another baby

I think it's none of your business why people have children nor why people end up having to use food banks. The majority of people who are using food banks are in employment but paid very little. The baby may have been an accident or much wanted to complete their family. It makes no difference to me. Your tone is rather accusatory I'm afraid. I'd rather be charitable.

I agree with you OP.

I don’t think many people factored in a Global Pandemic when discussing family size.

If you’d asked me this time last year what my worries were for both me and DH being made redundant we’re I’d have just laughed.

Now it’s all I worry about. It’s a very real threat.

I do consider it my business if my taxes are being used to support people who are doing nothing to help themselves.
Having another child when you can’t support the ones you have is totally irresponsible.
Contraception can be obtained free of charge and if using it is against you religion or whatever then abstention is the answer.

I agree with you Espee as you are speaking a lot of sense.

Having more than two children is irresponsible whether you can afford them or not, but especially when you can't afford them. It's no use people complaining about climate change, pollution, lack of natural resources, housing and other depleted services etc. when too many humans are being produced and living too long in the same finite space i.e Earth!!!!!

Are you a net contributor?
How many children have you had?

Maybe the child was already conceived before CoVid intervened?

It was predicted that there would be a baby boom as a result of lockdown.

Having more than two children is irresponsible whether you can afford them or not

However Bozzer having his 6/7th child was 'lovely'.

Qiuzqueen, I had five children plus a foster child. Their taxes pay /will pay your pension.

i agree with Grandmabatty.
we don't know the details of other people's lives, and this reductionism, as if people are just a profit and loss calculation is repugnant, and also invalid.
that fourth child may be the one who discovers a cure for cancer, or who comes to care for your dying relative, and is the only one they trust.
how many of us would have passed the test for net profit to the economy, or even the social/family circle we inhabit.

Babies aren't always planned.

I think that it is irresponsible if someone plans to get pregnant knowing that she can't afford to support the baby, but life doesn't always work out the way we expect it to.

Foodbanks are nothing to do with you, or the state. They are funded by contributions from people who care about others, so the woman concerned isn't costing any of us anything on that score. I think it's a national disgrace that we need them at all, but that's a different discussion.

These are very difficult times for everyone, and I agree with Grandmabatty that a bit of kindness towards others would go a long way.

Esspee

I do consider it my business if my taxes are being used to support people who are doing nothing to help themselves.
Having another child when you can’t support the ones you have is totally irresponsible.
Contraception can be obtained free of charge and if using it is against you religion or whatever then abstention is the answer.

Completely agree.

Crikey.

The milk of human kindness is overflowing on this thread, isn't it?

How many children a family has is none of anyone else's business. Perhaps it would help to come to terms with their additional children by considering that when they're grown up, they may well be feeding you and wiping your bum when you're in a nursing home.

Riverwalk

^Having more than two children is irresponsible whether you can afford them or not^

However Bozzer having his 6/7th child was 'lovely'.

But Bozzer wasn’t having to rely on food banks to feed his admittedly large number of children.

Many women who have more children than they can support are married to husbands who feel entitled to as much sex without condoms as they wish.

The solution is to educate and otherwise support nubile women who are at risk of marrying men who don't respect them.

I didn't see the news item the OP refers to, but I do wonder why they didn't interview a struggling family with one child.

Is it designed to bring out the worse in people?

Rather like when there's an item on shortage of school places, and they film it in a school where 95% of the children are obviously of immigrant background.

And when they highlight foodbanks with footage of overweight clients who have mobile phones.

I’ve seen documentaries stating we’re not making enough children, yet we’re top heavy with older people. There’ll be no one to pay for them if there’s no younger people working and paying taxes.

This family may have never imagined that they’d have to depend on food banks when they took the decision to have a fourth child. So many people have had their lives turned upside down over the past few months. The last thing they need is to be judged by people who know nothing of their circumstances.

An environmental study published in Environmental Research Letters in 2017 stated that, in order to save the planet:

four choices were consistently high impact in cutting emissions: eating a plant-based diet, living car-free, avoiding flying and having one fewer child. The biggest impact choice of these? Having one fewer child, which would save 58.6 tonnes of carbon per year. The next most effective was living car-free for a year, which would save 2.4 tonnes. “That was basically showing every child that we would choose to create in a high-emitting country has a huge carbon legacy"

Of course, that one fewer child could have been the one who found out how to rid the earth of plastic.
Who knows?

They have obviously chosen to have a fourth child as in 2020 contraception is easy to obtain. Surely child number 4 can’t be a mistake.

The human race would have died out many times over if people had only had children the could 'afford'.

That might have been a blessing for the rest of life on earth, of course, depending on your viewpoint.