To wonder why all benefits are not limited to two children only

[SuzysZoo]

Ok. I know that this is going to be a bit contentious. I don't mean retrospectively either. I just wonder why, in these cash strapped times, the government doesn't just say that all benefits, child benefit etc should be limited IN THE FUTURE, IN AT LEAST 9 MONTHS TIME, to 2 children per family only...... My point being that if you have more you should support them yourself. AIBU?

There is no need for that Alousie. I think that if you meet a certain kind of man at a stage in your life when you are becoming a woman you will have an interesting life.

I now take much pleasure in being very dull. I live in a dull village, in a rather dull house, I teach in a school that is very safe and buying a new brand of tea is the most exciting I get.

At 15, you're still a child. You're situation highlights part of the national problem. At 15, I want my kids to be experiencing everything that school has to offer such as all the extra-curricular stuff and trips. I want them to want to play sport or go to the cinema or out to eat with friend. I certainly don't want them to be considering a long term relationship and children!

Parents and society should be offering their teenagers more so that they want to put off becoming adults until 18. Then they should want to have lots of fun and sex and put off parenthood because the rest of their life is so full and so much better than it would be if they had kids so very young.

Teenageres are not having kids to get a council flat, they're having kids because they have nothing else in their lives.

Carpet - I think what your underlying message is saying (I think!) choose your partner very carefully but do take some responsibility for your choices. If you have children you need to recognise that you made a choice too. There are so many threads on Mumsnet with women slagging off their ex but they chose to marry them/have their children etc.

And so going back to the original post. If you make a mistake, marry the wrong guy, have children with no visible means of support - then life will not be rosy for you. You will not be able to afford what you see others having. It is not your right to have the same - that is just life.

I am wondering Twinkly - are you able to say - do you have an Asian/Middle Eastern background?

I did not have a child until I was 26! I met him when I was 15. I was not considering a long term relationship with him or any kind really as I was a child and a very naive one at that. But I was emotionally needy and he spotted that. We did not start dating properly until I was 19. But in many ways I was part of the problem because a grown man was sniffing around me when I was 15 and no one cared or thought to protect me.

No, I do not have an Asian or Middle Eastern background.

Rocky I accept that I chose to marry him and have a child with him, although their were circumstances that lead me to make that mistake it was still my mistake. Life was not rosy for me and I have not once said that as a single mother I should have luxuries. I fully take the responsibility for my stupid choices and intend to pay back every penny that I took whether that is financially or doing voluntary work. I owe the state a lot.

sorry there

I think, Rocky, that I'm always amazed at how many women don't think it all through before marriage/commitment. Sure, have sex with them if you fancy them but don't get emotionally entangled until you have spent many years getting to know them-and certainly don't have children with them before that.

Twinkly, You don't need to defend yourself. I wasn't criticising you. At 15 your parents should still be looking after your emotional wellbeing. The absense of THAT is the biggest issue in everything that has happened this week.

I am not making excuses by my mum did not have a clue about how to parent, we have made very similar mistakes in life. We were both tempted away from abusive homes by abusive men who led double lives. I spent many years blaming my Mum for my mistakes but that gets you nowhere. I don't even blame my ex husband now, he was clearly fucked up with his own issues. You can never be in control of others actions but you can control your own. I have been brutally honest about my mistakes and that means I will not make then again. If I did what Rocky suggested I was doing and simply blamed others I would not move forward.

I am determined that my dd will not repeat our mistakes. Hence my dull life in a dull village, with a lovely but rather dull man, in a dull house with a safe job.

I think it is way too simplistic to introduce a blanket rule that says all benefits are capped at 2 children, because people go on and off benefits at different times in their lives, for different reasons. It would be wrong to penalise someone who has been made redundant after several years of being working and paying tax, if they happen to have four kids.

But I do think perhaps there should be a rule introduced that says if you are already on benefits, and you have two children, you will not receive any more benefits (including child benefit) if you choose to have subsequent children whilst you are in that situation. Likewise you will not become eligible for a bigger house or a higher level of HB by having another child, unless you are working. Perhaps it should even be for one child. (mutliple births would be a special case obviously.) That way, people can be allowed their one 'emergency bailout' as it were, for unplanned PGs, but cannot go on choosing to remain on benefits and having a large family as a lifestyle choice.

