Hungry kids and shitty views

[icequeen34]

I apologise as I'm sure there are already threads on this topic. But I feel so so sad and angry today, not only about Marcus Rashfords campaign to feed hungry kids over the holidays being rejected. But some of the horrible views and justifications being spouted - mainly the old 'lazy parents need to take responsibility for feeding their kids' remark. Some utter twat was saying poor families should grow their own food because 'it's not hard' and another Tory MP claimed the blame lies with absent parents (as if his leader isn't one of those).

These are terrible comments from privileged people who clearly don't understand the lack of time, money, outdoor space and education needed to grow your own or shop more savvy. But even in the cases of the worst most lazy parents, why can't people see that the children shouldn't be the ones to suffer? It really boils my blood especially when MPs get so much in terms of expenses for food.

Sorry for the rant I just feel very disappointed and upset today.

@May172010 Same here. A one bed flat was the standard type of housing in my city. Every kid I knew shared a bedroom with a sibling until they grew up and moved out. But further down the thread someone was saying that's "overcrowding"
A 3 bed house would've been an extravagant luxury for a family, yet in the UK it's considered a standard necessity.
We were poor, my dad was an alcoholic, my mum worked 2 jobs for low pay, we didn't have any benefits and communism had just collapsed so the whole country was in disarray but not once did I go hungry, because my mum prioritised feeding me.

Before anyone jumps on me, I don't support this new policy and think every child should get free school meals regardless of whether their parents are genuinely poor or just "feckless". I don't want any child to go hungry.

BUT these threads about poverty always descend into ludicrousness. People going on about lack of electricity, fridges, kettles etc. I live in a deprived neighbourhood with lots of people on benefits/low wages and just don't recognise this Dickensian environment that's being described. Maybe that could be someone's situation in the short term, if they've fallen on hard times. But it's not standard for someone to not have electricity or a fridge, long-term, in the UK. Most people where I live have the basics to live a modest lifestyle.
The only people that regularly don't have electric/gas and kitchen goods are drug addicts who don't pay their bills and sell all their stuff to pay for drugs. So if a child is regularly going into school hungry that should be investigated because there are likely to be deeper issues than pure lack of money.

Pumper, some of it is the government’s problem. Issues due to minimum wage/benefits not being enough to cover housing, food and essentials is their issue. Parents who neglect to feed their children due to poor prioritisation of money are not. However, squabbling about whose fault or responsibility it is doesn’t provide a solution, it just delays things.
I suppose I feel that if I was extremely passionate about a cause and had the financial capital and social platform to start investing in community schemes to make a difference, this may be more effective than nagging at a government who have failed to provide and likely will fail to do so in future.
The solution doesn’t depend on whose problem it is, it requires someone to own it and say, “I’ll take this on because I want to and I can.”
Community cafes that are appealing to kids/teens would provide somewhere for young people to be, could be started up as not for profit organisations, could plough proceeds back in to provide food for those in need. Providing jobs for people, cooking, catering, delivering, etc...
Football themed places that young people want to go to, make them trendy and appealing, those that have the money to do so would spend to eat/drink/socialise, odd surprise appearances by a football star would help the appeal and not just make it a place for needy people, separating people into groups. (Now may not be the best time for this admittedly, but this was a problem pre COVID and will be post)
Giving out food is a short term but necessary solution, but investment in long term schemes is the only real way out of this. Yes the government should be doing this, but I bet a whip round at Man Utd would go a long way to helping kick start things.

@Roosterbooster99

Tyranttoddler Don’t leave, you haven’t done anything wrong. That poster is on the wind up, they’re here to cause trouble. Nobody is suggesting that kids are starving to death, nobody is saying this is the policy that will end child hunger or neglect. We’re saying it’s the bare minimum this government can do

If this policy won’t end poverty and children aren’t starving to death, then why is it desperately needed? FFS. Knock knock. Is there a brain cell in there.

I bet you’re one of these people who thinks it was okay for Labour to over up thousands of children being raped for years just coz they’re left wing.

Are you really this desperate for a fight? Goady, trolling bollocks from start to finish.

It’s needed because there are hungry children now who need lunch. It’s an easy to implement, relatively cheap way to ease a bit of suffering.

What would help the most is a full time job actually supporting someone without the need for uc
You would soon see the difference between the poor and the feckless.
It doesnt matter what the parents have or havent done. What matters is these innocent children are here now and are hungry now so something needs to change now.

Frankly I'm totally baffled by these threads going about this week about children hunger.

What do we mean by hunger? Is any feeling hunger at any time something to be concerned about and therefore recorded?

