Housing for pregnant 17 year old

neverdespairgirl

LillyJ wrote: »

Just to use an example (I hope she doesn't mind) neverdespairgirl is an unmarried mother living with her partner and 2 year old and we would all think of her as "mainstream" - but it is her job and standing in society that makes us think of her that way. .

I don't mind at all. For us, personally, marriage is not a significant thing. We are both committed to each other and our son (he's 3 now! Just.) and that's the important thing.

I'd be taken aback if someone did think I was chavvie scum for my domestic circumstances, but I wouldn't be bothered by it.

It did give OH the chance to joke about unmarried mothers sitting on the sofa all day when I was on maternity leave, so there are upsides.

neverdespairgirl

Congratulations on your future grandchild!

The homelessness route is not a fun one - while your DD would eventually get a place, she could be shunted around a number of nasty hostels etc first. Not a good thing with a newborn baby.

Does your DD work? Or is she studying?

PasturesNew

We need to raise the age of consent for sex to about 40.

That'd sort a lot of it out

bubblesmoney

There are currently 5.4m people of working age who are not working but drawing benefits instead- ie being supported by us taxpayers. They cost us £16bn pa (I repeat £16,000,000,000) in benefit payments alone*, plus the further cost of lost tax revenue. And despite endless programmes and pledges to get them into work, their number has remained roughly unchanged since 2000 (see this blog on the hopeless New Deal).

Ref: http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/search?q=alison

Coming to the concept of ‘they have a RIGHT to get social housing’. This is what it BREEDS literally in the long term.

unless we implement a radical programme to tackle this problem of people getting pregnant for the sake of getting social housing and leeching off the tax payers (you and I) we'll find ourselves dealing with more and more Alisons.
And her kids.
All the way to eternity.
We know (see same article in the BlogSpot linked above) there are around 3m households like hers that are workless and living on benefits. And if they all get £20 grand pa, that adds up to £60bn.
"Every year, almost 50,000 girls under 18 fall pregnant, leading critics to claim that government-led efforts to encourage safer sex are backfiring. The number who conceive is at its highest level since a multi-million-pound teenage pregnancy crackdown almost a decade ago. As a result, Britain tops the league table of teenage mothers in western Europe, despite also having a record number of school-age abortions. This comes despite the Government investing more than £150 million in an attempt to stem the tide of conceptions - and pledging to cut teenage pregnancy rates by half by the end of this decade." (Sunday Telegraph 30.12.07)
Despite recent declines in teenage conception rates, England and Wales has
the highest teenage birth rate in Western Europe (see page 34 onwards in the link for statistics on teenage mothers). In 2002, the birth rate for women aged under 20 in England and Wales was around four times higher than the Netherlands and twice as high as France and Germany.
Research evidence, particularly from longitudinal studies, shows that
teenage pregnancy is associated with poorer outcomes for both young parents and their children. (1. Health Development Agency (2004) Teenage Pregnancy: an update on key characteristics of effective interventions. 2. Social Exclusion Unit (1999) Teenage Pregnancy, TSO: London.) Teenage mothers are less likely to finish their education; are more likely to bring up their child alone and in poverty and have a higher risk of poor mental health than older mothers. Infant mortality rates for babies born to teenage mothers are around 60 per cent higher than for babies born to older mothers. The children of teenage mothers have an increased risk of living in poverty and poor quality housing and are more likely to have accidents and behavioural problems.

The risk of teenage motherhood and fatherhood was highest among
individuals experiencing multiple risk factors such as having a mother
who was a teenage parent, having emotional problems at age 7 and age
16 and low educational attainment at 16 (9. Kiernan K (1995) Transition to Parenthood: Young mothers, young fathers – associated factors and later life experiences, Welfare State
Programme, Discussion Paper WSP/113, LSE. 10. Berrington A, Diamond I, Ingham R, Stevenson J et al (2005) Consequences of teenage parenthood: Pathways which minimise the long term negative impacts of teenage childbearing. University of Southampton. Research commissioned by Teenage Pregnancy Unit.).

So it is all the more likely Alisons will give rise to many other Alisons.

“Giving more money (i.e. benefits and social housing) to !!!!less teens so as to reward their !!!!lessness is a sure way of boosting even further the number of problem mums.