Twinkly, your last post just proves my last point. Lack of emotional literacy is a huge problem for many children. Some people do need help to parent. They also need to realise that parenting doesn't stop at 11. In fact, teenagers are often more emotionally needy than toddlers! As parents, we have a responsibility to ensure that any children we have become productive, responsible members of society. It's a cop out just to say the government should be doing more for teenagers. PARENTS should be doing more for teenagers.

I think that is the problem tbh, benefits are necessarily a simple system applied to very complex lives. Someone will always lose out and there will be others who seem to get too much.

I agree, my daughter is about to turn 10 so she is not a teenager yet. However one of the decisions that dp and I made was that one of us would be there in the morning before she goes to school and when she gets home. So dp works time and I know that dd benefits from having a lot of interaction and attention from him during that time. She knows that he works part time to be with her because she is important. I never felt important or valued as a child which meant that the first person who came along who showed me some attention would have my undying loyalty. In my case it was a man, in the case of others it is a gang leader.

I think the mother and baby unit is a good idea. I was very concerned when I read about Loudlasses 7 friends who all managed to become pregnant and were illiterate. I am probably being mean but if they were in a hostel they may have support and help with their learning difficulties rather than producing more children that they are not paying for.

Gosh - go away for a day and it's turned into a very interesting debate with some varied views! I think FellatioNelson's post above seems a reasonable way to express what I meant originally, although I know a LOT of people have pointed out that the only people who would suffer in the end are the chlldren (which is not the intended hypothetical result). Interesting that the benefits cap in America had an effect on birthrates...as someone pointed out......TBH I don't hold out much long term hope for Child Benefit. Higher rate taxpayers this time round, everyone next time round is what I think will happen......

Well the children would suffer in theory, if people carried on having them at the same rate, but I am pretty sure that once we broke the cycle of dependency/expectation that any amount of children was not only a right, regardless of your circumstances, (selfish and stupid) but that extra children meant bigger financial reward and a bigger house, then things would soon settle down to a managable level.

At the moment the system makes no sense. It rewards and incentivises people to stay benefit dependent if they keep having more children.

I agree alemci , I lived in something similar to a mother and baby unit for a while and although I didn't have literacy issues I had other things going on and I found it empowering to be with other women.

Carpetlover, yes, I was pretty young. But I was also the victim of a man who thought I could 'save' him and who (when that obviously couldn't be achieved) was very determined to hide his secret behind a suburban family lifestyle complete with all the appropriate props (wife and children). Not all gay men have the sort of caricaturish mannerisms you see in the media. films, etc. People I know (who also know exH) in RL in whom I have confided have been extremely surprised.

When I found evidence of his true orientation and started putting all the pieces together (it was the last thing I would have suspected after an abusive marriage during which he had me convinced I was depressed and suffering from ocd, a terrible mother, useless at housekeeping, cooking and taking responsibility for the children, and completely incapable of dealing with a chequebook) I went online looking for support because it was such a total shock to me to find my life had been basically a lie, and someone else's lie at that. I found a large forum of wives and gfs of gay and bisexual men who had made a fateful discovery or who strongly suspected their significant others of living a lie.

The members, women of all ages, came from all sorts of backgrounds and had been involved with their partners for varying amounts of time. The only thing we all had in common was that we had been taken in by men, some of whom were actively trying to deceive themselves, some of whom admitted to having known since their teens that they were gay, some of whom adamantly refused to admit anything even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Advice given to all newbies on the forum was to have a thorough std and Hep B checkup, because sadly, many of the men were so caught up in their deceit that they had exposed their partners to stds rather than start using condoms at home and facing the questions from wives or gfs.

exH is deeply closeted even still. His mother nearly had an apoplectic fit when I told her what I had found on the computer (membership of gay hook up sites and porn galore). Having got to know exMIL over the years, I am surprised any of her children are able to function in society at all.

I don't think you can change the goal posts on people who have already planned a family based on certain expectations of support, if and when needed.

