To think this is scandalous yet in plain sight because the patriarchy has no shame

[Webjisroommate]

A year ago I separated from my DD’s father and she was in the middle of her first year of nursery. He paid the cms amount every month, without fail. This was 360 a month, even though I was left to pay over 1,300 on nursery fees alone. Obviously the situation has now changed slightly with the hours but his 360 contribution is quite literally nowhere near half her costs. I have spoken about this with other mum friends and have learned that 360 is actually pretty fortunate! Some women are being paid less than 200 and others have to chase cms when their ex is self employed. I was not aware of any of this before having Dd.

My career is now hugely clipped as I am doing 95% of childcare while ex sees her a day a week… the day I use mostly to clean and get the house in order to start the week again. And yes, I suggested 50/50, he didn’t want that.

I honestly feel like this is a huge joke player on women in plain sight while nothing is actually done about it?! I also can’t fathom how HMRC can chase tax from the self employed but Cms can’t chase these men to pay for their children. It’s a disgrace. Why is this allowed to happen?!

Some also get off on fathering children and will tamper with condoms and women’s contraceptives without their knowledge. It’s an actual kink for some.

When I was at college a friend kindly invited me to stay the night as we had an early start for a trip the next morning and I lived about 40 minutes from the college.

I was shocked at the sparsity of the flat. No carpets and the most basic furniture, the only pictures were the ones the DCs had done in school and although it was November the heating was off. Their mum at no dinner that night - I felt awful but she insisted I should eat. Yet the girls were always beautifully presented and from the outside you'd never have known there were any financial issues at all. Their mum worked but on a low income - well before the days of the minimum wage. My friend had taken a weekend job in a shop when she was 14 to help.

It was 1993.

It's never left me. It was a life lesson. It made me understand what poverty meant in this country. I thought I knew but that was my 17 year old middle class arrogance

Months later for some reason the question of maintenance came up - I don't remember why at all but I know we were talking about money and our fathers - both our parents were single. My friend told me that their father paid £1 a week maintenance towards the 2 girls. Looking at inflation calculator that's £2.09. I think things have improved but single mums get shafted then and now

You're absolutely right, OP. This is just one of a hundred different ways society and the state exploits women's sense of social and moral responsibility and expects them to step up and behave better than they expect men to. Women still do the vast majority of cleaning and domestic work in their and their family's homes, they are the ones the school phones and expects to drop everything when a child is ill, they carry the emotional and practical burdens of feeding, looking after the health and development of their families and they're under immense pressure to make birthdays and Christmas increasingly special. And of course they are expected to provide emotional care for the extended family and act as unpaid carers for elderly relatives. Yet Andrew Tate and similar misogynists preach that women have it easier than men and apparently some young men identify as women because they believe women have it easier too.

I'm an older woman: I fought for women's and LGB rights in the 80s and 90s and was a second-wave feminist. We saw what appeared to be great strides in equality. Then the liberal feminists came along, wanting to include men in feminism and calling my generation strident and man-hating and feminism began to fall apart. The libfems triumphed and now we have the situation you describe here, OP, where society takes it as read that women will step up to fill the gaps while men are allowed to relinquish their responsibilities. Meanwhile women are punished most severely by the cost of living crisis and the destruction of state support.

Women are learning. We're having fewer and fewer children and we're having them much later in life, with the knock-on effects of that (increased rates of ASD, ADHD etc) which cost the state. But what we need is a strong feminist movement to redress the balance that has tipped back towards men and we need to bring up our boys and young men to be better partners, husbands and fathers.

@Dayoldbag you're basically saying the same as the poster on page 1 who said women shouldn't have babies "willy nilly". The vast majority of single parents were married or in long term relationships with men whom were committed and involved with the pregnancy and child - until it got too hard / boring / restrictive / expensive / in the way of a shiny new OW / taking up the mother's time and attention. No one can guarantee what their partner / husband will be like. There's a thread on here about a woman whose husband left after 20 years and became an absolute callous bastard pretty much overnight. Those of us who were left holding the babies are usually blind-sided (and not there are not always red flags).It really doesn't matter who left who, the point is a child should be adequately supported by BOTH parents and given that the NRP is not restricted by childcare, they ought to be able to increase their earnings, retrain, take double shifts etc if that is what it takes to contribute an appropriate amount.

