Don't give up work to be a SAHM unless

[akaemmafrost]

You have a HEFTY private income or can work from home.

I gave up work, usual reasons, wages would barely cover childcare, WE wanted kids to be at home with a parent.

Fast forward. I now have two dc, the father of my dc cheated on me, physically, emotionally and financially abused me.

One of my dc has SN and cannot attend school for the moment.

I've been out of work for 10 years now, I have no profession. In 6 years time our child support will stop as will most of our benefits. I will near fifty having not worked at all for 18 years.

My future is shit. Utterly grey and bleak. All I have to look forward to is a state pension. While my ex earns a fortune, travels the world and has new relationships.

This is reality for me. So think long and hard about giving up work to stay at home because no matter how shit your job is it's preferable to my future don't you think?

And it was all decided for me by a man who decided he hated me and didn't want to be married anymore and a child being diagnosed with significant SN.

It's that simple.

Thing is, in broad terms, men need 'marriage' far more than women do. Because men want and need women to service them domestically and feed their egos as well as raising their children. So things got set up in such a way that there was no alternative to marriage, and then women were told that they were the ones who wanted and needed it, and there is still this deep-level terror at the idea that women can live independent of men and like doing so... because who will look after men and do their housework?

and some women who chose to be housewifes and financially dependent upon the male wallet,they need men

I couldn't agree more with the OP. Just having a significative gap in your CV is enough to ruin the most successful career.

I stopped working to become a trawling spouse for a few years... i have been working continuosly for more than 5 years now and I am no way near to earn what I was earning when I stopped.

@ solid

What a lot of arrant sexist nonsense.

@ visualarts

yeah. I think it's objectionable that people targeted to fund welfare for others find that having done so rules them out of benefiting. If the state wants you to fund your children, give the bloody tax back first. the economy is screwed not because we don't pay enough tax but because the state spends a third more than it takes.

@ charbon

i think we agree. if the marital income is deemed to be pooled, then the value of 20k of childcare is 10k each. If there's a split, then both parents have already paid, each has sacrificed their half of the excess and they are quits on that score avant la lettre.

If the SAHP wants to maintain his / her financial independence, the correct route is to go back to work, pay for childcare and not be an SAHP at all. If both agree that their child is best raised by one SAHP, I do not see that that parent has some sort of later claim against the other for her loss of career. The return on losing a career was having a child raised by a parent, by mutual consent.

it's all very well getting exercised about this stuff and how the law's the law and it's all settled, but a CWOT unless one understands where the other lot are coming from. Men's exposure to divorce is sufficiently alarming that they're now reluctant to get married at all. Divorce lawyers have responded by suggesting that people - i.e. the higher earning spouse - should be forced by law to take on the same liabilities whether married or not. Drinks all round.

I have daughters and I do not see the current situation or this development as advancing or bettering them in any way whatsoever. In the same way that making it hard to sack people assists only those already in a job, making it financially risky to associate with women will stop men doing so, and as long as there is porn and prostitution they won't even care.

What a phenomenally unpleasant post.

Makes me glad to be single .

I know. But somebody needed Incognito browsing mode, somebody is funding all these east European prostitutes, and even the prime minister of Italy is at it.

One must deal with the world as it is.

They're not at that age yet but I think my advice to my daughters will be don't be dependent on anyone and don't marry anyone poorer than yourself.

Helpful.

Erm. Somebody has to marry someone poorer than themselves. I doubt if any couple both have exactly the same income and savings.

Apocalypto, when I had children, I was earning the same as my ex h. Due to biology and the law on maternity vs paternity leave at the time, it was only ever going to be me who would become a SAHP. My DS2 also has SN, so my time at home became longer than originally intended, because he needed me. I was happy to do this, because my Ex H's career took off in the meantime so we could easily afford it. It was the right decision at the time, because I never imagined he would ever leave me for an OW. My job, bringing up our DC was, if anything, more important than his.

Now I'm on my own with my 3 DC, my ex H is paying the legal minimum child maintenance and living the high life with his OW. I work during school hours only so I can continue to care for my DS2.

Yes, I 'lost' my career by mutual consent, but had I ever suspected my ex H would do the dirty on us all, things would have been very different. What exactly have I done to deserve to live in poverty with my DC? Remember, I had the more important job, it just happens to be unpaid.

I worked part time when I could, full time when I had to. It was striking a balance between, working and earning a living and being a mum that affected my career.

