge the quality of being a WOHP but they are not the same. Both have strengths and weaknesses but they are not the same.