SAHM numbers lowest for 15 years - we need your views for Sky interview tomorrow am

[carriemumsnet]

The headlines for the report say:

• Number of stay at home parents in the UK drops 21% from 2.8 million in 1993 to 2.2 million today

• Parents say their household would need an average income of £31,731 for one parent to stay at home, yet the average annual income for a male is £28,464 (10% less) and a female is £18,047 (43% less)

• Over a third (36%) of families with children under 2 have both parents at work, and 1 in 3 (38%) working parents spend less than 4 waking hours a day with their children

• If money was no object, 7 out of 10 (71%) working parents would have stayed at home to raise their children[9]

I guess the first question they'll ask is does this reflect Mumsnetters' experienec? Are Mumsnetters feeling the pinch financially and is this making folks who might have considered staying at home - go back to work?

What would be your ideal?
The Gov giving you money to either :
Pay for childcare
Pay grandparents/extended family

Or do you think it should be left as is - personal choice but dependent on financial circumstance?

Any other pithy thoughts and insights gratefully accepted. Will only have about 3 or 4 mins so won't be able to completely set the world to rights, but be good to know what you think.

Thanks in advance

OK I am a SAHM of 2 boys 3.2 and 23 months.

In order for me to be a SAHM, we relocated back from Berkshire to the N Yorkshire, where house prices were less.

Although we have family here, we didnt have children for them to be looked after by someone else and also they are there grandparents not their childminders.

Money is extreamly tight and I might have to look for a part time job when DH is at home. We thought we could manage on savings, but car needed unexpected repairs, washer broke etc and also relocation expenses wiped them out. Day to day home fuel costs, increase in council tax and deisel have really hit us hard.

In an ideal world I would like receive a little more child benefit or even receive free percriptions or dental treatment for me, but as DH works we have to pay for my stuff.

Child care costs would wipe out any positive benefit from me going back to work and why pay someone to look after them when both my boys and I enjoy our time together. They are little for such a short space of time and soon they will spend more time at school than they do awake at home. This is the time in their lives that I have the most influenece and I am trying to use it to bring up two well balnced and adjusted gentlemen

My ideal would be none of those.

It would be the government to STOP allowing employers to pay people a non-living wage, to outsource work to increase their profits and to actually do something about: the price of property -and therefore rents- in the UK, the increases in council tax and the increases in energy and fuel prices.

Instead of giving money out and putting in another expensive, inefficient bureaucracy like the Tax Credits machine, how about just not taking so much of it from employees in the first place?

I am a SAHM and Dp has,in the past been a stay at home dad.We have always struggled financially.The economy is,wrongly geared around both parents working.
Why can't a parent be paid for staying at home and looking after their children? Rather than having to farm them out to[in some instances dubious providers of childcare]I am not talking about people who choose to work and use childcare.
It is putting immense pressure on parents/children and grandparents.

I'm a SAHM to 1 child who is 2.7yrs.

We are skint. Absolutely skint. But with the skill set i have there's nothing out there that would pay me enough to make it worth the childcare fees etc and be flexible.

and TBH I LIKE being at home with my son despite the financial strain.

Free perscriptions and dental care would be fantastic.
I am a pt worker (16 hours) and 8 of those are on a Saturday so we don't have to pay childcare as DP can look after LO.
I hate having to work weekends as it eats into the little amount of family time we have, but I see no other option.

It is getting harder and harder to afford SAHMdom I should think. I have always wanted to be a SAHM but it has never been financially feasible - we are lucky enough to own our own home (not outright though) but it's a smallish house in a cheap area so relocation isn't an option to free up cash and we can't afford to live on just DH's salary, which far from minimum wage but not exactly generous.

I think that...

if one parent is a SAHP then the other should be given their tax allowance

The tax credit system needs to be looked at - there is a big band of income that receives the same amount or credit (iirc 20 - 50K) which means that even if I were to give up my job we wouldn't get any more tax credits.

Perhaps other measures such as council tax being calculated on the number of income earners in a house, ie a reduction in CT if there is a SAHP.

BUT - all this costs money doesn't it?

How about the government pays parents of children under school age/nursery voucher age the equivilent of say minimum wage for 40 hrs pw? The parent can then choose to either live of this as a SAAHM or use it towards childcare to return to work.

I think that in this way we would be able to choose to either work and pay for extras or spend extra time with our kids- a personal choice not one that is made for us because of finacail reasons.

Also I would like the possibility that a grandparent or other relative could be paid for childcare through the tax credit system as personally i think family care is better for a very young child as opposed to more formal childcare

I don't really see how it can be financially feasible to go to work. It is so expensive to pay for childcare where I live that if I return to work at the end of my maternity leave, taking everything into account we would be a whole £50 per month better off. Which is not worth it. Perhaps other people have really big mortgages or really big wages or cheaper childcare. I would love to go back to work part time.

I also agree with elements of other posts- council tax/ prescriptions/ tax allowances etc

I am a SAHM to two boys 11 and 13. I am too disabled to work but have worked part time in the past. I think the government should do something about the rising costs of everything, including the 51% rise in tax over the last 10 years. They should give the working parent a larger tax allowance which would ease the financial burden of the family. If they made it easier for parents to stay at home there wouldn't be the need for so many nursery places and child care payments in tax credits.
I think as a long tern thing I am sure if more parents were able to SAH then maybe there wouldn't be so many feral teenagers. I know my boys need me a lot now, and I am much happier knowing where they are and who they are with etc.

