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

There is but the moaners like to pretend there isn't

Yes that's the point I was making.

People always preface an opinion like this one with "I'm not a Tory, but I'm about to say this:...."

Whether she's a Tory or not is irrelevant and entirely up to her.

My point was, they are allowed to be Tories. It's not illegal. Clearly lots of people are, as they keep getting into power.

We wanted a large family. We had a large family that we could easily afford at that time. I am unaware of a Chinese-style 'one child only' policy that applies here.

Life changes! Do people who choose to have five kids not stop and think 'what if one/both of us loses our jobs, what if one of us gets ill/dies, what if one of us falls out of love/husband runs off with someone else. Can I take care of said children?

People just don't like taking personal responsibility.

You shouldn’t be having any children at all if you haven’t considered what you would do if they were higher needs or multiples. We balance probabilities and plan as best we can and we pay taxes to provide a safety net.

Posters keep telling us we need more children because of an ageing population are talking bollocks.

Next year 2025 it's predicted more people will die than will be born in the UK.

Our population will increase still but due to immigration.

https://www.ft.com/content/7a558711-c1b8-4a41-8e72-8470cbd117e5

Yes, I agree it is always the DC who looses out, either on parents time and attention or on resources. I had 3 DC and would have dearly loved a fourth. But, like the previous poster, I didn't want to take away resources from our current dc. I couldn't shake off the broody urge. Instead I waited until my 3 were older and then became a Foster Carer and so this fulfills my need to care for DC but I get an allowance to cover their cost and my 3 DC are adults now so I have plenty of time to spend on FS.

Whilst I agree that a degree of personal responsibility is needed, women should never be made to feel like they must abort. Accidents will always happen. We cannot determine a genuine accident without asking women to explain themselves and that's just not on.

Could we make childcare and retraining more accessible so more women can return to work?
Could we lower the cost of child-related essentials?
How about increasing women's access to contraceptive choices? Yes, they are free of charge but what good is that when you can't even get an appointment with the GP?

Before the 2 child cap imo the only people who could afford large families were the rich and the poor. The latter because the government/tax payer played 'daddy'.

The reality is that even having 1 child is expensive and perhaps we should start with that expectation. Many of us don't have more than 2 because that's all we know we can cope with and afford because our circumstances might change.

I would put money on none of those parents having ever had a normal paid full time job. Very few of those children will be net contributors. They are growing up in an environment where no responsibility is taken, everything is expected to be provided. How is this good for them?

Re the ageing population, at some point we need to take the pain of a crossover of having a top heavy ageing population before moving to a more balanced one. Perhaps also we need to address keeping people alive at any cost regardless of how ill/functioning they are.

Well, obviously, no one actually needs any children. People only have children because they want them not need them. 1 or 2 is the sensible number

I think you just only notice the ones that don’t. Lots of larger families manage perfectly well.

I couldn't really vote, as in general I agree, but sometimes 'life happens', and there are unforeseen circumstances. In any case, most people at least in the UK do avoid having large families that they may not be able to afford. Of families with children. 85% have one or two, and only a small minority have 4 or more.

To me what the article shows is that you're not going to stop people from having kids by restricting benefits. There's no benefit that comes close to covering the cost of raising a child and it's total bullshit that people have babies to get benefits.

Most larger families on lower income happen because of relationship breakdown I imagine. People should be able to get help of they want to have more kids for whatever reason - and it is getting help. It's not covering the costs and it's certainly not living a life of luxury because of all your benefits.

If everyone stuck to 2 children, we'd be left marrying cousins in a couple of generations.

As for not being able to afford it, we absolutely can. We could afford a universal basic income and to invest in public services. Instead we choose to spend billions propping up inequality, billions more in corporate welfare and in stripping out public assets and resources.

I would’ve agreed a few years ago. But more and more people are becoming single parents the cost of living is crazy high! What about people who accidentally get pregnant? People who are too late to have an abortion? People who have disabled kids? Not all medical conditions fall under the scope of TFMR. Why can dickhead dads just walk away and leave the woman and his kids in a mess? It’s just too much of a grey area to just say ‘don’t have kids if you can’t afford them’.