OK I didn't have a partner as I was a single mum and now mine has left home and I work full time I find myself in a dead end job with no chance of promotion, just earning enough to get by.

I think mothers, suffer, career wise, full stop.

Yes Scrazy, I think choosing to be a mother, and how many dc to have, has a big impact on how the finances balance out in a relationship. Like the OP, I have a child with SN but he is an only child, so despite being a single parent (who receives no maintenance at all and was dependent on benefits for the majority of DS's younger years), I was able to retrain, travel, have new relationships etc. DS also has severe ASD and had to be home-edded for several years, but only while I fought our local authority to place him in a (private) special school, which is very hard to argue for. I think that if I had another child to care for, especially another one with SN, it simply wouldn't have been possible and I could well have ended up in the same position as the OP.

I think that the more children a single parent has, the harder it is to be able to cover the costs of working, find childcare for socialising, and to find a new relationship to help share the burden. That's something most women just don't consider when planning the number of children. Whenever there is a thread on MN about deciding on having another dc, it is always with the assumption that the couple will stay together, and that any dc won't have SN (or existing dc won't develop SN), which this thread shows is quite an assumption to make!

It's all really luck of the draw isn't it? :(

I've got a friend who decided to get pregnant on a whim (she talks now about what an idiot she was) at 18. Her boyfriend turned abusive almost immediately. (The pregnancy was actually his idea) She had him tossed in jail for assault. After a few years and counseling, he now has their daughter every other weekend and pays court ordered maintenance. He shows up for things like school functions and skypes with the little girl every few days, but it's not the down and dirty of being a parent, is it?

The same friend just had another little girl about seven weeks ago...most beautiful baby I've ever seen besides my DS. The father of THIS one begged and begged my friend to abort, but she couldn't. He threatened to kill himself so many times that she basically went into hiding so that he wouldn't know she hadn't terminated. She contacted his parents to say that he needed help and also to let them know that she would be open to a relationship between them and their granddaughter if they chose. No response. AFTER the baby was born he called to say that "I'd like to see my daughter." She said he needed to call regularly and actually ASK about the little girl before he would be allowed to see her. He never called back.

She works full time, bought her own house, does everything on her own. It makes me fucking furious, to tell you the truth. Walking away was never an option for her.

My mom also got up the duff at 18. She and my dad have been married for almost 34 years now and my dad worked his fingers to the bone for all of us, all these years. What makes some men utter crap and some not, I wonder.

What exactly have I done to deserve to live in poverty with my DC? Remember, I had the more important job, it just happens to be unpaid.

Amen to that.
You have to hope that there is Karma somewhere waiting with a huge bucket of cold water...

That is the $6m question, CheerfulYank.

Apocalypto --

Who says it's 20K of childcare?

And how is the value pooled when one 'income' is not actually income and has probably cost the person providing the free childcare a heck of a lot more in real income?

If a doctor stays home to care for two children for 6 years she has lost much more than $20K in real income. Same goes for even your average secretary in London.

'The return on losing a career was having a child raised by a parent, by mutual consent.'

That was 'mutual consent' dependent on certain conditions being met, for instance not shagging the secretary/not getting hooked on cocaine/not becoming an abusive nightmare -- even the biggest dolt of a man can understand that nobody in their right mind would forgo the possibility of earning an income unless there was to be much more by way of reward than the payout of a child being raised by a parent. Do you think women are stupid?

And yes, a phenomenally unpleasant post.

Sorry for you Apocalypto, more than angry, if you honestly think that prostitutes and porn are adequate substitutes for a real relationship with a real woman and the possibility of family life with children. Too bad for men if they value money more than that.

I think you are selling men short, actually, Apocalypto. They are capable of more than meaningless sex and sodding off when they're needed, at least in my opinion.

If my son ever acts in such a way I will kill him consider myself quite failed as a parent.

Math , despite her anxiety is actually correct because what needs to be taken into account is not the theoretical cost of a rejected alternative, but the opportunity cost of the actual scenario selected by the beneficiaries of that scenario.

Say that by mutual consent, a couple decide that one parent will be a SAHP until the children are at school (let's say they have 3 kids and it's 10 years before they're all at school and that the salary of the SAHP was £50k.) By making that decision, the couple are sacrificing £50k each year, so they are implicitly agreeing (mutually) that that is the value to the family of having a SAHP (i.e. that's the opportunity cost). The fact that the couple could have put the children in nursery for, say, £20k per year is completely irrelevant because they didn't actually do that- they rejected that option.