I'm SAHM to 2 dds. We are lucky in that we do not struggle financially, however if I had gone back to work my wage would not have covered childcare. A better incentive for SAHM's would be to give them money to stay at home to look after their children. i have friends who were SAHM for the 1st child and then gradually went back to work, but now are SAHMs again and they say they were better off when they were working, not because of their wage but because they got more money off the government.

I had my little boy in July and although I planned to return to work, in the end I became a SAHM as it would have broken my heart to leave him in the care of anyone else. I really did not love my job enough to give up this time with my son even if we do struggle financially.

I'm now pregnant again so I would have gone back for 2 weeks then on maternity leave again!

'I think the government should do something about the rising costs of everything, including the 51% rise in tax over the last 10 years.'

Exaclty, mumof37. Especially as such a strategy will not alienate the voters among us who do not have or no longer have dependent children.

One of the things I think is hardest about the SAHM thing is that if you choose to be one, unless your partner is on a low income, then you seem to be completely invisible to the government.

You're not paying tax or NI, and they aren't interested in rewarding you or supporting you for raising children who will be useful members of the economy when they grow up - it's as if you don't exist. They barely even recognise that you might not have the opportunity to build up your NI contributions for your pension.

Some sort of SAHM Allowance would go a long way to recognising that what SAHMs do is valued and recognised.

Thats the point I was trying to make LMDancing. They say that children benefit the most when they are brought up at home by their parents, and secondly by family members, but the government do nothing to assist us.

is it part of the decline just explained by the fall in the birth rate?
fewer pre-school children implies less SAHM

As others have said I really cannot see the point of the government forcing people back to work after having children, pouring money into "free" (thats a misleading title if ever there were one) nursery places sure start etc etc when a lot of women would love to have the money they have to spend on childcare and stay with their own children rather than placing them in low quality childcare (which is what the vast majority nurseries I have seen are) with young girls on minimum wage who cant be arsed -as someone else said - pay the minimum wage to the SAHP or to whoever the parents choose to look after their children (e.g grand parents) who provide a far higher standard of care than strangers in most cases.

Certainly doesn't reflect my personal experience. Definately feeling the more than the pinch. I have no choice but to stay at home as this was a condition of GS being placed with us and us getting the residence order (along with other conditions like giving up a joint income of over £78,000 a year and our home before moving 350 miles away to get GS away from his dad).

DH now brings home around £12,000 (after tax, etc). Our rent alone takes £7500 of that before any other bills and attempts to feed a family of four. The only thing we get is £29 per month HB and do not qualify for anything else.

In my case (and for thousands of others in the same situation), paying kinship carers the same money that foster parents get would be brilliant after all, we are saving local authorities - AKA the government - thousands of pounds a year and often have major consequences on not only our finances, but lives in general.

The whole child tax credits thing is a nightmare too. We know people who are entitiled but who don't bother applying because it's so complicated (and there is no easy equation to work out what you're owed). I'm sure that there are a lot of people like that, and the cynic in me says that that's why the system was set up that way.

I'd rather a return to the "married man's" or perhaps better worded "head of household" tax allowance. It's easy and everyone automatically gets it.

It's also really galling that when DH works his socks off to be given a raise, that regular income tax takes a third, and we lose another third in CTC that we then don't get. So he's effectively taxed at 66%! How does that help us when food and energy prices are rocketing up and up and the cost of housing is outrageous?

OK, rant over.

I thought the birth rate was actually going up now, not down. And I imagine whoever compiled this report will have checked it's not merely fewer births.

Agree that it seems wrong that all government policy is directed at forcing mothers (or fathers) into work whether they like it or not - big drive on childcare but no support/recognition for parents who SAH or would like to. As if we are not good enough to look after our own children. I hated leaving ds in nursery when he was a baby.

I dunno, not comfortable with the idea of government giving money to well-off families who can already afford for one parent to stay at home. Would penalise the poor in favour of the rich. But means-testing costs money.

Maybe the transferable tax allowance is the way to go.

Change the thresholds at which families are entitled to receive CTC.

Haven't read the whole thread but wanted to add:

We are on a budget, we have a low income, but we choose for me to be able to stay at home, because we want our kids who aren't yet in school to be raised by a loving parent.

We have a small house, an old car, don't take expensive holidays etc etc because we choose to make sacrifices so that I can be at home.

When the kids are in school I will work during school hours, and we will be rich (maybe?!)

We all have the choice but it is do-able if you are willing to put in the effort.

That said, if the gov. want to pay SAHMothers then that's okay with me

agree about the tax credits fiasco. DH just got a minute payrise which equates to £25 PER YEAR. As he is now £2 over the threshhold for Working tax credit we now lose every penny of our WTC - £133 A MONTH (four weekly totalling £1729 a year). So, effectively he gets a payrise and yet we are financially worse off by £1704 a year - how is that 'fair'.

Steve Biddulph is a massive champion of paying parents to stay at home with small children, and predicts a lot of families/society's problems would go away if more parents could be in the home, no kids in commercial childcare etc.

SORRY, my above point was: perhaps if the Giv spent more money on SAHParents then they would reap the benefits through the generations (and save money in other ares)