Don’t have more kids if you can’t afford them!

[SportMum1982]

I’m not a raving Tory! But honestly I would have loved more children!!! I would have loved 4 kids but I know we cannot afford 4 kids.

Why do people expect the state to pay for their children? Bar education though! If I’m being really cruel tell me, but I feel I did want more kids but stopped.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67999028

As I asked in my post *VivienneMary" , what should happen to the children whose parents can't afford to feed them ? What do you suggest? You have evaded this question completely.

Now you know as well as I do that in 1930 odd there was not access to contraception in the same way there is now.

I am not saying you cannot raise well adjusted kids if you're poor. I am saying you cannot raise well adjusted kids when you know the state won't help you after 2 kids, yet you continue to have yet more kids you can't afford, driving your existing kids into poverty. Different if contraception is not available, but it is.

Why do you think the state has more responsibility to these children than their own parents? I just can't get my head around that.

My own family (both sides) were poor. Mum was brought up with tons of siblings by an alcoholic mentally ill dad. Her mum died when she was 4. Dad is from a council estate and he has more than one sibling.

@OddityOddityOdd
I would imagine they would have to do the same as families that work and get no benefits.
Manage on their existing income.
No one gets a pay rise from their employer when they have another child.
And not everyone who is not entitled to benefits is well off. Some are a couple of pound over the threshold to claim and are worse off as they don't qualify for the extra benefits of free meals, prescriptions, dentist and discounted travel.

^this. I can’t afford a bigger house and another child so I stopped at 3. Im sorry but I work with people who are predominantly on benefits and don’t work at all. There is a culture with UK that “it’s ok the state will provide whatever I need”

Gosh, if you can't afford to feed your children that's honestly pretty bad. At that point, it's neglect whether their heart is in the right place or not. Really sad for a newborn to be born into a situation where it can't be fed properly.

I'm a Professional woman who had a child at 23 (he's now 10). We stopped at one not because we couldn't afford two but because the it's easier to go back to work and have a social life with one. A few year ago we made it impossible to have more which is always an option open to anyone rich or poor.

Personally I think it should only apply to existing claimants so if you are claiming and have two you don't get funding for a 3rd as you can't afford it. If you're paying into the system then a contribution based system should fund 3+ kids for say 18 months to allow those who fall on hard times to get back in their feet. Once the new childcare comes in (we need more state nurseries with higher ratios to provide it) no one has an excuse not to go out to work and pay into the system.

All those saying you can't claim benefits which you are not entitled to have you seen in today's paper one of the Great British Bake Off contestants has just admitted to £20,000 of benefit fraud. He claimed to be suffering from severe anxiety.

As I said before, if you claim a mental health condition it is very difficult to prove or disprove it

If you grew up in a working class household, then you know exactly what I mean. My own parents instilled a work ethic in me and wanted the best for me too. Did they understand how to help me achieve that? No. If you can’t see there is a world of difference between a middle class upbringing and a working class upbringing, you’re either completely naive or wilfully ignorant. If your parents didn’t go to university how are they supposed to know how to navigate the paths and pitfalls?

Some women can't use hormonal contraception. Some women use contraception and still get pregnant. Some people make mistakes, because they're human beings and none of us are perfect. And if that a person is pregnant and abortion is not something they can accept they still have no option other than to continue with the pregnancy. In any case - when people want a child they engage in wishful thinking. We all do it. People have children when they have a cancer diagnosis - do you think that's immoral? That makes them a bad person? Or when people have an older child with complex health needs? We hope we can cope, and that life will get better. We'll find a better job. Our cancer treatment will succeed. We'll get support from family and friends. We'll find a cheaper home. Again - people don't behave like robots when it comes to decision making about the things which are more emotionally important to them.

"I am not saying you cannot raise well adjusted kids if you're poor. I am saying you cannot raise well adjusted kids when you know the state won't help you after 2 kids, yet you continue to have yet more kids you can't afford, driving your existing kids into poverty. Different if contraception is not available, but it is."

Except the evidence on the two child cap shows that most people weren't aware that they wouldn't be able to get help from the state to care for their additional child should they need it. If you'd read the research on the two child cap you'd know that, but you don't want to read it because the experts from both sides of the political spectrum have examined the evidence on how this policy is working and said - it doesn't work, it's causing suffering, it's harming children. You've got an idea in your mind and you're sticking to it, regardless of the evidence.