What the “the oh it is their right for social housing brigade” and the other cheerleaders should be doing is studying US experience. There, the teenage pregnancy rate fell by over a third in a decade. And a key driver was the Clinton welfare reforms which cut support for impecunious mums.” Ref: http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/2007/09/problem-mums.html

For every alison there is another Michael who is literally taking the !!!! and working hard at looting the honest tax payers. The modern day do gooders would love this I guess and say after all it is a ‘life’ and shouldn’t destroy a life.

May be the people who believe it is a life and go read up on the laws of the land and see whether IT is actually a life as per the law of the land and whether IT has any rights at all. What sort of a life is IT going to get with these sort of parents planning on giving birth to it. 15y down the line I wouldn’t be surprised if the teenager is here seeking advice on how to get social housing for her pregnant daughter.

“Key points on some dole scroungers as follows:

• Over 4.3 million people of working-age and 1.79 million children are living in workless households- ie 6m people (10% of Britain's entire population) are living in 3m households where one or more adults is of working age but nobody works, and the household is entirely dependent on state welfare
• 16% of working age households are workless
• These households cost us at least £12.7bn pa in welfare payments (nearly 4 pence on the standard rate of income tax for the rest of us)
• In 80% of the households, nobody is even seeking work
• The government reckons 2m of these people can be put to work, including 1m currently drawing incapacity benefit and 0.3m lone parents” see link

see this rascal who is already having a football team (oh I forgot ‘lives’) and now raising substitutes for the team as well
no wonder there are so many scroungers joining the line when even people cheating to be scroungers even when they get caught get let off like this
overall, we're spending in excess of £100bn pa on "social protection" (excluding that spent on pensioners). That's about £4,000 pa per UK household.

Such spending literally breeds welfare dependency, and there's now overwhelming evidence of the harm that does- not only to the immediate recipients, but also to their children, and their children's children.

less than 19% of current working age welfare benefits are in any way conditional on getting work:

So that's 100% rights but only 19% responsibilities.

No wonder we've got 5 million non-working dependents.

Ref: see this

Apologies for the long rant.

Options for the OP

• Buy bunk beds and put other children in 1 room and give 1 room to pregnant daughter and put crib there
• Put pregnant daughter in dining room with crib. she is after all your daughter, so dont send them to single mother hostels / BBs. what is meant by family, if they are not there to support children at times like this. i know you are doing your best.
• Tell the Bum (father to be) to get his life sorted and make maintenance payments for his partner and child when child born. Or get him to work in the house, cook clean scrub floor and do all house work including washing dishes and clothes (6am-9am and 5pm-10pm 8h a day for minimum wage)and earn his living and between 9am and 5pm kick his !!!! out of the house to do proper job search. March him down to job centre and see that he gets on list for any manual labour job available. There must be loads around with no one willing to do them.
• The bum who presently is not working (apparently cant find a job) (all the bloody migrants are finding jobs because not many people actually want jobs even when there are shortages in many sectors. ps. even I am a bloody migrant) and fathering a baby can find work if he wants to. He has apparently got a disability, if he qualifies for the selection criteria then he automatically needs to be shortlisted for any job (govt) that he applies for. He can apply for all manual labour jobs in all govt depts. See adverts in council and nhs hospital etc
• Speak to daughter about abortion or get the daughter to speak to her GP about it and make an informed decision about it. Stop giving daughter ANY pocket money. Make her do any housework so that she earns her living expenses. If she is old enough to get pregnant and have a baby then she is old enough to earn her living. Seriously speak to daughter about how this will put her in poverty most likely for the rest of her life, will ruin her education chances and also career, so to consider abortion which is a legal option.
• Last but not the least, even if she has the baby encourage her to go see the GP later and discuss options regarding injectable contraception as that works for many years (3-5years with failure rates quoted of as low as 0.05%) and it is specifically meant for people like this who are more likely to get ‘accidentally’ pregnant because they forgot to take precautions or ‘apparently the contraception failed’ excuses (see link for statistics on failure rates). The depot injection if advised by GP should prevent further ‘failures of contraception’ excuses and having another pregnancy next year. Also discuss with GP for help for counselling, including for adoption if considered appropriate option
• Do not rule out any option without thinking it through rationally

