To want to sink to my knees and cry?

[tessofthedurbervilles]

When my baby is born I would be better off not working than returning to my well paid respectable job....that is just the most stupid thing ever. All I want to do is pay my way but the system is making it easier to live on handouts.....

hi treedelivery - it's awful isn't it - I had a client who gave up being a CAB advisor because of this, he couldn't bear that he was telling people to effectively destroy their family unit and become out of work in order to claim more money!

Obviously the welfare state has to cater for the most needy, I understand that, but there is a case for helping people like yourself when troubled times suddenly hit, without you having to reduce your circumstances further in order to qualify for help.

I can't remember, did I suggest to you that you ask your mortgage company if you can take a "maternity break" from your mortgage? My sister managed this (I didn't, I must admit). Sorry if someone else has said it, I haven't read the entire thread

Big ((hugs)) to you and everyone else who is in this invidious position at the moment, through no real fault of their own.

I had babies at 22/24 and 26 (and then 36) but I took 2 weeks off so again no career disruption, something I was prepared to do because I wanted to be able to afford private school fees, a nanny when they were under 5, skiing holidayslike we just came back from today etc. Not showing off, just looking at when people have children and what effect it has and how you can do it without hurting what potentially might be a good career. If you'd always earn call centre type wages then it's an entirely different thing.

My three older children are picking careers as they're all at university stage and it's obviously very interesting talking to them and their friends about life plans, what work people enjoy (which is hugely important - if I sold up I could just about manage without working but I don't want to - I love the work I do), and what will earn them what they need. They do have some silly ideas some peopel - they'll say XYZ has a very well paid job because they get free clothes or a company car and yet the upper salary of that job is say £50k and another is £1m a year. I do think guiding children so they know the consequences of their actions matters.

So I earn more than my siblings and they went to Oxbridge and I didn't. Is that because I'm the oldest child? I suspect my oldest will earn the most too. It's proven that first children tend to succeed more whatever their gender. Or was it simply because when I was 10 I wanted to buy a island when I grew up (which I then did buy) and so I wqas picking careers partly on whether I could buy an island and also I wanted 7 children and didn't want a may to pay for them when I was about 14 so I suppose that affect career choice and always I've always been reasonably commercial and into business so that's another part of it. Pure academics dont' have the same mind set.

What makes one nurse stay on the average wage and another who I know build up a nationwide chain nursing agency contracting services to the NHS and then sell it off for a lot? Both would start at nurses . May be it's hormones and risk taking - some women have more testosterone perhaps than others.

Going back to ages of having your children one advantage of having them in your early 20s and not taking time off is you're not used to having any mnoey at all then so you just continue without very much so in some ways it's easier and we knew the nanny cost half each of our net salaries but that in 10 - 15 years' time I might earn a huge lot more so it was a long term investment.

Could I ask what people consider to be well paid? I read in the paper that the average wage for a woman working full time is 21,000. I would consider a professor to be very well paid, as even postgrad researchers typically get paid 30-40 thousand.

I would say, putting childcare aside, 30 thousand was well paid and 40 thousand was very paid. Yet I get the impression (not from MN is particular but from life in general) that graduates are going to typically earn in excess of this, which I'm not convinced is true, or not true if you are a woman.

There was a thread on this before and I did some googling which was quite interesting (for me at least).

I discovered that people earning more than £50k were in the top 10% of earners in the UK. From memory, I think that people earning more than £100k were in the top 1% of earners.

thumbwitch, similar to the experience you mention of the benefit experience, when my husband had an accident that left him disabled, he got an appointment with the local disability advice centre. He wanted to know how to sort out the situation with his employer, as there were certain things he would need adapting, but as he does a desk based job, he could still do his job.

The advice centre could not advise him on working, only not working; their advice was to leave work and claim benefits, particularly as he had children. This is madness, and horrible to hear if you are adjusting to life as disabled.

It is almost as if they want families to go on benefits.