"Why do you think the state has more responsibility to these children than their own parents? I just can't get my head around that."

But we accept that the state steps in when parents can't or won't care for their children. It's a basic principle that drives a lot of public policy, because it makes the welfare of the child central to the social contract. Your take on this is - yes, we know this change in policy will result in long term harm to the child, but we that's not our problem as a society.

BTW - your thinking is very common in the states, including when it comes to things like healthcare. 'why should the state have responsibility to pay for your healthcare or your children's healthcare?' The whole right wing rhetoric around personal responsibility is toxic.

"My own family (both sides) were poor. Mum was brought up with tons of siblings by an alcoholic mentally ill dad. Her mum died when she was 4. Dad is from a council estate and he has more than one sibling."

What's the point of this little bio? You think it gives you moral authority when it comes to justifying why the state shouldn't offer the same sort of support to children living in large families than it extends to children with fewer siblings?

Nobody says that there's no benefit fraud, like nobody says that tax fraud doesn't exist or that people don't ever fiddle expenses.

Lol, well what was the point of your own little bio previously then? The "point" of mine was to show you that no one in my family has been born with a silver spoon in their mouth either.

Yes I'm well aware that people make mistakes, thanks. But if they keep making the same mistake over and over again, it's not up to the state to make it easy for them.

Anyway, we are never going to agree so this will be my last post on the subject.

The government were right to have implemented this cap and I hope it continues.

A couple of posters insisted that it is not possible to claim benefits for health problems that you don't actually have.

I argued this was not true as I have a neighbour doing exactly that. Supposed anxiety that makes him unable to leave his house and therefore unable to work and yet works cash in hand 4 or 5 days a week out of his house. Oh and goes food shopping and walks his dogs etc etc.

"I imagine that people who don't have sufficient to meet their basic needs, will do the same as people who have more than sufficient to meet their basic needs"

What's that then? Stop eating? Not have heating or electricity? Don't pay your bills? Send their kids to school in shoes two sizes too small? Sell their furniture? Go out and do sex work? Shop lift?

A family with three children where the third child is born after 2017 will get £260 a month less than an identical family where the third child was born in late 2016. UC is designed to be a 'subsistence income'. That means it's intended only to cover a family's basic needs. This means that a family subject to the two child cap categorically don't have enough income to meet their children's basic needs, and that has serious, long term implications for their health and development.

All these endless excuses for feckless behavior and justifications as to my people act the way we do is the reason why the UK and the benefits system is in the mess it is.
By saving some women can't take hormonal contraceptives or some women are on bad relationships or some women can't work etc etc we are removing the need for anyone taking responsibility for their own actions.
I am also interested in the wider point of why it is perfectly acceptable to say some people do not have the capacity to make decisions about how many children to have but wildly controversial to say, that being the case, they don't have the mental capacity to raise these children or vote. You can have it both ways apparently.

@izimbra
Maybe get a job?
Where do you draw the line?
Should people be able to keep having children for more money?

And it seems these repeated accidental pregnancies happen within families on benefits.

Unfortunate for the children but it's the parent's responsibility.

And not everyone who is not entitled to benefits is well off. Some are a couple of pound over the threshold to claim and are worse off as they don't qualify for the extra benefits of free meals, prescriptions, dentist and discounted travel

If you think that everyone who claims a benefit can claim all of these things then you are misinformed. To qualify for free school meals your household income has to be no more than £7,400 a year. Forget being well off, you'd have to be very poor to qualify.

"All these endless excuses for feckless behavior and justifications as to my people act the way we do is the reason why the UK and the benefits system is in the mess it is."

So don't excuse it. Judge women. Especially working class women, women who've grown up in poverty. Women who come from immigrant backgrounds. Young women. Uneducated women. All these people are far, far more likely to be living on low incomes, to start a family early and to have more than two children. Point the finger at them. Clutch your pearls.

None of which will stop women having children they eventually struggle to provide for, for various reasons, many of them completely beyond their control.

The rest of us will look at humane ways of reducing the number of children being raised in severe poverty, and reducing the impact of severe poverty on the education and health of children. The two child cap and benefits cap aren't effective and don't encourage people to take responsibility.

And by the way - dropping in comments about people not having the capacity to vote, wow, you're really outing yourself. Many people couldn't cope with raising young children, including elderly people, and those with significant mental illness. Doesn't mean they don't have capacity to vote.

