Should CM be considered as part of income

[SnowJon]

Should Child Maintenance be included when claiming benefits?

Example child maintenance is being paid to the resident carer. Why should that parent then be enabled to claim further benefits like Free school meals etc? Is that not what the cm is for?

The system is screwed in my eyes

I’ve reported this thread. I’m sick of seeing goady threads portraying single mothers as lazy grasping piss takers on a PARENTING site ffs. If it was any other group of people targeted this way it would be deleted and op banned as ‘not in the spirit’. I wonder if mn towers do not consider us as equal as other users on here tbh, since we are more likely to live in poverty and have less disposable income and therefore we are less desirable a demographic to them as they chase their ‘aspirational’ sponsors. If this thread was about people on disability benefits it would be a distant memory by now and that’s just a fact.

This is such a pointless because each situation will be different.

In my case, single mum when kiddies were still young, always worked ft earning just above being able to receive any tax credits. Ex pays no maintenance (always in and out of jobs working self employed). By the time I have paid for childcare, the mortgage, bills and travel costs, I'm left with very little of my decent wage and have to be very careful.

A friend of mine has three kids from two different men, both with very good jobs. She gets over £1500 in maintenance. She works minimal hours as self employed teaching guitar and claims tax credits. Her house was paid by her first husband so no mortgage. She is doing very well financially each month.

These are probably two extremes with most single parents somewhere in between. It still feels very wrong that single mums who gets very large maintenance can claim maximum benefits in addition making them much better off at the end of the month than a mum working ft paying high tax.

OP, you're trying to simplify something that just isn't simple at all.
In theory I do actually agree that maintenance could be taken into account, however in order for that to work then we have to ensure that non paying NRPs are very much in the minority, if not non existent. At the moment it's the other way around, NRPs paying full stop, or enough to cover 50% of costs are in the minority. Your DH/P may be one of the good ones and pay the right amount without fail, but he certainly is a minority. It would be far too complicated and costly to do this on a case by case basis.
There's NRPs who pay the right amount regularly and without fail, take their responsibility seriously and do everything they can. Don't have more children if it means the existing ones would have to go without - as anyone should consider btw - and generally do the right thing.
Then there's NRPs like my ex who always had an excuse not to pay the £20 a week (and I think even you can realise that a child costs more than £40 a week!) 'voluntary' maintenance and therefore was chased by CSA and then CMS, and did everything possible to avoid that catching up, and then had his 'historic' debt written off just as his DD gets to the age where maintenance ends.
And then there's those who pay sometimes, but not when they judge they have something more important to spend it on.
And then those who don't pay at all.

Unfortunately the first group are very much the minority, and the following groups have dictated how things need to be. You're blaming the wrong people, the reason maintenance can't be taken into account when calculating benefits is because the greater proportion of NRPs don't pay. This way a few RPs may receive a double whammy so to speak, but your way many, many more will suffer.
Effectively why should the rules change which would affect ppl like me much more negatively than the standing rules affect you currently? You should be angry at the hoards of non paying NRPS that made this necessary to stop children living in poverty.

MadameButterface I actually heartily agree with you it’s a disgrace the way single mothers are attacked frequently not only on this site but pretty much everywhere in uk

But, as a single parent mner
“If this thread was about people on disability benefits it would be a distant memory by now”

I’m afraid this is also not the case there are frequently threads attacking disabled benefits claimants too and they’re rarely deleted either.

“being a parent isn't and that's why putting monetary value on it is wrong” it’s not putting a monetary value on parenting! If it was believe me the cost would be MUCH more. It’s being realistic that children don’t exist for free! They need housed, fed, clothed etc NRP’s and their new partners/wives trying to argue AGAINST the NRP’s paying a reasonable amount of cm are actually the ones valuing money OVER children.

It’s despicable to begrudge a CHILD the money needed to house, feed, clothe etc them

“Remember the NRP still has the same Bill's as in housing utility Bill's as well as have money for food then still needs money for when the children are staying” NO they don’t have the same bills, they have a very small proportion of costs to cover when THEIR child stays with them (IF their child stays with them, the vast majority of nrps I know who are difficult over paying cm also tend to not do overnights) which, considering that again the vast majority of the time what they’re paying in cm doesn’t come close to the 50% of costs of the child the rp is covering, actually only goes a LITTLE way to balancing out that.

One of the things nrps do and which my ex did is keeping good, new clothes the child/ren were sent to the nrp with and refusing to return them within a reasonable time before the child outgrows them, it’s nasty and vindictive and hurts the child/ren, it doesn’t really gain the nrp anything but causes unnecessary difficulty for the rp.

And you’ve explained yourself very well you just don’t like that the majority of posters disagree with you and think your attitude to your step children is extremely poor.

Cheers @Graphista and i do take your point about goady threads about disabled people (wtf is up with all the ‘disabled toilets’ goaders atm??), they do pop up frequently, HOWEVER, i feel like mn are much better at realising that those threads are goady bollocks, removing and banning them. I feel like there is a lot more tolerance of the characterising of single parents as ‘undeserving poor’ on here than any other group, because we do live in a patriarchy and the notion that if a woman leaves or loses her man then she is at fault in some way is still very much at play.