I didn't meet my husband until I was 22, we didn't get married until I was 28!
No way I would have wanted to have babies with the bloke I was seeing at university...

ElmoandElla - all the ladies on this thread are living within our means, thank you. I don't think you have fully understood what we are discussing here, it is more about what we are having to do and give up career wise to ensure we are living with our means, a compromise that men never seem to have to make!

Well don't be the one who makes the compromise. You owe it to other women and your daughters to ensure it isn't always women who are giving things up, compromising, halving their income etc etc. But as Anna says plenty of women we know stop work as say lawyer and then go back after 5 years in their 40s and start a business selling clothes, coffee or whatever it might be.

I met my children's father after university too but we married at 21 and had the first baby 13 months later as I wanted to get on with having babies and I chose to take 2 weeks off work for that so no career sacrifice or may be a bit because obviously I also left work at reasonable times in my 20s to breastfeed, see the children etc.

On this...."I would say, putting childcare aside, 30 thousand was well paid and 40 thousand was very paid. Yet I get the impression (not from MN is particular but from life in general) that graduates are going to typically earn in excess of this, which I'm not convinced is true, or not true if you are a woman."

That's correct. The average wage is £25k or something. On graduates my daughter's boyfriend has just started in recruitment on £18k I think it is. My daughters' starting wage will be £37k but that's after 1 - 2 years post graduate in a profession and £60 - £70k 2 years later. You make your pact with the devil as it were in some careers and work very hard for high pay and realise you'll even work all night some of the time as my brother a junior doctor did as I have done but you put up with that (it's easier than holding a crying baby all night) and isn't continuous. What always seems a bad deal though is women who pick low status low paid jobs which are hard work and they hate. So if there is any choice pick something you like to do. Anyway I must actually start the day's work now. 2nd Jan a working day for most people as indeed were 29 - 30th.

I think the ability to compromise is a good thing for women

most of us have had to live with compromise every day, whether its in your career, family life, relations with others etc etc.

we have to be adaptable, flexible and still try to be honest to ourselves

then we find outselves in the situation treedelivery finds herself in, through no fault of our own

sometimes I feel if I didn't compromise I'd self combust with the unfairness of it all!

Life is all about negotiation and compromise. The more education women have, the greater their negotiation position versus men ie they have more to offer (individually and collectively) and are therefore better able to assert themselves and get what they want out of life and society. That may or may not be a high-powered professional career (if you read the Christmas edition of the Economist and its in depth report on Darwinism there is quite a lot of insight on this issue).

Xenia, I think your posts are very interesting and insightful. I try to tell my daughter similar things, and only hope she has the good sense to listen. I am not sure she does, though. However she is doing a Cambridge degree, so maybe the surplus value ethic of some of the others will rub off on her a bit.

However I do still think that not everyone has a free run at 'choice', nor can everyone be in the top 10%, simply because statistically there isn't space, for a start.

Regarding salary levels, a lot depends on where you like, how much your salary buys in practice. £40,000 in London is really quite different from £40,000 in North Lincolnshire, for example.

I think from what everyone is saying that clearly it's middle income female earners who seem to get the worst deal policy wise, and end up running themselves ragged. My only further contribution to the policy debate at the moment is to suggest that currently children's tax allowances are effectively wasted - they have to pay tax if they earn over the threshold (for example as child actors) but there is no way of offsetting these allowances against parental income if they are not working. If there was some mechanism by which this could be done, it would liberate taxable income for use in relation to childcare for people not eligible for vouchers, tax credits and so on. You could possibly even abolish the tax credit system, which is expensive and cumbersome to administer. There would be a case for permitting this for SAHP as well, which gives a kind of carers wage without the Government actually having to shell out. Thoughts?

Maybe this should be the BoffinMum manifesto??

Well, as regards choosing a career that is well-paid, I thought I had! Only to earn top salary you need to have your own practice, which means working 24/7, 365 days a year, and I don't want that.

