To think some posters need a "reality check" re. views on benefit changes

[lesley33]

I have some concerns about some of the proposed changes to benefits and how these may adversely affect people. So this is NOT a thread about that. But I am getting increasingly fed up at some of the frankly ridiculous reasons some posters are giving against the proposed changes. Examples include:

1. That children 12 and over will be traumatised if both parents work - even if second parent only works 20 hours a week.

1. That a parent with children 12 and over shouldn't have to commute up to 90 minutes each way to work. Far from ideal I know and if someone is on low wages this might not be affordable. But perfectly doable.

1. That childcare is impossible to get for teenagers. Ignoring the fact that many parents, myself included use a combination of kids home alone and afterschool activities.

AIBU to think some people need a reality check? Plenty of people with children already work, many with both parents working full time by the time their kids are teenagers. Plenty of people have long commutes, struggle with childcare, etc. Things might not be "ideal", but these are things that many many working parents already do.

Is waiting until DD is 7 weeks to start job hunting really so bad? DH didn't wait btw he just took a break from job hunting on Christmas day ans New Years Day. Maybe that's lazy but job hunting, especially in the current climate is soul destroying and for sanity's sake you need to think about something else for a few hours.

I think there is a little of that, yes. Though most people are compassionate enough to get that they have to provide support when needed.

But it's when people seemingly refuse to make some of the horrible choices that they have to tmake that it pisses them off. Or when people seem to compound their problems by making idiotic decisions that they throw their hands up.

It's very difficult to convince a person who has had to leave all their family and homeland behind them to come to the UK for work, that someone shouldn't move ten miles out of central London.

(I think I can recall Hunty being told to or that she should ahve terminated on other threads yes)

On this thread someone said if you can't afford childcare you shouldn't have children.. That was the post where I started to get upset, I haven't read the other threads.

The solution to what peachy?

i think expectation is part of how you respond - i think we have all been given a false sense of life that should be easier now than is actually realistic.

if you look at what all our ancestors coped with 50, 100, 200, years ago, what people still cope with in the third world: what they deal/dealt with is part of the normal human experience.

DPs mum died just after her 50th birthday, when her youngest son was still a teenager. the average life expectancy for a woman now in Zimbabwe is 38. looking at the whole of human existance, DPs mum hasnt done as badly as first it looks.

You said that other people managed to just deal with curve balls thrown at them.

Now in fact we have found a way, but it's one we are damned to lucky to have: excepting that what should a family like mine be doing?

There are curve balls and there are curve balls.

Whyw ould you advocate that Tilly?

Dad was child 15/16, Mum disabled, dad an alkie- Dad is aware he would have been conceived in rape, most of the family were. Grandad drank his entire wages, as indeed did my Great Nan and her Mum before her apparently. Dad was raised by his elder sisters until they emigrated, then at age 5 he started working for neighbours etc.

He survived (several of his siblings died from drink issues though, dad managed to beat his own drink demons) but is it really a case of 'they surviced so it's OK?'

i could list the alcohol problems in my family but i dont think 'whose ancestors had it worse' would get us anywhere.

you are talking about the past.

Well I tend to keep out of these discussions, but OP if the 'reasons' you have given have been put forward as genuine reasons for a benefit dependent jobless person not to look for work then YADNBU, and yes, a reality check is needed.

A teenager does not need childcare for crying out loud.

waits for someone to come and say what about my teenager who is blind deaf and has no limbs

Yes I am, and you posted that people coped in the past and were OK.

I was simply showing they were not always.

And FYI some of my ancestors were clever sods who changed the course of the monarchy in the UK so not had it worse!

tilly is right in that expectation is part of how you respond.

My Nan always said you had to assume that things would get tough and act accordingly. Never assume that things will stay the same.
And she was right.

I grew up knowing the following can happen:
Men bugger off.
Men die.
Children are born disabled.
Children die.
Work can and will dry up.
Landlords can and will kick you out.
You will gte old and you will get sick.

Wordfactory I know all of those things too, I always prepare for what may go wrong.