I was one of those kids growing up who was always hungry whilst my sister 4 years younger was never hungry. I was slightly chubby, she was very skinny but both were healthy, but with the same meals in front of us. Would she nowadays be counted in those children suffering from hunger because of her weight, or me because I'd been interviewed and asked if I ever felt hungry, I'd responded yes to almost always!

Statistically, figures show a very different picture to what we are made to believe here. 1.38% of Y6 are underweight. Not all these will be because of lack of finances.

On the other hand, almost 35% of Year 6 are now overweight or obese.

More than 1.3% of families will be dependent on some level of benefits and the 35% of overweight kids any all be from well off family who are not dependent on any benefits.

So was it we are trying to tackle? The 1.38% of kids who are underweight? That would make sense but where is the evidence that more money will help when that figure has been stabled for quite some years when obesity is instead drastically increasing year on year to a much higher level?

It’s needed because there are hungry children now who need lunch.

Can you provide a single scrap of evidence for that claim? We have never had year round free lunches but we’ve never had widespread child malnutrition.

It’s just not needed. It’s just middle class, middle aged virtue signalling - and you are harming poor children because you’re insisting help is aimed at something poor kids don’t need because it lets you massage your own ego.

Poor kids need extra support at school, free books. If you really cared about them then you’d recognise that.

It’s an easy to implement, relatively cheap way to ease a bit of suffering

It’s not cheap and there is no eveiden e of suffering.

Can you provide a single scrap of evidence for that claim?
They can't!

From Wikipedia:
In the run-up to the 2015 general election, the issue of hunger in the UK became somewhat politicised, with right wing commentators expressing scepticism about figures presented by church groups and left-leaning activists. An All-Party MP group focusing on hunger in the UK has called for activists to be cautious in how they discuss the problem of domestic hunger, as exaggerated claims and political point scoring risk reducing public support for tackling the issue. In a 2016 report, the All-Party group stated it is not possible to accurately quantify the number of people suffering from hunger in the UK, and called for better collection of data. The UK government began the official measurement of food insecurity in 2019, and is set to begin reporting on this from March 2021

Morning, everyone.

We've deleted a few posts on this thread and just wanted to remind everyone that we're all for heated debate and understand that topics like this are emotive, but personal attacks break our talk guidelines and will be removed.

All the points that people make about feckless parents who don't care enough to buy value cereal for their children and how there is no excuse for this behaviour are interesting. Yes, you're right. It is shitty on those parents part (those parents who I am willing to bet make up a smaller part of the problem than we like to admit because it doesn't fit with the narrative of lazy parents being to blame) and it really highlights how underfunded social services is, because there are services that should be supporting families to make better choices, to understand the importance of providing breakfast and how to budget and How to cook nutritious meals on a budget and how to shop in a way that maximises your spending power. There are services that should be in place to catch these problems and support families to do better and get better, but those services currently spend their time dealing with only the extreme cases of child abuse and neglect, when things are spiralled to far out of control and children are in physical danger.

So now we have children failed by the safety net that should be in place to pick up these problems at home, and failed by the government to provide a basic level of care that involves them not going hungry for up to six weeks at a stretch because they won't put the needs of the child above their own judgement of the parents, despite them being the ones who cut the funding to support those families in the first place.

It is never the children's fault, for being failed by society (because we all had the choice of a better way, but it looks like we chose this joke of a government instead) and potentially for being failed by their parents too.

And for what it's worth I truly don't believe this is a problem caused by the feckless parents the majority of the time. Either way, kids are hungry and learning that life is pretty shit and how many of those kids grow up to be Marcus Rashfords and how many don't, because they don't think they'll ever amount to anything better or anything worth something.
I know which society I'd rather live in and it's one where a big portion of the youth don't grow up disassociated and disillusioned and disengaged with society around them.

Bravo Zaffa

Roosterbooster99. Your assertion is incorrect. The UK has had very widespread malnutrition over the centuries. It started lessening with the introduction of the welfare system but in 1920s about half of all children were significantly malnourished. Better social support is one of the key reasons for declining infant and child mortality.

@Roosterbooster99 why don’t you go into the real world, out of your little bubble and actually see that children don’t need fucking books.

Honestly, how far removed can you actually get? It’s mind boggling.

Poor kids need extra support at school, free books. If you really cared about them then you’d recognise that.
Yes! They need a lot of other things too. We have organised funded WiFi for families, laptops for children (thanks to a local uni and no thanks to the government), tutoring, all free revision guides and targeted intervention. That's what the PP budget is meant to be for. Improving outcomes for the most disadvantaged and narrowing the gap.

@Roosterbooster99

It’s needed because there are hungry children now who need lunch.