I don't WANT megabucks- I just want to be able to work and actually feel like it is financially worth it. And I AM lucky enough to earn a good hourly wage, so I can quite understand why people on a lesser wage would feel it futile to return to work if they had to shell out for childcare.

I don't see this as a feminist issue- I see it as a family issue, and something that society could address. I have no problems with putting my career on hold- I chose to have children, I ENJOY being at home with my children more than I enjoy work, tbh. But the cost of childcare is a huge expense that I didn't look into before having kids- so shoot me!

It's great for people to say "have your children in your 20s", but considering I didn't meet my dh until I was 28, it would have been difficult for me! I don't think you can be so prescriptive- you cannot plan your life like that, or encourage your children to follow a life-plan designed by you, surely?

Boffinmum, I totally agree that it is the middle sector who always get the worst deal- maybe because we make the least noise?? Let's get this riot started!

Why shouldn't people choose to do a job they are good at, and trained for? And why should their skills then be lost to society because there is no scheme in place to accomodate childcare costs? Agree that tax credits are not a great system, and I'm sure something better could be brought in that would reward mothers who choose to share their skills with society, rather than penalise them.

I'll come and throw muffins with you !

I think that middle-earning women don't preoccupy the policy makers as much as very low and low earners because families with a middle-earner woman will probably survive and not go on benefits even if that woman is not making a profit (or even making a slight loss) after childcare costs. Policy makers are primarily concerned with keeping people off benefits and able to support themselves long term.

I don't get tax credits as I've always earned too much although my parents got child tax allowances to set against tax at the highest rate before child benefit came along.

In terms of tax theory I'd rather we all had no allowances and paid 20% flat tax (Bulgaria calls me sometimes when the 31st Jan/July tax bills loom) but if we're stuck with 41% (upprate tax/NI and more to come) then I'd settle for childcare costs being tax deductible (and school fees). When I pay school fees I am in a sense investing for the nation so it gets well educated children who will pay a lot of tax. When I contribute to a pension for which there are huge tax breaks I am contributing only to myself and wealth in old age.

Anyway I don't like tax allowances, distortions, credits and state provision so much lower tax and then people choose whether ot have the dog, the horse, the expensive skiing hobby or children at their own expense.

I also agree middle income female earners do do worst and many who work part time get overly burdened.

So who is going to start a petition to get policy makers to take more notice of middle-earning women? We could also do a nice comparative survey of the tax breaks to families and the position of second earners across the developed world - there are plenty of intelligent MNers all over the globe to produce the research...

The problem with petitions is that they are all too polite and ignorable. Petitions are ten-a-penny.

Also in relation to research, the Gvt does this type of comparison all the time and generally ignores it. We are clearly tired of waiting.

The question is, how do we really look suitably determined and powerful, to get our cause noticed? I am not sure I have any answers to this, short of a topless dash holding our babies down Downing Street, and it's far too cold for that sort of 1960s nonsense.

Not if the petition is large enough and not if the research is presented in a really visible/attractive way such that lots of journalists want to write about it...

Do you really think so?

What would the petition say? What do we want?
How many people do you think we could get to sign it?
Do you really think there are enough middle income parents out there who would be interested? I am worried too many people still think of children as a lifestyle accessory and relate childcare costs to that.

Oh yes, if we did it properly and used all our contacts we could do a fabulous international survey and get masses of signatures (all of MN to begin with).

How about we did a survey where we compared the tax and childcare positions of comparably middle-class families across Europe? With real case studies (ie real families) - I can do a French family, Franca can do an Italian family, Belgo can do a Belgian family etc...

One way to make the expense more palatable is to view it as a joint expense. If Mother and father both working you both need childcare therefore it is not taking all your income it is taking some of yours and some of DPs. I know from experience that it can decimate two good incomes paying childcare for 2 children. We had a live in nanny so that we could both take advantage of evening and weekend overtime when it became available (didn't have to call on nanny much as could usually cover for each other but you have to be sure) One thing that is certain however is that if you give up work altogether then when you want to go back it will be harder to find a job and you will probably be paid less. Working part time or freelance is a god idea, esp. if it is something you can do weekends or evenings.