It doesnt make having a disabled child any easier. I can cope with him, its hard work but I can do it.

The hard part is the part where other people are involved. From ignorant members of the public right down to clueless politicians with the power to pull the rug from beneath us.

How do you respond to things that are utterly out of your control but unavoidable and with the power to fuck your life up even more?

Part of it yes.

But I personally have met every challenge with a solution- dh income fell I took two jobs; etc etc etc... but there are limits.

And the worst thing I did for myself was believing I could solve everything sent at me, because the fallout from getting some humility was as big emotionally as all the rest of the impacts of what happened. From my own personal beleif system it was probably a deserved bit of karma but nonetheless, the last thing I needed when dealing with the SN diagnoses was a huge challenge to my the way my world functioned.

Bloody deserved it though, I must have been a right PITA and it hs done me good.

And it doesn't matter how prepared YOU are, I volunteered at Sn schools age 16, I knew reality there; but you think the infrastructure is there to help you and it isn't.

peachy - but as you have just shown, others did cope (monarchy eh ) & many more people besides.

Well you and I are very differnet peachy cos I would have always assumed that there definitely wasn't the infrastructure there. That you'd be on your own.

Somehting else my Nan told me was never ever be at the mercy of a government of any colour. They are all bastards who change their minds like the wind. That has been my talisman tbh.

How do you respond to things that are utterly out of your control but unavoidable and with the power to fuck your life up even more?

i focus on very simple things & the worse it is the more simple the thing i focus on:

e.g. did i wake up this morning an orphan in somalia? no. Well someone did - probably many children did so i not doing that badly, whatever happens.

Quite often, I don't think people do cope, and it's naive to say 'don't assume the infrastructure is there to help you.

Years ago, SN children were institutionalised, abandoned and even killed. Even those who were much loved by parents because the parents could not cope with caring for that child and earning enough money. Those that had money may have been better off, but they were battling the stigma anyway.

For ordinary people in the UK, there is no choice. If they 'get on with it' by assuming that there isn't an infrastructure (e.g. specialist schooling and financial help) on which they can rely, what options are there?

1. Parents work leaving SN child completely unsupervised (no school will have them after all and there won''t be money to pay for a carer).

1. Parents don't work, starve and become homeless.

1. One parent works while the other stays home and cares. Family slide more and more into debt because the income is inadequate and SAHC eventually becomes ill because of the overwhelming burden.

That's not a choice or coping. It's going under.

I used to wake up thinking every day will I get the letter that says the landlord wants the house back so we have to go into B&B and social take the disabled boys off me for 6 months minimum until we are rehoused. I would cry at 3am from sheer fear, and send ds4 to pick up the post I was too scared.

Luckily it got so bad I had a breakdown in December, had a kindly GP and now feel much stronger. I do mean luckily; I would lay money I'd not be here now otherwise. Something happened though that triggered a complete collapse and that was certainly a good thing.

The infrastructure I relied on was stuff such as special needs schools that you can get places in without a 6 year fight, even vaguely empathic mothers at the school gates smiling rather than bitching that their child is losing out by having your child in their child's class. Pretty basic stuff that I thought my taxes went towards. Not being screamed at and threatened by fathers who want ds1 kicked out of their class, fathers who scared traffic manager dh let alone me with my then-newborn in my pram and caused me to have a panic attack every time I went to school for two years, good job DH was on shifts then as I couldn't go alone at all for months.

Until I lived it, I thought people were better than they are.

Gosh Tilly...I'd better remember that one. I might be suffering from a painful &life-limiting disease, while caring for a severely disabled child, but hey...at least I'm not a Somalian orphan.

What fucking planet are you on, woman? Do you skip through life like some malign Pollyanna, handing out such bon mots to terminal cancer sufferers?

VeryLittleGravitas - you see now you assume you know about my life.

Next you'll be coming out with the old chestnut "We're never given more to bear then we can handle" and "You must have broad shoulders for god to have gifted you such a burden"

Touche Tilly