to ask if literally anyone feels they are paid adequate child maintenance? I'm feeling desperate

[hadenlugff]

Just that really. I’m paid 570 but it won’t even cover half of the nursery fees let alone wrap around care and everything else.

Not only that but it’s not even guaranteed so I can’t rely on it… and that’s fucking awful as I should be able to have some
assurance that I won’t be left entirely to raise a child that is half someone else’s.

I know people have it worse, it’s not a race to then bottom. I’m just dreading dc starting nursery in autumn and dont know how I will manage. Is anyone happy with what they get for maintenance? Ever? It feels so shit.

It is their choice.

women are not support humans. If they take that role it’s on them.

if two parents have equal careers how is it “the obvious choice” for the female half to become a support system for the male half.

there are plenty of other options, they can both reduce hours, they can both continue working, they can both change jobs to make it more flexible.

but if you give up your job or career you should do it in the full knowledge that chances are, should it end, you’re stuffed. Even if he’s a great father and does 50:50 or pays 50% of the kids costs, the other 50% is on you. If you have been out of work your lifestyle is going to take a huge hit.

Well biology is a bit of an issue if the mother wants to breastfeed..yes there are ways around this but they require a lot of planning and organising, all of which fall on the mother. I think it's disingenuous to claim that a woman chooses, years in advance to operate as a single parent, doing 95% of everything when she had planned children, within a marriage or at least a partnership with a shared mortgage etc. I actually think you'd struggle to find a woman on here who would argue that the male NRP should pay MORE than 50% of costs, unless there was a really huge disparity of income, and that's for the child's sake, not the mother's. As said above, this would be easily solved if more men were willing to genuinely take on 50/50 care but they rarely are, either during or after a relationship.

You always make comments on my posts. Are you one of the minimum wage partners that sacrificed your stellar career and want to be supported for life as if you have any option?

One thread (two with this one) is hardly “always” given how frequently you regurgitate your misogynistic bollocks.

Classy lady.🤔

As said above, this would be easily solved if more men were willing to genuinely take on 50/50 care but they rarely are, either during or after a relationship

even this isn’t practical.

dh genuinely did 50:50. Not a high earner but flexi hours so did school runs, bedtimes etc. his mum did all pre school childcare so she could work.

when his ex had an affair and manipulated him into leaving, he had nowhere to go except his mums one bed flat.

so even if he’d wanted to continue 50:50, no where to sleep, no space for toys, no garden etc.

when the divorce went through she’d “disappeared” 15k of joint savings, and there was barely any equity in the house. So he got nothing, she kept the house and car.

so there he was, paying his mum board, having to pay to take his kids out when he saw them, having to buy a car to do so, paying cms. He didn’t have enough disposable income to rent anywhere other than a shared house.

so again, if one household won’t split to provide two adequate living arrangements, how does 50:50 work?

Every case is different. We are primarily discussing NRPs who avoid paying, or pay the minimum and choose to do fuck all. As I said above, the only way to create a fair system is to sufficiently fund the CMS with enough well trained personnel to look into things.

I get £180 a month for two children. Ex has them 4 days a month and gets to do all the exciting things with them that I can’t afford then - takeaways, meals out, cinema, theme parks. He earns £46k a year and has been on holiday to Mauritius in the past year, Amsterdam and Italy, with his new girlfriend, lucky him…..

Have you applied through the CMS?

Of course they should be. They need to pay 59% of their child's costs as a minimum. Why on Earth should the other parent subsidise their half of the expenses for their own child after a divorce?

It's not about being a decent human being its about being realistic. 50% just doesn't work because of so many reasons.

Tough. The resident parent doesn't have the option to just opt out and say it's "not realistic" or "doesn't work" to pay their half. People should think before having children and be forced to pay for half of their living costs if they are such crap people they won't do it out of choice.

gogohmm
For the most part I think people should push for 50/50 and no maintenance, would mean so much less agro when they won't cooperate

Many ex-husbands do not see their children at all. Why should the mother do all of the work AND pay more than 50% of the costs of raising the children?

Because the poor man might find it a struggle to have to manage financially if he met his financial responsibilities? Let me find a tiny violin. Let's let the mothers doing the work struggle financially on top instead and make up his share of expenses shall we, and then tax them more than two parent households with the same earnings as well to compound the disadvantage. 🙄

Exactly. Poor little menz who might find they struggle financially if they have to support their own children by paying their half of costs. I mean, WTAF?

But the mother should expect to pay most of the father's half of expenses for them AND do all parenting AND higher childcare costs as a result of being a lone parent AND pay more tax than a two parent household with the same earnings AND woe betide any who complain about it.

Yeah, sounds fair.

It's not just about money is it? Not everyone earns enough to pay 50% on a low salary it is simply not possible. It's about effort and intentions because if a father is genuinely bringing to the table what he can such as doing more over night stays, school runs and pulling his weight during the school holidays it wouldn't even be an argument about paying half because he would have his child in the 1st place.