Now- how to make sure that both parents benefit and sacrifice equally. The benefit of the child being brought up by a parent is to both parents, not only the SAHP. However, the cost in terms of earnings potential is only to the SAHP (the WOHP actually gets a benefit vs having a working spouse in terms of never having to get home for the nanny, being able to be travel at a moment's notice etc, but that's hard to quantify so is largely ignored). Whilst the relationship is continuing, both parents sacrifice that £50k to the family pot each year. However, should they split, then the situation changes. The WOHP no longer has a cost of the SAHP being a SAHP, but the SAHP is still bearing the cost, long after she/he stops being a SAHP. Therefore, arguably the WOHP should compensate the SAHP for loss of earnings once the relationship ends, in perpetuity, because the ramifications of having a ten year career break on earnings potential are lifelong.

I wonder how much of it is cultural, as well. One of the things that makes me sick is that the man I mentioned above (the one who threatened to kill himself if my friend continued her pregnancy) has "working class" tattooed on his hand. First of all he isn't, he's a spoiled rich little twat, and second of all any working class man around here (I live in a tiny farming community) would frankly beat the shit out of him for his attitude. (I'm not condoning violence either, I'm just saying.)

There are a LOT of not so great things about a lot of the guys around here...very backward, narrow minded attitudes, etc, but I've got to say that for the most part, to a man they would never let their child do without. I've heard a few guys derided as "worthless piece of shit" by others because they cheat on their wives or don't work hard enough to keep their children from going without.

I know this can be a very dangerous attitude in and of itself because in some ways it sets the man up as the "protector" and the woman as the little wife at home, or some old bull like that. (Though I honestly know very few women who do nothing in the way of paid employment) Still, it is interesting.

Rich man said it all better than I could. Both parents accept financial loss if one gives up work. That loss is shared (...should be)

Regarding benefits. The govt recognises that insisting maintenance is in included in calculations is a waste of time and money because the ability to enforce maintenance just doesn't exist.... Hence so many women are without it.

In some ways I think apocalypse is saying something I'd agree with. You can't pretend that a person earning £40k is 'worth' that once they give up work.

They just aren't in real life...because we are all only worth what someone will pay us. (True worth of parenting surpasses finances)

However acknowledging that real financial loss at that point and agreeing that SAHP mitigates it is needed

It was completely unplanned Visual. But apparently this man skips about spreading herpes hither and yon as well so he's just a worthless POS in general, it would seem.

Yes, Blue I only had the 1 and trained when she was a baby. I didn't need a man to help support us and got a tiny bit of maintenance. But I am not where my male manager is because I needed to juggle part time work. I could have worked full time and got myself a decent paying job but both myself and child would have missed out on so much time together.

Hey it's hard being a mother .

OP I am sorry for all your troubles. I do agree with you btw. I see lots of friends giving up work out of choice and it makes me wince a bit because I also have friends ten years on whose marriages have failed or whose partner has died and life is very bleak for them. It seems like such a wise choice for a certain period of time when the DCs are very young but I would counsel anyone looking at this option to think very very carefully about ways to maintain their financial independence. You just don't know what's around the corner.

I feel lucky in a way because I was brought up by a single parent who absolutely drummed into me the importance of retaining financial control on some level because you just don't know what's going to happen. So for me this has always been a priority. I know that for some women work doesn't cover the costs of childcare but in a way that's not the point - working outside the home is an insurance policy against future disaster and it has huge value for that reason alone.

OP I'm sorry about your situation and hope things get more manageable for you.

I absolutely agree with this. I was a sahm when my husband developed severe mh problems......out of the blue. He went downhill rapidly and was unable to hold down his previous well paid job. Nearly 5 years on and he is still suffering and been in and out of hospitals for years.....he's not worked for 6 years. we separated because of the stress of his illness and then effect it was having on our 4 children. I was left with a mortgage to pay, no job, 4 kids and debts. No maintenance as he wasn't able to work and spent many months under a section.

So I got a job and went back to work. been promoted twice and have a reasonable salary and excellent conditions of employment. We've had another child since and I've managed to do it all alone. It was bloody hard and life would have been made easier if I was already working when this happened. People truly don't realise how vulnerable they are when they rely on another person to work.