You do know that not everyone who gets benefits gets those things, don't you? You only get those if you earn less than £7k a year and claim. I work full time, get some UC and I do not get a discount on anything because I earn over the threshold.

There’s the pill, the implant, the coil, durec, and the after morning pill what more do you want. There’s also the SNIP.

This thread has been profoundly depressing. Like you I think that most people, including really inadequate parents, still love their children, even though they may struggle to do right by them. I also believe that most children love their parents, even when those parents make selfish mistakes that hurt their children. The one thing I absolutely know is that piling social stress on already stressed families by pushing them into deep poverty NEVER makes anything better for parents or for children.

My point is that in such situations we need to prioritise the children's needs. Feeling compassion for the reasons the parents may be incapable doesn't make it acceptable for the children to have their childhoods and life chances wrecked and given that even many of the posters making excuses for such parents have also acknowledged that they are not capable of making good decisions, not capable of prioritising their children over themselves, no capable of even learning what decent parenting looks like, then giving them more money will not provide those children with a decent childhood because the lack of money is a side effect of their problems not the cause of it. Whatever the reasons i.e. whether it is down to laziness or wilful neglect or trauma or addiction or just plain stupidity it's a moot point because the children still suffer regardless. If they can't break the cycle themselves then the children need to be removed and cared for properly. Hence why it's important to take a child-centred approach and remove children at a lower threshold and earlier stage, not tolerate them having shitty childhoods and give these so-called parents chance after chance to traumatise their own children and make pathetic, selfish excuses for it. And to distinguish between such people and families whose problem is simply financial and the parents are good parents, do put their children first and for whom more financial help will actually help the children and enable those parents to stabilise their finances and provide a happy, safe, stable home where children can reach their full potential, which they can in a properly funded care system as international evidence shows, as I pointed out earlier in the thread.

I am sick of hearing excuses for abusive adults and all this woe for the reasons why they are messed up. Many of us have been there and lived through horrific childhoods ourselves so I find this moralising very patronising and frankly clueless. To choose to have children without sorting yourself out first is a choice, it's always a choice no matter what you have been through and adults need to take responsibility for their actions especially when children are involved and they know the consequences first hand because they have lived them. At some point we do have to accept that some people are just hopeless, vile, selfish and abusive human beings who care about nobody but themselves and stop trying to excuse their behaviour.

It is disingenuous in the extreme to try to conflate the two groups of parents I have described and even worse to pretend to care about children if you're happy for them to be left to endure being in the care of such people.

How you extrapolated I suggested taking away the vote from people I have absolutely no idea

Then you didn't read the post. It logically follows from the view you expressed that these people are incapable of making simple decisions about their own lives that they would be even more incapable of making complex decisions on national policy that affect other people. If they are not even capable of understanding that children need a stable home, security, parental time, nutrition, education, love, have material needs etc then how will they be capable of making decisions on economics, defence, taxation, education, health, trade offs between funding various services, etc at a national level that require a decent grasp of current affairs, international trade arrangements, economics, geopolitics etc?

I think that people should be able to have child/ren because reproduction is a basic human right, but it's easier to protect yourself and the child/ren if you only have one, perhaps two. It's so hard to escape a bad relationship if you have a few children. Nobody's forbidding someone from having a child/ren, but they need to accept that the more children they have, the harder it can be because life is more difficult now. It's their choice.

Not sure experimenting on innocent children is the answer.

Well exactly. But that's why many more of them should be removed.

Where do you suggest removing them to ? Have a read up on Fatima Whitbread and the care system, you really think it's any better ? The fact is people make bad choices, they screw their lifes up and the lifes of others, they maybe don't mean to but they do. They don't think through the consequences of their behaviours and their choices. In an ideal world people wouldn't do these things but that isn't our reality. Just because you think they shouldn't, it doesn't mean that they don't do whatever it is. When we are faced with the reality of poor decisions, we have to mitigate the best we can. Looking after families facing and trying to reduce social issues benefits everyone in the long term. Of course everyone should make sensible decisions but the simple reality is that they don't. Saying they should won't change anything.

Maybe it is just that a proportion of people who appear on paper that they woul d struggle if they have dc3 actually dont maybe because
Someone works cash in hand
self employed
Sells on ebay or car boots
grows own food
beause they may get say fsm so most of the time just having something cheap simple etc for tea
do opposite shifts to partner so never pay childcare
live central so no car or transport costs

if you rent you dont pay to maontain or rennovate property.