Yes it’s a huge problem. I believe that there are hordes of teenagers and young adults, hordes, chomping at the bit to have their ever increasing families funded by the state rather than the security of well paid employment. Why wouldn’t you? It’s an amazing life and they even have their own supermarkets like Lidl that, and you won’t believe this, are cheaper and charities that will give them clothes.

/s

A bit too simplistic OP...

You can't plan everything in life and there are many things you can't control: relationships end, a partner can develop a serious illness that prevents them from working or even leads to their death, redundancies, mental health crisis, abusive partner causing the other partner to have to leave with the kids for everyone's safety, men who refuse to support their kids and disappear...

There are so many things that can happen to make a family have to rely on benefit.

It is silly to suggest that it is always a case of people purposely having several kids to get more benefits or a council house.

It is a very Daily Mail, black and white narrative but life is more complicated than that.

There always will be feckless people and the best we can do is make sure their kids get a decent education and don't follow their example.

You can’t plan for everything in life, no. But you can plan for the more likely scenarios including divorce, redundancy and death of a parent. We considered these when deciding to have DC and also our second DC, we wouldn’t have had them if we couldn’t have afforded to provide for them of these scenarios happened. If we divorce I can provide for them by myself, and so could my DH.

There always will be feckless people and the best we can do is make sure their kids get a decent education and don't follow their example.

We can’t. The kids barely turn up to school now, the parents back them, they don’t have a hope of a decent education (most of them). It’s a lost cause tbh.

Yabu to not appreciate:

People circumstances can change overnight.

We need the birth rate to increase.

It's not the fault of the children.

Too many deadbeat dads who don't pay and the country turns a blind eye.

How many children would you say a person needs?

1-3 children is enough to have children and a family though, that's the point

Nobody is saying 1 child policy but 5 is a lot. And not everything is about money. People say if you can afford them, have them. It's not about money!

I sort of agree because people don't really think before having multiples of kids.

However I have never been able to afford my children alone without any support. My husband and I decided to equally have children, both working full time but my job paid so little that I would never have been able to pay for anything other than a house share if I was single let alone with children. I still went ahead and had 2 knowing that if my marriage were to break down I would need to claim benefits.

It's also why I ended up working evenings and weekends because we would have maybe broken even paying for full-time nursery had I stayed in the job I was doing pre kids and we needed a small income to pay the bills.

Probably my own fault for trying to develop a career in hospitality knowing how badly it pays despite working all hours round the clock but kids weren't my focus fresh out of Uni at 23. I didn't realise how difficult it would be to climb the ranks and have a family and when I did I quit trying to.

Which net contributors? Childless smokers paying 40% tax who left school at 18 and never used the NHS?

But I agree, there's a breakdown, I just happen to think it's more to do with the 10% getting ever richer at the expense of the rest of us.

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/nov/27/uk-spends-more-financing-inequality-in-favour-of-rich-than-rest-of-europe-report-finds

We need the birth rate to increase

not really. From a global perspective we need the current global population to be more evenly distributed. But peeps get very Tom-cat-territorial at that suggestion.

Too many deadbeat dads who don't pay and the country turns a blind eye
I agree, it's much too easy for men to abandon the children that they create leaving the mother to carry all of the burden, to do all of the work (and it is work even if it isn't paid work)
I don't see how this can be addressed though🤷🏼‍♀️

But what is the alternative? How do you stop people having more kids than they can afford?
Means test every pregnant woman and her family to see if she can afford it and if not then what? Make her get rid of it? Take it away once it's born?
Fine people after two?
What if I have twins then my partner loses his job?
I can't afford to pay for them so the government has to help me.
It's not as black and white as you make out.
Out of everything my taxes get used for then I don't actually mind it going towards feeding and clothing a child that didn't ask to be born into poverty.
And maybe think does it actually affect you? Any actual detriment to your enjoyment/ability to provide/enjoy life due to this?