But what might work is something that will come into force for the current crop of 13 year olds and younger, when they start having children. Something they are made fully aware is coming.

Rather than stick a figure on the number of children perhaps a flat rate for families, couples and single people is the same way a salary or a wage works.

You income when employed doesn't go up as you expand your family, it stays the same and you find ways to make it stretch further, perhaps benefits could follow the same model. There is no automatic right to benefits in Italy. It will depend on how much you have paid into a company scheme, or how much a government programme assigns, it will be time limited and it is not ajusted according to how many children you have.

While the negative birth rate here might not be without its own downside, there is a very conservative approach to family planning, and there certainly isn't such a huge number of teenage girls getting pregnant, despite a very poor sex education programme. I think a lack of government willingness to pick up the pieces if it all goes bent, knowing you will have to burden your extended family with your choices when in need, curtails people's willingness to base their family size on income during the good times and they tend rather to plan on what they can cope with when times are not so good.

So perhaps a flat rate form of support for families would be a compromise between the "based on family size" that the UK has now, and the "fuck all" you get over here that would allow for a positive birth rate while not being seen to encourage people to have more children than they can realistically afford to support, in bad times as well as good ?

Mathanxiety, it sounds like you had a terrible time and I'm glad you found the support you needed.
Just to clarify though, I wasn't meaning that older more experienced women would pick up on campness or that the person would act 'gay' (whatever that is) but rather that a more experienced woman would pick up on the sexual nuances and habits and notice things that seemed not quite right.

I mention it because I had a boyfriend when I was 17 who turned out to be gay. He was my first so I had nothing to compare it to but looking back, years later I can see how contrived the sex was. How he never got caught up in the moment, was never overcome with lust. It was all very functional, never playful. DH and I have been together a long time so there's not much being overcome with lust any more but he still grabs my bum when I bend over to pick up washing and stuff. Still sometimes gets aroused when he's squeezing into me and still makes playful innuendo. He still notices pretty girls on the beach and buys me overly sexy and ridiculously impractical underwear. I definitely think that at 40+, I would now recognise it or certainly think something wasn't quite right sexually whereas maybe not when I was younger.

Interesting Fastweb - so basically there is no more child poverty than in the UK simply because people know there isn't a safety net?

No, northerngirl, that's not what fastweb said.

By the way, your claim that "USA said they wouldn't house single mothers and the teenage pregnancy rate dropped by 36% within a year" has now been repeated several times on this thread, so could you point us to the source of that statement?

I am at the moment on benefits but retraining in Jan to come off. I can not wait. But in the mean time I would never have another child. It's not fair on the one i already have and i of course can't expect any one else to have to provide for another child. I am also pretty sure it would also push back my future employment even more.

BUT it is not easy to get funding for courses any more. I'm sure you all know that the budget for this has been cut by a huge amount and I was incredibly lucky to get my course payed for. I am 100% sure that if i lived in a less middle class area I would not have stood a chance. Our current government is forcing down the age of children who's parents are to receive income support to they hope school age but offering very little other option.

Benefits provide the bare minimum so much so that I am now living back at home. I wish I could afford fags and booze and plasma screen telly's, then maybe ds wouldn't have had to go out looting.

The fact is that this is a complex question. Those trying to invent one rule that will fix it are finding themselves stumbling over certain circumstances that don't work under that rule.

So the first point is "stop trying to solve it with one rule". Some things can't be done that way.

Some things are clearly wrong. if you just say "You can't expect others to pay for your kids" then as someone pointed out further back you are not morally entitled to claim child benefit. Lets get a list of those people for a start and make some cuts and then go from there.

We lost everything several times over (DH amdew redundant, I had to become a carer, 3 kids with a gentic disorder we didn;t relaise until after born...) and we'd have been fucked.

We worked, we paid tax 9actually we still do: dh seldf employed low income and me dormant self employed but ready to go again when youngest and last sorted health wise).

I don't know why people have kids without wanting to work for them BUT i did work for a parenting charity and it wasn't (in my famillies, who cared about their kids or would not be with us) about extra benefits, it was complex reasons- many seem to have come from unstable backgrounds and have a need to be loved and useful; not all but certainly saw that.