If someone's genuinely doing 50% of parenting and providing a separate home for that child and covering 50% of sick days and childcare/ childcare costs because they live with half of the time, and therefore also paying half of their holidays and trips and activities and food and utilities, then fine. That is different, and no transfers of money between the parents will be required.

My comments are primarily about absent, non-resident fathers who do little if any parenting and see their children very little if at all. Damn right they should pay 50% of their living costs. The mother is then still doing all parenting and paying her 50%. It's pathetic to claim that it's unreasonable to expect a father at least to cover his half of the cost of raising his child and yes, he should be forced to make whatever lifestyle changes he has to in order to do it. It's the absolute minimum we should expect from even the shittest parent, to cover half of their child's costs. If anyone's bar is so low they think this is too much to expect then they should not be having children.

I didn't claim it was an unreasonable expectation. I'm just thinking what is realistic there is a huge difference!

I think most of us are mothers on the thread and as you can read most people will be lest holding the kids despite some of us getting £0 or much larger amounts.

I think you have misunderstood what I'm pointing out to you, I know what hard slog goes into being a parent..... I don't see any logic in setting the bar so high. People can't pay what they don't have if someone paid £350 and that was all they could afford I'd accept that it is unfair you are absolutely right. You can't get blood out of a stone though.

@IAmCinderella 👏👏👏👏 exactly. Of course any lower earning nrp could choose to step up and parent, or use his free time to study and become a higher earner, or work a second job. Funny how they don't though...oh because they don't have to. The RP picks it up, either through sacrificing a damn sight more than 20% of salary or running themselves ragged doing childcare and a full-time decent job, or using UC and damaging her own long term prospects (as well as being slagged off for being a feckless lazy single mum). Frankly, an Eow NRP, even if he was paying a full 50% of costs would still be getting off easy as the RP is providing him with 24/7 childcare for the 13 days (half of the 26) every month he is not seeing his child. I worked it out once, years, ago, after ex left. Using my childminder's rates, it would have cost him a couple of grand a month had he been charged for that.

@Flowersun6 but it's not "blood out of a stone". A stone is incapable of giving blood and cannot change that. A human is capable of improving their earnings, or parenting more to allow the RP to work more. If I didn't have my kids 26/30 days I'd be doing 2 or 3 evening shifts a week on top of what I do all day just to build up savings. I could tutor, do bar work, work weekends. And I'd have significantly more income to myself than I do now. But I can't, because ex sees them actually less than eow. But he chooses not to earn what he could. He's actually on 20k less now than when we were together because he decided he'd like an easier life...nice for some.

Sounds familiar...

I'm not here to argue with you. I'm a single parent myself

I'm not picking a fight, just I hear that phrase a lot and it irks me. Most NRPs, could, if they chose, do a lot more to balance the parenting and costs but choose not to, and our current "system" not only enables it but penalises those of us on the sticky end of the wicket. There's zero political will to get into this or make it an election issue.

It is their choice.

women are not support humans. If they take that role it’s on them.

if two parents have equal careers how is it “the obvious choice” for the female half to become a support system for the male half.

there are plenty of other options, they can both reduce hours, they can both continue working, they can both change jobs to make it more flexible.

but if you give up your job or career you should do it in the full knowledge that chances are, should it end, you’re stuffed. Even if he’s a great father and does 50:50 or pays 50% of the kids costs, the other 50% is on you. If you have been out of work your lifestyle is going to take a huge hit.

Many of us have made no such choice. I did not decide to be a "support human".

My ex-husband decided to fuck off when our children were babies. He does not see them at all. I always worked full time and earned as much as him even when we were married.

Explain to me please why I should do all of the work of raising our children as a lone parent AND he shouldn't even pay 50% of the costs of raising them? AND I should also pay more tax than a two parent household with the same earnings as me and subsidise their children even though they have two parents to split earning and time at home between them?

And to top it all off put up with this endless crap vilifying single mothers.

We are the heroins, the responsible ones, the superhuman ones doing the job of two people. Society should put us up on a pedestal not constantly attack us and direct all of this spite at us.

It's disgusting frankly and I'm so done biting my tongue and being polite about it.

The people who need vilifying are the people who don't provide for their children. Society needs to shame them. And anybody who accepts them as a friend or family member or even worse starts a relationship with someone who doesn't even provide for their existing children or - even more stupid - has yet more with that person who has shown themselves to be incapable of being a responsible adult or parent.

Those are the people that should be shamed and penalised, the ones who abandon their children or try to weasel out of paying for their upbringing. Not the ones who stick around and do the hard work.

Have you considered that your ex left because of your hate for everything and everyone that doesn't agree with you?

Have you considered that your ex left because of your hate for everything and everyone that doesn't agree with you?

Yeah, well done.

This is exactly what I mean.

It must be the woman's fault, of course. 🙄