Children carers shouldn’t be allowed

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There was a powerful segment in Ch4 news about an 11 year old girl who is the carer of her mother, who suffers from Chronic fatigue syndrome, and 7 year old autistic brother.

The poor poor girl. This is no life for a child.

Well what do you suggest When I am at work during holidays, my dD has to make food for her and her borther, and oh if he wants it, she has had to walk with hi paces as he can,t walk on his own some days. My oH used to be very active unitl recently. If I stay at home we live off benefits.

I always feel sad for young carers who care for their physically disabled parents but it must be even harder for those who are carers to parents with severe mental health problems, alcoholics etc . The term young carer covers everyone who helps their disabled sibling with a few tasks to young children running full households. I always remember a child who was living alone doing her GCSEs as her mum was in hospital for months, I couldn’t believe while most kids are focused just on their GCSEs she was going grocery shopping, making dinner and eating it alone, studying and sleeping alone at night. There really does need to be more funding so people can have live in carers if needed and take the pressure off the child

I agree in a perfect world that family and others like it would have appropriate support.
Unfortunately that’s probably not possible.

It's not unfortunate that families don't have appropriate support, it's a decision the government has made, that as a society we are not willing to pay the price required to provide appropriate care for all adults with disabilities.

The economy will be crippled by the pandemic.

Now is not the time to wish for unreasonable perfect world with near unlimited funding. Yes, it would be nice, no it won't happen. There simply won't be any funding! NHS, education, all will suffer even more .Not because the "tories" decide to have fun and deprive the country, but because the economy will be in a bad state.

So the only solution is to redirect benefits and help for those who really need it - like these children.

People who can afford to use their benefits for luxuries, such a holiday, wine and god knows what are stealing from these families. Where do you think the money will come from?
We could put Buckingham and other palaces for sale, but I doubt if the royals will agree.

@GrumpyHoonMain your family has some seriously fucked up priorities, and I can’t believe you haven’t notified ss if you haven’t already

DB shouldn't be working and leaving the care of his baby to a 4 year old. There are childminders that will care for key worker children. Or Grumpy should be stepping in to help. Rather than leaving a child to do that. Grumpy is just as culpable, yet chooses to blame the disabled person rather than themselves, their brother etc for the situation.

It is a form of child abuse and if social services departments allow this to happen by not funding or facilitating other care they should have corporate responsibility for failing and be liable to prosecution.

No child should be a child carer but I'm not convinced raising taxes is the answer very often raised taxes gets spent on random shit rather than being focused in the places that actually need it to be spent.

How much money is wasted on universal free school meals, for primary school 1-3?
Scottish baby boxes?

Lots of money seems to get spent on free vote winners and not in the places that really need it.

We need more money for social care, and people have voted for that not to happen. This has consequences on real peoples lives. Had you not realised that?

Also the mention of MH, there is very little support for people with serious MH problems, very little.
Most people struggle by as best as they can with charities plugging some of the gaps. The same for disabled people and their children. And yes it would help if so many fathers did not walk away.

How much money is wasted on universal free school meals, for primary school 1-3?

not sure feeding the children is such a waste?

I was a carer to my mum and sister . Mum with severe mental health issues, sister with autism, learning difficulties and adhd .

Majority of care was supporting my mum emotionally. That I honestly think was harder than the other stuff, having conversations about things I couldn’t comprehend from a very early age (rape, abuse, psychiatric care).

I was heavily reliant on having school as a constant feature, and brownies, and being able to bang on the neighbours door for help if it was beyond what I could deal with .

My mum has always been a wonderful mum and done her absolute best but I so often wish I’d had a dad, or another adult, who could have done some of that for me.

We didn’t have much help or support - 1994-2009 or so, it didn’t seem to exist in a way that was useful . Endless streams of social workers but they’d back off very quickly as my mum swung rapidly between being angry at the intrusion and being too ‘attached’ to them . They had a nursery for abused women and their children ... and for primary/junior secondary age kids there was a social work group that took us out one day a week in the summer . I was referred to young carers at age 15 or so, but that was very poorly funded and stopped when I was 17 . No further support after age 17 - your only option was to go to adult carers groups , so majority elderly people caring for spouse or middle aged caring for parents . Not 17 year olds wanting to go to uni !!

I was 21 before someone really, really helped me through her job, but by that point I’d had the first of two nervous breakdowns .

However, I honestly think you do what you have to do , it would have broken my mum if we’d been taken off her . I’ve been told that my experiences have helped shape me and have had wonderful opportunities working for the NHS and volunteering - a lot of which I got into on the back of my experiences .

There does need to be a lot more understanding and willingness to help , but I can’t see that increasing any time soon sadly , and God only knows how you cope with being a young carer and this nightmare at the same time. Hardly bears thinking about .