“Remember the NRP still has the same Bill's as in housing utility Bill's as well as have money for food then still needs money for when the children are staying”
My ex doesn't live near my kids school (or any school) so doesn't pay the premium that I do for living in catchment of a good school.

He feeds them 3 meals every 2 weeks, the kids bring all their washing home and the kids share a room unlike my home where they have their own rooms. My bigger house obviously means all utilities cost more as they are based on size and amount used. I suspect that my council tax with single person discount is more than his because he lives in a smaller property not in catchment.

@MadameButterface I have just reported for similar reasons.

I am sick to death of reading of evil Rp.

My ex was unable to have Ds unsupervised from 6 weeks old . Never worked since we left before my Ds was one and infrequently till he was 3... I do it all though it will be my fault for choosing a bad dad .

Sometimes people need to think before stereotyping a whole group of parents mostly doing on their own.

@Starlight456 i totally agree with you. Just lately we have had ‘aibu to think women should be more careful about who they have dc with’, the thread where aome total nobheads unilaterally decided that lone/single parents should not be allowed to style ourselves as such unless our dcs’ fathers have literally zero to do with them, and now this. I am fucking sick of it. It’s bad enough the govt and the press sticking the boot in whenever they can making us out to be feckless slags. This is a parenting site and we are parents. I am so sick of this shit. Would love to hear some comment from mnhq actually. Come on lads, justify this shit.

I am sick of the endless debating over something like this that is imaginary. It’s like asking ‘what would you do with £1million’

It’s not going to be reformed, for all the reasons already stated so keep digging into it becomes offensive and upsetting

I think Op has probably enjoyed gaining a lot of detail about people by giving away none about themselves

I think it’s a man

@Starlight456
@MadameButterface

I totally agree with both of you. There's this overriding opinion that fathers pay for the 'lifestyle' of resident mothers and we're all not working and living the highlife on a combination of benefits and maintenance, fleecing everyone in sight, and that women had their children for this reason only. Is it political spin? Newspapers? What?
And another thread or two recently about how single parents don't have it that hard. There seems to be some sort of campaign going on on here to discredit and put down single mums recently. Is it because some of us have proved that we can do better than men? That we can not just survive but pick up their slack and get ahead? Some women really don't like the capability of another woman and the fact they can demonstrate they don't need a partner to bring up children well or have a decent career, or live a decent life. It seems to offend some people and we need to be put back in our box.
I just don't understand the thinking behind looking at two people, one who's walked away from his responsibility freely and knowingly, and one who hasn't and arriving at the conclusion that the one picking up the pieces is the bad guy. Baffles me.

That is how my ex views me. He’s never once expressed one nice sentiment towards me for all of the hard work I have done, the only time he says anything is when he is unhappy about something. He used to go through phases of demanding I get their haircut, and would drop them home to me after a day with him and make yet another comment
He also grills my DC about whether I have a boyfriend all the time

Some Dad’s earn a lot and in turn, pay a lot of CM. Other Dad’s don’t earn much so pay very little, some Dad’s fiddle the system so they don’t have to pay as much as they should.

CM isn’t usually thousands of pounds, many RP’s only get £50 per child per week or even less. I’m not sure if you have ever raised a child but they cost a heck of a lot more than that. CM barely covers basics for most RP’s and if the NRP barely sees the children, it’s even worse.

@Gottagetout i think there are several factors at play in posters who decide to demonise (female) single parents

1. blokes, obvs, a lot of them begrudge paying for their dc, that’s the most obvious one

2. new partners of separated fathers, they also begrudge the money side of it and the tangible reminder that he had a life and what he thought was a happy ever after before her. Also i think that any decent self respecting woman should be slightly disgusted at herself for resenting her man for being a good father and supporting his children and the cognitive dissonance from this impulse causes them to project on to the former partner this ‘ugh what a lazy gold digger she is’ mentality that actually is coming from within themselves, at knowing they are being utterly unreasonable to resent the situation

3. the smug marrieds ‘i have it hard too, my dh doesn’t get in till half seven’ or whatever people. It’s no secret that relationships frequently falter and fail and often it’s no one’s fault, just humans being humans. It’s also no secret that single mothers have been seen as shit on society’s shoe since forever, and politically motivated austerity and the awful punitive universal credit system finds handy scape goats in is, to hold us up as lazy, feckless, immoral etc, and justify the lack of dignity anyone with recourse to benefits must currently suffer. In their heart of hearts, any woman who has made sacrifices for the family, for the domestic sphere, knows she could end up exactly where we are. So she has to engage in magical thinking ‘oh it’s not that bad really’ ‘oh they make it all up about how hard it is when really they’re always on holiday or in the nail bar’ ‘oh well they must be scummy bitches because they must have done something to end up this way because if they haven’t then i have to face the possibility that i too could find myself in that ignoble position and that’s not a thought i want to entertain’

It is an intersection of plain old misogyny, and the anti poor, anti benefits snobbery that has always existed on mn. It’s completely unacceptable, and mnhq refuse to do anything about it, see also their lily livered approach to entertaining bullshit ‘but why isn’t having a big pram the same as being disabled’ threads or the disgusting racism levelled at meghan markle. Step your game up mnhq, draw a line in the sand. 14 million people in poverty in this rich country is a disgrace and you routinely allow victim blaming benefit bashing bullshit like this to stand. What a fine parenting site eh