Can you provide a single scrap of evidence for that claim? We have never had year round free lunches but we’ve never had widespread child malnutrition.

It’s just not needed. It’s just middle class, middle aged virtue signalling - and you are harming poor children because you’re insisting help is aimed at something poor kids don’t need because it lets you massage your own ego.

Poor kids need extra support at school, free books. If you really cared about them then you’d recognise that.

It’s an easy to implement, relatively cheap way to ease a bit of suffering

It’s not cheap and there is no eveiden e of suffering.

We’re never had a pandemic. Again, I’m not suggesting this is the solution to all the world’s ills, I’m saying not supporting free meals because you claim your childhood was horrendous (while having a pop at ‘the left’) makes you a dickhead.

[quote TeddyIsaHe]@Roosterbooster99 why don’t you go into the real world, out of your little bubble and actually see that children don’t need fucking books.

Honestly, how far removed can you actually get? It’s mind boggling.[/quote]
Definitely a touch of the hairy hands here. Ticks all the boxes of a daily-mail idiot so desperate to hate that they can’t follow logic. Pathetic.

Agreed OP - the posts complaining about their tax being used to feed hungry children. Much better for it to be used for HS2 or increase to MP's wages.

Children are going hungry and I don't care how or why. I would just like them to be fed. Since when is it entitled for children to not be hungry?!

I get so annoyed

Children are going hungry and I don't care how or why. I would just like them to be fed. Since when is it entitled for children to not be hungry?!

I think we should very much care how and why, because otherwise it will never be better, is it. Wanting to sort why and how and talk about it doesn't mean people don't want the kids fed. Most population does. No gripe against children. It's not entitled for children not to be hungry. The word entitled isn't aimed at children, but some of the parents.

I think in a lot of cases it is a lack of organisation, rather than lack of money to buy basic food.

I was always starving as a child at school. I found it really hard to get up in the morning so would always leave it to last second before rolling out of bed. I had several siblings and our parents didn’t notice whether anyone had eaten breakfast.

My parents didn’t put much effort into having an evening meal together either, mum would boil a vat of potatoes and carrots every single day and we’d have some sort of meat or fish and it would be put in containers on the table and siblings would come and go taking plates to the TV, rather than sit down together. I’d rarely eat the dinner, just making myself lots of toast and cereal instead.

I remember having a really loud rumbly tummy every morning at school, which was so embarrassing when the class was quiet - I remember the squirming as I felt it start.

I was so lazy about getting out of bed, so it’s not totally my parents’ fault, however I’m making sure to instil more meal-time and sleep discipline with my own kids, and not having so many kids that we lose control.

Not saying my experience is typical but it’s just an example where money for food was not the problem, but discipline and household organisation.

Feel like I’m opening a wound here as I’ve not really ever talked about this experience! In other ways they were good parents, pushed the value of education and were very strict about certain things, drove us about everywhere. I think part of the problem is my mum hardly eats and doesn’t enjoy food herself, also she is socially unaware, and is naturally just disorganised.

Well done all of you who voted for the tories. This has been happening for years. They don't care about us!!!

Just gonna park this here for anyone else who is tired of subsidising booze for politicians.

you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/end-subsidised-food-and-alcohol-in-parliament-and-the-lords?bucket&source=facebook-share-button&time=1603337281&utm_medium=socialshare&utm_source=facebook&share=ce8e5dbc-f66e-4759-8ac7-23485435c226&fbclid=IwAR3LcvsT7QA_CNO3dN4i7EI1VLjdkSJjgIzPXuDrgCexAKsAqHEiynsAo38#signature-form

‘Children going to school without breakfast is never a matter of simple poverty. It's usually due to parents who live chaotic disordered lives, have mental illness, drug and alcohol addictions, etc. Simply providing food vouchers for the holiday does little to help some of these families- the problems run deeper in society and can't be fixed by throwing cash their way!’

This is true.

There's a lot of issues contributing to children going hungry. We need to feed them AND get to the root cause.
I think children should have proper budgeting and cooking lessons at school so they learn how to shop on a budget and cook meals using what they've bought.
If their parents aren't teaching them this, and school aren't teaching them this, then the cycle will just repeat.
We have to break the cycle and feed the children in the meantime.

A lot of local businesses are offering free meals for children, I feel a bit uncomfortable that they have to go in with an adult, but only the child will get a meal. Often if the child is hungry then the adult invariably is too, and although a great gesture I wonder what the uptake will be. I have offered to donate money to help cover the costs at my local, but I hope they extend to adults too.

Free childcare and decent salaries for all with benefits only for disabled.