This is why HM Gov love people like the 99 year old raising millions for the NHS; they like to reinforce the idea that essential services should be funded by charitable donation and are somehow an added extra.

DS1's friend was such a one. Forced into a caring role when her father buggered off leaving her (7) and her younger sister (3) with her mother.

Within weeks her mother developed ME or FM or something similar. H had to do everything for her. Her father said her mother was faking it and wouldn't get involved. He insisted on access weekends even though the mother said she couldn't cope. H missed a lot of school but managed to get decent A levels for university.

Her mother did all she could to stop her going because the younger sister refused to do anything. H never went back home. She is estranged from her mother but still sees her sister, who also left home as soon as she could.

It is cruel to force children to be carers. H said she'd be better off in care and really wanted that to happen.

YANBU OP

Keep voting Tory folks

I didn't grow up in the UK, but I was the unofficial (often only) carer for my ill grandmother, mentally ill grandmother and my three young siblings. My parents were a mix of irresponsible and struggling to find work, they would often travel to different cities and would be gone for months at a time. Both grandmothers received very little retirement/medical benefits, and at my young age (I was 11 when all this started), I remember having to cash those cheques at shady stores that would take large cuts. I remember waiting for my parents to call and tell me what I had to do to keep things 'normal' for my siblings.

Only years later, do I see what a difficult and cumbersome burden it was on me.

But there was no one else my parents could trust, they had asked a relative who stayed for a week and then left because there was a blizzard coming and she wanted to be with her own family.

It was beyond difficult.

Bluebeck, the same shit happens whoever is in power. In many cases its the adult denying the need for outside help. What really is shocking is that nearly all those children will have another parent. Wtf are these other (absent?) parents doing to support their children?

There have always been child carers, I know there shouldn't be, but no government has made any effort to prioritise funding.
If you paid more tax it wouldn't go to help.
I suppose gov just think that charity will pay for it, so they don't have to.
There's so much raised for children in need and there's always a link to the support given to child carers.
The gov have cut everything, it will be NHS and education after we come out of this.

@GrumpyHoonMain That is appalling, and this is on your brother, not his wife. Your nephew is being neglected, as is the 1 year old getting inadequate care. If their father insists on going to work then either someone else needs to support the mother in caring for the children, or you need to call social services.

How much money is wasted on universal free school meals, for primary school 1-3?

not sure feeding the children is such a waste?

The point is people are responsible for feeding their own children lunch for 16 years of childhood except for the 3 years the school feeds them.
Seriously what benefit is it, plenty of us survived on a sandwich for lunch.

The amount raised looks like a lot, but shared between the many children who need help it really isn't.

I agree with the poster who said that a woman who already has complex care needs should not have a child. I know we can't stop it happening, and I know many on MN disagree. But I too have seen a disabled woman who had daily carers, was single, choosing to have a baby with a father who was never on the scene. The mother could not look after herself, so she could never care appropriately for a child. She was giving birth to her future carer.

YANBU. I’m a carer for my disabled DD, and it’s by far the hardest job I’ve ever done. I have no idea how a child carer copes. There is no support in this country for Carers, even the legally required respite is sadly lacking in most areas.

I’m lucky that I can, usually, flex my work to whilst DD is at school or asleep, but that means I get zero free time to myself. She’s an absolute joy, but the constant fight for services, that legally councils should be providing, and the social isolation is soul destroying.

one of the fuirst things in this pandemic to get cut was social care and mental health.look what they did to the care act 14.this will leave thousands of disabled dead!and trust me benefits will get worse.
and we all now realise people cant possibly live off the amount people were going to have to live off if they lost their jobs in the pandemic and went onto uc.sooooo oh yes we find money to give them 80% because people put up a huge fucking stink.
but hang on a minute.what about all the people who have been on shit benefits and uc and in debt and death from it so how come they are staying on this amount and now probably less because of all this.
they will be once again the people to suffer from this.all the money we need do you think it wont come from social care first?

I have cfs. I get my dd to do as little as possible. I’m lucky in that we have money to throw at the problem and dh does a lot. My pregnancy was difficult and I never recovered. My health deteriorated when dd was about 3. She was my one and only child. Darn right I wasn’t having another even though I would really have liked one. I was struggling too much with the first. Grumpy it was awfully unfair of both parents to have a second child when they weren’t coping with the first.

From the age of 11 my sister and I were carers for my dad who had developed early vascular dementia (probably due to many years of smoking). My mum worked full time to pay the bills and would come home stressed and bad tempered and shout at me in particular. We often missed school, or would get called home from school in the middle of the day. No one cared. I failed most of my O levels (what GCSEs were called then). I felt sorry for mum and dad but my teenage years were really shit. I will feel forever guilty at my relief when he died.