How are SINGLE mothers supposed to go back to work

[jasmin93]

Another lady just raised a very important question with the title "How are mothers supposed to go back to work".
Many of you suggested that the partner/father should jump in as 50/50 equals. I do agree with that.

Here is my issue: not everyone has a partner or a father who cares about their children. And just imagine you are that single parent with a 1 year old without any family support.

Out of curiosity, what would you do?
Considering your Full time job only brings in 26k gross a year?

Xx

DD is 2.5. I work part time, universal credit top up. I have one family member but they work full time so they can only provide help in a real emergency.

It's tough. I'm retraining and looking at going full time but I'm going to have to do the maths before I apply for any job to make sure I can actually afford to do it. 1k a month nursery fees aren't going to make it particularly easy to work.

It's a slog

Breakfast club drop off, commute, demanding job, rush back to pick up from after school club arriving by a whisker, straight to various clubs, eventually home, dinner, kids bedtime, sit down around 9:30pm if lucky

I'm fucking knackered tbh but I have a big mortgage so needs must

It's shameful that 99 times out of 100 it's the father who walks away without a 2nd glance, thinking the odd Wed night tea-time plus EOW counts as parenting.

The man's career is unaffected & the single mum gets criticised when she's the one juggling everything 26 days of the month.

Hat off to all you single mums out there

I will never not be absolutely furious that men can just up and leave a partner and child/ren and not pay a penny. Yes it's great that so many women have coped and survived despite that but it's not ok.
I saw a thread on Facebook once where a woman was asking how to go about collecting proper maintenance from ex and so many replies were 'i don't get a penny so leave it' or 'you're lucky he's paying £5, don't rock the boat' and I was so angry that they were basically resigned to men paying nothing and saw a tokenistic amount as fantastic and worth celebrating.

We will NEVER reach equality whilst this is allowed to happen. Whilst women make up the majority of single parent households, shoulder the emotional and domestic responsibilities of child rearing and often face a financial penalty in terms of not being able to work or having to take jobs that pay less but work around childcare.. we just can't match the earning and social power of men in the same way and it's outrageous.

There HAS to be a way to stop this

If you had a career to start with i suppose it's doable but for those of us who made the mistake of having kids first - forget it! I've tried pretty much everything i can think of and fallen on my arse. Shitty feeling like i'm letting my kids down again and again.

@Babdoc you sound like a strong woman but conments like "when you have children it's your responsibility to provide for them" only added to my pain, humiliation, anxiety and general distress and frustration when i was a single parent to 2 kids under 5. One with autism.

I have no shame having been in receipt of benefits now though. The system is stacked against women. Childcare should be free. Until childcare is free, it is a women"s problem. And any women's problems are worse for single mothers.

A doctor has already invested into herself but try to imagine being the single parent to young kids when you were just job hunting for admin or secretarial work.

To anybody in this situation now, if you cannot make working work, dont berate yrslf. I flagellated myself for years and all my kids got from having their mother at home was a shamed, depressed anxious version of me.

There should be more support for mothers, because although yes if you have children they are your responsibility, men can evade those responsibilities so there needs to be a lot more support for single mothers. A lot more support and a lot less judgement for those who cannot make it work.

@SlightlyBonkersQFA don't be ashamed of it. I went on income support after splitting with DS's dad when DS was 10 months old and stayed on it until he started school. I have no qualifications so have only ever had low paid jobs - nursery costs plus travel costs would have resulted in me getting less money than I did on benefits.

Would me going back to work have been the right thing to do morally? Maybe. But morals don't pay the bills.

I am back at work part time now but my bosses allow me to work school hours and my job, home and DS's school are all within walking distance of each other so I have been very lucky to find this job.

I agree re. Men. Last summer me and dd's dad had sat down and worked out how to cover every day of the school holidays for the rest of the year. 2 days before the summer break he announces he has a new job working away mon-fri, too good to turn down. So I said fine, cough up for holiday club, and luckily he did, or I'd have had to give up my job.

I see it all the time on here, with women who are not single parents, saying their DH couldn't possibly leave work to collect a sick child. Funny how having a dick physically prevents them from picking up any of the slack, yet countless women manage to negotiate flexible working or compressed hours, and don't have a bloody choice but to leave work when school phones.

Sorry bit of a rant there, as Ive just finished mopping up sick and phoning work to say I'm going to be late

@OUwhatnext yep agreed.

My ex genuinely cannot leave work to pick up DS if he is sick (he is a train driver and I don't think his passengers would be impressed if he abandoned them on the tracks ) however he has midweek days off so can do a lot of holiday childcare. He is also very generous with money so DS and I don't struggle in that respect.

I still think he has a pretty easy ride though. I get told all the time what a great dad he is, and he is, but I resent being told that I'm "lucky" that he is involved and financially supports DS. I'm not going to be slavishly grateful that he is doing what he should be doing. And I'm the one that has made the sacrifices by working around school hours so I can do all the school runs etc.

Whoah, SlightlyBonkers, I’m not judging anyone. Your DC are indeed your responsibility. But if your salary can’t financially support them, then of course you need to claim benefits to do so. That’s what benefits are for!
I have a state widows pension, and when the kids were young I also received child benefit. I didn’t feel stigmatised in claiming those - I pay tax for the express purpose of providing that safety net to people in need.
I think you may be projecting your own fear of judgment onto others - quite inappropriately in my case at least!

