Large families

MiceElf Marie Stopes was one of them.

I know, orca, but I wonder if everyone realises that. I somethimes think they are not aware of where their comments are heading.

Ah yes. She believed in racial purity too, along with another well known personage in Germany.

I am hoping Orca was joking.
Somebody mentioned the American model - heaven help the poor if we ever go down that route.
It costs much more than £13.50 a week to feed and clothe a child so apart from idiots like Philpotts, I would suggest that many large families are accidental rather than cynically planned. And, of course, some people just like having children. How eccentric!

To get to the bare bones of this discussion: there is a family with four children and low income, partly derived from child benefit. Perhaps the parents have lost their jobs and live in an area of high unemployment. Perhaps they are too ill/disabled to work. If the child benefit is withdrawn after the first two, it will create some hardship for the whole family.

We have had the statistics to show that large families are unusual in Britain, so benefits payments to them do not take a huge chunk out of the overall budget.

My proposal is that things are left as they are as the number of large families is falling anyway.
Can we have some alternative proposals, please? Perhaps not of the type Orca has put forward.

My comments about Orca's suggestion were obviously made whilst other people were posting.

Orca "Choosing not to work" is very contentious when unemployment is high. Particularly for those with low skills and little experience.

Say you have two under fives partner has gone, died or whatever. You live in a rural area with few jobs locally. If you want to work you have to be able to earn enough to be better off. Afford transport to work and pay for child care etc.

I live in a small town but there is very little work here it would be about 6 and 10 miles to the nearest towns accessible by public transport.

There is a big group of retail distribution centers about 10miles way in another direction and you cannot get there without your own transport. There is no direct public transport which is viable in area like this. Pay is low and very early shift hours would add to child care problems. And we still want the food they package delivered cheaply to our supermarket shelves.

You also need job permanence as moving from employment back to benefit or even changing hours seems to cause no end of problems in getting tax credits etc sorted out. I have known families stuck with no income for a couple of weeks at at a time while state support is being recalculated.
If you were on temporary or part time work at the basic national wage level you have no chance of saving money.

So do you risk the trouble of taking short term jobs which can cause so much more stress or yourself and your family, or stay on benefit so you can continue to look after your children and feed them each week.

Look what trouble some of our well experienced GNers have had recently trying to get a job and they have not had to consider how to manage childcare.

It is factors like these that really make it difficult for anyone on low income to make any choice about working that is sound economically. Which factors the government rhetoric fails to recognise.

Nellie when I say choosing not to work I mean just that...making a life-style choice that they do not want to get a job. This is nothing to do with those who want to work but can't get into employment.
Two totally different scenarios.

I don't know whether someone will have lots of children just to get more money from the welfare state, but I think many of us agree that welfare payments need to be reduced. Would it not be a good idea to announce that say 1 year from the date of the announcement child benefit will only be paid for the first 2 or 3 children BUT any families above that number already receiving child benefit will continue to receive it until the child leaves full time education (which I think is the case now).

Absent I am sorry, I didn't realise that you didn't understand the concept of copy and paste. I copied and pasted your post, your words and you still maintain you said no such thing. Again, I would ask you which poster made the comments you have attributed to them?

Limiting child benefit to only the first two children would seem to be the best way forward. As it would be totally unfair to penalise families where there are aleady more than two it would only be workable if it was announced that it would take effect say, in January 2014. Yes, it would be slow to make a difference to the bill, but IMO it would certainly stop people who are long term benefit claimants think twice about adding to their families if they knew they would not be getting an increase in their payments. I know there are some women who "love babies and being pregnant" - well that is fine if you can afford it. I love Laboutin shoes, but guess what? I don't have any - wonder why.....

sunseeker do be careful, you'll be accused of wanting to starve children to death with this suggestion

Ceesnan you too

sunseeker you posted while I was writing, great minds?!!

Sel how could I or Ceesnan be accused of that, we are not suggesting that those with existing large families should have their payments stopped.

But what about all the 'accidental' pregnancies? And the multiple births?

In the case of "multiple" births I think perhaps a exception could be made. As for "accidental" pregnancies, surely with the easy access to contraception these days there shouldn't be many of those - it may even encourage people to use contraception.

Sunseeker Philpot admitted he did this and one of the reasons reason he wanted custody of his mistress's children was for the money in benefits.

You'd be surprised how many women claim to be 'super-fertile' and for whom no contraception seems to work, sunseeker

Orca yes, but thankfully there are very few Philpotts in this world.

Sel

"Greatnan I'm not so sure you're right. Reading letters in various newspapers and even some of the posts on Gransnet, I think that there are people who would leave the children of existing large families on welfare to starve. They would shake their heads and say how sad it is but the parents have been so irresponsible."

See – I do understand the concept of copying and pasting. For the record I used to literally to cut, copy and paste in the days before computer setting.

Returning to our muttons, is this the post you mean? Where have I attributed a specific comment to a specific member of gransnet rather than extrapolating from various posts on various threads over quite a long period of time advocating reductions in benefits for families deemed to have too many children?

And Sel I have certainly never suggested that any member of gransnet wanted children to starve. Or was that supposed to be a little witticism – so appropriate in the context. Ha bloody ha.

Actually the Sun is worth reading today as it has both sides of the argument on the front page!
www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4875901/Did-benefits-culture-turn-Mick-Philpott-into-a-killer.html

Orca I asked how you would wish to deal with the issue of the long term unemployed with large families.

You replied "monitoring families through society and social services". What exactly does that mean?

You added that such families have "sufficient money" to cover their needs but not their greed. Are you seriously saying that cutting benefits for, say, 11 children down to 3 children would not have a catastrophic effect on a family's income? People are up in arms about absent's comments but, whilst she acknowledges herself the term "starvation" was perhaps an over-dramatisation, the ultimate result of massively decreasing welfare payments would be severe malnourishment. If, as somebody suggested, the current system was maintained for current recipients but limited to 2/3 children for new claimants, there is no guarantee that this would prevent large families, and children born into such families would suffer.

Nelliemoser explains the barriers to moving from benefit to work these days - particularly with the sort of "zero hours" contracts that are becoming increasingly popular with employers. As Polly Toynbee was quoted in the Sun article, there are 5 people chasing every job and in some depressed areas there are 20 people chasing every job.

The Sun's columnist talks about people "breeding", which I think is a dehumanising and offensive term and one which has sinister historical connotations.

Greatnan cautions against using the American model as a guide for our own social arrangements. I second that. Despite being the richest country in the world, the US has a relatively high rate of infant mortality and significant child poverty. The recent documentary that some gransnetters watched showed the dire poverty in which a a surprisingly large number of American children are living - hardly a recommendation for the US system.

Eloethan Thank you for that [qualified] vote of confidence. The people who are up in arms are frequently given to attacking my posts – it's a kind of hobby for them when they are bored.