In order to find solutions to problems, it is necessary to look at the issues from all sides, rather then decide upfront which side you are going to support and then to jump in without any thought as to circumstances and viewpoints. Sometimes it is the intelligent thing to do to look at situations and why they happen rather than making instant decisions.

Perhaps National Insurance numbers should be on birth certificates and also be required for opening any bank account or other financial product.

It would make non paying parents traceable, their income more accessible and might make other financial dodginess more difficult to get away with.

Gosh, thewe poor men. Presumably the pharmaceutical companies are stockpiling the male birth control in anticipation of this vast demand 🙄

Getonwitit · Yesterday 20:36
This is where women have to sit up and take notice of what is happening to other women. Maybe it is time to make sure an account is opened and childcare costs are saved by both parents to be before a baby is conceived.

Do you not think he would take half of that when splitting up? I'm pretty sure it would be classed as savings.

I don't think they do, actually. They just know that if they don't, no one else will step up and so women tend to put their children first, unlike many men.

Be logical. By the time a husband leaves a wife with a couple (or more) kids, it's a tad bit late for a termination.

It doesn't help that the UK seems to pretty woeful in providing/subsidising childcare.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/06/childcare-puzzle-which-countries-in-europe-have-the-highest-and-lowest-childcare-costs

What happens if the father can have the children 50% of the time but the mother wants them to go to childcare and not spend the time with father/fathers family? Does he have to pay 50% childcare or does this then become her costs as she refusing to let Dad have them 50/50

I'm not sure how much you think he should be paying, but ~15% of his net income doesn't seem that bad.

What percentage of the woman's income do you think goes on supporting the children?
It will vary according to the size of the home she needs maintain, and the age of the children, and someone please correct me if I am wrong- never been there- but I think it's rather more than 15% of her income.

This simply isn't true

Pregnancy is a risk of having sex. Always.

Men can use a condom. Some pregnancies result from contraceptive failure so "she told me she was on the pill" is a nonsense excuse. She might have been. At least if you used a condom you took some responsibility and you can know she didn't entrap you deliberately.

Also it hardly covers men who abandon their wives and kids and don't pay up.

"There are women complicit in this too"

Yes there absolutely are, in all kinds of ways.

The biggest losers are the poor children, who have a stressy and unpleasant life due to their single mothers being forced to struggle and their fathers behaving like irresponsible oversexed teenagers.

XH spent court-ordered money that should have funded dd's further education, on flying to an exotic location and marrying a woman exactly half his age. I will never see that money, all I will see are red letters from HMRC because I now can't pay my taxes.

I was going to have a nice quiet non-confrontational browse of lighthearted aibu threads but now I'm angry.

Do any posters know of any activitist or pressure groups.

I'm interested in what people say about the system in the US being much better. I assume it has changed since my friend was trying to get child support from her ex husband there (over 20 years ago).

When they split up he refused to pay child support. She took him to court and got a ruling that he should pay whatever it was, but it wasn't enforceable because he moved to a different state. She had to start the process all over again in the new state. I think she gave up after he had moved about 6 times.

So you want all women to be psychic now?

Men are equally morally ethically responsible for half of the costs of their children. The fact society doesn't prioritise this is disgusting.

Yes I banged that drum for 20 years - very disappointing to hear that it’s no better in 2024.

If he genuinely has the kids half the working week, and half the nights, half the meal times etc there would be no maintenance due. However all too often the man's "half" just happens to fall over the weekend, getting him out of the nursery bill and landing granny with babysitting duties.
If he wants 50/50 and doesn't have it, he can go through the courts.

there are no simple answers without taking everything into consideration are there, and certainly not I always support the woman, or I always support the man!

But should they pay the whole cost of them ? Two different things.
Also it's almost always the woman who is left holding the kids.

Not this AGAIN!

Why do you keep starting the same thread???

CMS is absolutely useless. It's not fit for purpose.
Men who don't pay should be heavily penalised, passports taken , driving licenses, jail.
It's a disgrace.

I completely agree with you.
I also should have written that in many cases after years together men do walk away and leave it to women, but that is on our government that allow men to do this.

However, women need to be ruthless too and protect themselves and put themselves 100% first, particularly in relationships of a short duration.
Because sadly many, many men, particularly those unmarried, but certainly not restricted to them, walk away from women and young children VERY easily.

Of course it is wrong and disgusting behaviour. I don't blame women for one bit of this.

What I am saying is, in as much as is possible they need to ruthlessly protect themselves because men certainly won't.