Sounds good to me, Anna888. How do we start a co-ordinated effort?
Do we think MNTowers might help in some way?

JJJ

Neither I, nor anyone else, said that people should have children in their 20s rather than their 30s. For many people having children in their 30s is the better or only choice.

But I certainly believe that should bring my children up with an understanding of my views, which they are then free to reject as adults. I have no wish to force my way of life on the rest of society, but I will certainly make them clear to my children:

I had my children after leaving University. I will (barring potential tragedies) have spent my whole adult productive life working to provide for my children and wider society through my taxes.

as do, many other adults (both men and women) work really hard throughout their twenties to buy a house and build up savings in order to have children in their thirites.

Many people are underpaid and attempt to save/buy a house in their twenties but can't save up enough for childcare/house due to low wages (and this seems to be the problem this thread is trying to find a solution to).

But their are many people that I know (not on MN) that have spent (by their own admission) their twenties drinking, partying, traveling and spending their money on having fun and did not focus on a career. They then complain about how they own no house (and I live in an area where house prices are affordable) and cannot cover childcare costs because they have no savings. I believe this scenario is increasingly common and is a new phenomenon that rarely applied to my parents generation who worked all their lives.

I think it is factually correct and sensible of me to tell my children that if they mess about in their 20s then they are going to be more likely to struggle when they reach their 30s to afford to have children/make a career/buy a house and save all at the same time. I would also advise them to think very carefully before marrying someone who had no savings, because that person is probably irresponsible.

I fully acknowledge that for some essential middle income earners, the government has left them with no viable way of affording children under any plan they could have made. That needs sorting out. But you cannot compare the flighty party person with the hardworking midwife who spent her 20s being underpaid.

Yes, agree with Milly. My sister spent a good few years kind of opted out of work and then had her babies when she was about 37. One reason I earn what I do is I really concentrated on babies and working full time from age 22 to now (47), no career breaks, no gap years, no 20 something years travelling etc etc.

What we don't want is Government thinking childcare is a female issue or that women all want to work full time. What I'd like to see is lots of examples in the press of women who work full time earn a lot and are happy rather than the continual message that woman equals "problem", equals person who can't do proper full time jobs, who just wants pin money and is married to some God of a man who earns 10x what she does.

When most women earn more than their partners things will change but as long as they marry older men who earn more they will always be in this position of coming second fiddle on everything. Yet it's not in our nature to marry down and therein lies the issue. When the female MD of Tesco is happy to marry the very attractive checkout man with the lovely smile we may be moving towards true equality.

Good points, Xenia, but isn't there a problem that holding up examples of the Nicola Horlicks type of person just promotes the meritocracy myth that patrially underpins the whole problem, i.e. if you can't afford childcare it's your own fault because you made the wrong choices, so too bad??

Fantastically well put Xenia.

I have only read first page but sympathise with OP. DH and I were in a fortunate position in that we could pay nursery fees for our 7month old twins for three days a week (nearly £1000 per month) which meant that I could work part time and still spend appreciable time with the boys. The best thing is that I could pay the fees from my part-time salary as well as most of the household bills and still had plenty of money to play around with. DH paid the mortgage and we were still able to over pay it by 100% each month. Consequently, we will have paid if off in 9 years.

I married DH when I was 36yo, had DTS when I was 39yo which meant that I was able to establish myself in my career in a forwarding thinking organisation where I was paid well and allowed to work part-time and still continue developing my career(they even provided me with laptop so that I can log in from home). When I returned from maternity leave (7months), they gave me a large project to run and I had three people working for me. I am now running a team of 15 scientist and engineers and my bosses have provided me everything I need to do the job efficiently and effectively and I still work part-time.

I thank my lucky stars every day that I am in this position.