Prozac and marriage counselling rather than universal CB? REALLY?

[ReshapeWhileDamp]

Nice

Not that I should expect a raddled old Tory to have much interest in or sympathy with the concept that mothers who have given up careers to look after their children ought to be accorded respect. Should I?

Was £20/week ever adequate 'respect'? Few give up a career to be a SAHM on the strength of Child Benefit.

I heard (with children screaming over breakfast) something on Radio 4 this morning about changing child benefit for marriage counselling. Is this where it came from?

The novelist Rachel Cusk has written that the prospective removal of child benefit from single-earning middle-class families is adding insult to the injury of well-educated women who feel they have suffered hugely by staying at home to look after their children, and deserve some recognition by the state for their sacrifice; but the answer to the frustration so powerfully anatomised by Ms Cusk ("The simmering but stymied rage of stay-at-home mums") is more likely to be provided by marriage counselling and Prozac than anything George Osborne can provide. This is a therapeutic rather than a fiscal problem.

Just to give you the actual context.

Not adequate, Cogito, no, but the fact that CB was always paid to the mother did at least accord her some recognition. It feels as if SAHMs are being made to vanish.

Pleiades, yes.

Just because he was (probably) having a pop at a perennial target (Rachel Cusk) doesn't mean it wasn't a shitty thing to say.

So SAHM's really think that? As a lone parent in FT employment who lost CTC last year and will lose CB next year I'd rather have the cash, don't get me wrong, but I don't think for a second it devalues me as a mother.

£20 a week is not the point for me. It is the protection of my pension and other rights that child benefit gives me that I value and feel should not be removed from parents who do not work.