The brutal reality is that it does not matter how much you earn as a single parent, if your children are young. You would be in roughly the same situation on £80K if you are paying full amount for childcare, never to mention all the overtimes involved in getting a £80K salary. Assuming 2 or 3 children that you are paying childcare for, everything that is taxed at 40% is leaving just enough net to cover additional childcare expenses.

I was foolish enough to take a very well paid job as a single parent of a 2 and a 3 year old. I lasted less than a year - out of the gross paycheck of £120K, my monthly net was £6K (without pension), the only childcare option feasible was a nanny as there was almost weekly need for travel abroad and the hours were brutal - that was £3K / month (actually almost the same as nursery x 2), the rent was around £1.5K in London zone 6, so I had around £1.5K left for bills, food, commuting costs, clothes, nanny's holiday cover etc. It was not poverty, of course, but still quite an unpleasant position, where a broken boiler meant credit card got used.

What really makes a difference is whether the other parent is involved or whether you have a reliable support network.

You're having a laugh @sympatheticswan nice sentiment but try less than 1.5k before the rent/mortgage. That's unpleasant.

@raspberryk
At that level there is help, including housing benefit. I am not minimising anyone's problems, just saying that it is not too rosy for high earning single parents either, they have a different set of problems which are also not easy to solve. I consciously dropped my hours and career now to the level where I can rely on the 30 hours provision and tax free childcare. Otherwise it is just working yourself into the ground with no tangible financial benefit really.

I'm a long parent. No family support. No involvement at all from DS father (financial or otherwise). I went back to work full time when DS was 6 months old and have worked FT since. I've spent an absolute fortune on childcare, and it has limited my career choices significantly. I'd actually really like to change career but I can't as need to maintain my current salary level.

but there is childcare available and you get help with childcare costs through TC/UC if you are on a low wage.

The only group of parents who is really excluded from the workplace are parents/carers of children with SN. No wrap around childcare and no holiday clubs plus lots of appointments in between.

Working as a lone parent of a child without SN is doddle in comparision.

And before anyone has a go at me - I worked as a lone parent without any help from family. Having a child with SN pushed me out of work. not being without a DP (at that time).

That figure is including the "help". Stupidly I was better off as a single parent student than at work. Imagine that, a non working student - who are traditionally seen as the poorest or the poor, being better off than someone working.
Sadly as I have a partner now I'm back to being worse off, and as he's not their father I can't ever expect him to take days off when they're sick either.

A lot of people here stating they do it with family help, but the op asked what you would do if you didn't have that!
You hope and pray your child is never sick and that is all you can do.

@SympatheticSwan you certainly don't get housing benefit at that level. I earn roughly £700pm and get just £25pw housing benefit plus tax credits. No way would you get HB on a £1.5k salary!

@raspberryk
Then I don't see why you are arguing. My comment was genuinely in good faith, and I know more than one woman who was not able to continue her career after becoming a single parent - despite being "loaded" from the payslip perspective, having heavily invested in her education and career etc.
If you don't have family help on tap, you are simply paying for it. A business trip for two days costs £300 in nanny overtime. Working until midnight in the busy season costs extra £400 / week. And it is not a frivolous expense, it realistically is a basic requirement of the mother being able to have a good paying job.
I am sometimes puzzled when MN generally accepts that a SAHM contributes a lot to her partner's ability to earn money by providing housekeeping and childcare - but at the same time dismisses the basic fact that a single working mother at the same level of pay / career progression will have to buy the same level of help at the market prices.

I think the answer really is that some of them aren't meant to go back to work, they are meant to be an example to everybody else of what happens if you don't 'make the right choices' and to get scapegoated for everything that goes wrong in society. It's those single mums on benefits who are causing the decay of society, never the men's fault, always the woman's

As a single mum, I didn’t have any choice. I found a child minder I liked, close to the office and just got on with it. Thankfully I earned enough that we could survive although it was a bit tight.
Ds is now at senior school. I do early school run for two boys, the other mum does evening run. I’ll have to get up at 6.30 every school morning for the next 6 years to get them on the bus but there’s no alternative.
It’s a bit relentless but worth it to give us both a decent standard of living.

I want to add that I’ve never met a feckless single mum, most of us work our arses off.

I don't have help so I pay for before and after school care and a Sitters subscription which I use if I have to work late. I run EVERYWHERE and I am exhausted. At work I make sure I am seen to be pulling my weight and I run from the station to the office to get in for 9 as childminder cannot start until 7.30 and I have a long commute. I rush back from work to let the CM go or to pick them up from clubs. My weekends are spent running around doing chores. I am knackered. XH takes DC out for pizza every 2-3 weeks, literally nothing else, and is called a good dad.

Part time and tax credit top up.

I'm a single mum of 4 work8ng full time. Youngest is nine. I am minimum wage and I have very little help and do everything myself..without tax credits I can't survive and wrap around school care too

@Mintjulia yes. Whether we're at home with the kids or out at work in the day it's a 24/7 slog with no-one to pick up the baton when we're ill or exhausted.