Absent fathers to be made into scape goats

[ivykaty44]

absent fathers

as a single mother who has lived without maintenence for periods of time and at times struggled to make ends meet I still think it is awful to suggest making a group of people stigmatised.

there are good NoneResidentParents and there are useless NRP, it isn't just absent fathers but sometimes absent mothers. What sort of country do we live in thuogh where we would want to stigmatise a whole group of people.

Better to keep the CSA free and make it work rather than the clerical mess it is at the moment.

swallowedAfly I do not find the term housewife offside why would I it's not a bad thing please don't try and pontificate on other womens behalf

I agree . There can be other threads against parents (female and male and I've known men deny their ex wives all contact by the way) who deny contact.

However I think it would helop those fathers who think women thwart contact and fathers always want to see their children to have the scales lifted and realise the bigger issue is men who won't pull their weight, find it quite convenient to spend weekends in bed with their new lover rather than with 3 toddlers up from 5am.

I don't think it is only men who want to spend the weekend alone with their new partner without the children! IME women are pretty keen to do that too...

Ah Dione, there's Skype and other webcam systems now, and 5 times a year isn't too bad if they speak regularly by webcam...twice or thrice a week, every day if that's what they want...
What an utter loasd of old bollocks!! Here we are claiming children are better off if mum doesnt even work but 2 goes on Skype is supposed to be enough for a father.. Bull.shit.

Mothering isn't undervalued, the nation loves mothers (in fact so much so that even if yours is an utter battleaxe you still love 'em) but we're still mothers mothering whether we work or not. Just because you don't work doesnt mean your doing anything amzing, certainly no more amazing than the rest of us.

Still, apparently just because I can see what is glaringly obvious, i.e. that the most important factor to a child's survival is money, I am some kind of mysogynist.. not sure how that is. I know 2 stay at home dad's and OI think they're pointless too.

Haven't read loads of the posts.

I posted early on though and am very disappointed that a Home Office minister or David Cameron himself no less, hasn't rung me offering to focus on my case accompanied by a lot of publicity and reporters flying out to Thailand to nail my ExH and put him on the spot.

marycorporate - I cannot understand why you think money is the most important thing a child requires. A small baby left alone without care for a day will die. Care is just as important as money.

yes but they have a relative value. Childcare and housekeeping is about £40k a year although of course some full time working fathers (and mothers) with idle partners get home to find not a jot has been done and child ignored/abused all day so it's not as simple as saying she or he who stayeth home is a God.

The fact is men for thousands, tend of thousands of years have spread their seed and moved on from Genghis Khan was just one of the more recent ones.

As it costs a lot to support single mothers except for those that earn what I do this Government and others wants to stop the problem and those of us who pay tax woul dbe very sympathetic to anything which made the men pay and reduced our tax bills.

oh FGS Marycorporate I was trying to cheer Dionne up. It's not ideal, I agree, but it's the best she's got.

The alternative is for the guy not to go to London but to stay at home in Northern Ireland and claim benefit until a new job turns up. And it doesn't sound as if Dionne's DP is offering that alternative.

Sorry, Dionne's XP I should say.

"those of us who pay tax woul dbe very sympathetic to anything which made the men pay and reduced our tax bills"

Tax bills are not reduced when NRPs pay maintenance. If you were familiar with the rules you would know that a PWC retains 100% of benefits despite what maintenance gets paid.

The cost of outsourcing childcare and housework will vary wildly depending on the quality, volume and flexibility required, and that is before tax treatment of those costs is taken into account. Fully costed (ie amount of gross income a second earner needs to generate in order to cover costs) outsourcing of childcare and housework at replacement quality level (ie someone in loco parentis in child's own home) can work out at around £75,000. Which is why it is often very unappealing for parents to make that decision.

I wish there was better media cover of the costs of working for second earners in couples with children. A lot of people seem to enter parenthood completely unprepared for those costs, having made life decisions (on career and house purchase) that render the cost/logistics scenario of dual career parenthood financially unworkable.

"why is anyone the second earner and why are the costs of childcare seen as the expense of the second earner?"

to work out the marginal benefit of that person working, from a financial perspective (as otherwise, that person would, certainly on a financial basis, be better off staying at home)

Until more women than not marry men who earn less than them the second earner issue will always be there. If you earn 10x your spouse you can bet whose career is taken seriously.

swallowed most couples will make whatever choice suits them both. In fact from reading many threads on here, it's clear that even if the woman earns the same as, or more than, her partner, she will still want to be the one that stays at home.

"but in that case by seeing the one person (the woman) as the 'second' earner it is automatically her career that is ditched" - I'm assuming you just ommitted to say 'in most cases', rather than blindly assuming that women must earn less .

And really, you think that in cases where a woman earns less then "maybe he could stop work" - . Reallty? Reduce household income by over 50% so that a woman doesn't feel financially discriminated against? Again, I think there would be a very small majority of women who would want to go to work rather than her husband when he earns significantly more

Yes I think we need to remember that most people don't have careers, they have jobs. So it's a no brainer, that the one with the lower paid job, is the one to give up the paid work.

Where both parties have careers though and there is some room for flexibility, SAF is right - women have to stop seeing their careers as expendable, because the risks of relationship are too high and the compensation for giving up your career too low, for most of us to have that luxury. But that does mean couples making real, significant short term financial sacrifice for the benefit of both parents and children. However, we're discussing a tiny percentage of the population who can afford to do that. As I say, most people don't have high paying careers, they may refer to their careers, but they're just jobs really, certainly in terms of wage.