Last but not the least, I empathise with your situation, it must come as a shock to any parent and must be very hard to deal with. Make sure this daughter doesn’t become a role model for the younger daughter. Otherwise you will soon have another pregnant teenager waiting to get council housing. Not a nice situation to be in. best of luck

bubblesmoney

neverdespairgirl do u never sleep:eek: . anytime i come on this forum, u r busy posting or thanking people here:p

davsidipp

mummytofour i have every right as a taxpayer to have my say.the lady with 7 children had her partner with her and what we heard them saying made my blood boil.1 or 2 is a genuine mistake but 7 and expecting the council to foot the bill because they wanted 7 children is another matter.they were not going to move unless the council found them the right house this time so obviously they were already housed and were complaining about said accomadation.i have got no problems against large families and everyone has hard times now and again that is what we have social security for but i do not agree because you have such a large family you expect the council to find you the home of your choice.

oldMcDonald

bubblesmoney wrote: »

neverdespairgirl do u never sleep:eek: . anytime i come on this forum, u r busy posting or thanking people here:p

I asked her the same question once. Her answer? Sleeping is for wimps!


:rotfl:


*I don't agree with her myself, but then again, I didn't tell her 'coz I'm a wimp!

catkins

zoelouise88 wrote: »

its not just youngsters who expect this, i fell pregnant and it was unplanned yes but there was no way on earth i was going to abort my child or live on the streets with him, so i went to the council for advice and they housed me i didnt expect anything at first just advice but they have a duty to house any pregnant women or girl no matter what the age.

But because they have a duty to house all pregnant women or girls couples with no children stand no chance at all. I knew a couple who through circumstances could not afford their own home, either buying or renting. They were on the council waiting list for 22 years!!! They lived in disgusting B&B's and eventually the woman committed suicide. In the years they were on the waiting list one of my neighbours' 17 year old daughters got pregnant. Although they had a 4 bedroomed house with only one other child at home they told the council they were throwing her out and straight away she was given a 3 bedroomed house. How the hell can that be fair?

I don't think the council should put pregnant woman at the top of the list. I am sorry but if you have nowhere to live you should not be having a baby.

Another poster said "Because as a society we took a decision some decades ago that babies shouldn't start their lives on the streets".

Well the parents of those babies should think about that shouldn't they? Sooner or later there will be no accommodation for councils to offer. There cannot be a neverending supply of flats, houses or even B&B's can there?

Kavanne

Oh yeah OP I forgot to say, I have had Implanon (the contraceptive implant, the rod one in my arm) for 2.5 years now and have found it very effective (obviously lol). I think your daughter needs to seriously consider this method of contraception once the baby is born.

carolt

bubblesmoney's advice re getting the prospective son-in-law to really look HARD to find a job and earn his keep sounds sensible.

If he really wants a job - any job - he'll find one. No reason why your daughter can't be doing something useful now either - she's only pregnant! I worked till 8.5 months pregnant with both my first two - unless there's a real health issue, or the work involves healthy lifting, pregnant women can do most jobs as well as anyone. Temp agencies had no problem employing me as long as I wanted to work when I came back to the UK pregnant with my first child.

Likewise, I went back to work as soon as my eldest was 4 months old, as I had no financial choice - maternity benefits at that point only lasted 4 months compared to the current year. My parents babysat; if you or any other family members are able to help with that, I'm sure that would be a fanstic help (assuming said boyfriend has a job by then). If not, no reason why he can't become a full-time dad while your daughter goes out to work.

It's a huge shame housing - privately rented or to buy - is so expensive in this country - one of my pet hates and the reason I post here, as those who know me will know. It's tragic that an ordinary guy on an ordinary wage should not be able to afford anywhere, even the scummiest 1 bed flat, to rent privately or through social housing.

Whilst I absolutely agree that the easy availability of 'free' housing does have the undesired effect of encouraging girls to get pregnant for a flat, equally, there seems to me to be something wrong with a society which allows private landlords to make any amount of profit they like, whilst ignoring children who have to grow up in totally unsuitable, unsafe and inappropriate environments.

Sadly, whilst private rents and house prices are this high, I can well imagine that for those without high educational qualifications or the expectation of getting a well-paying job, getting pregnant to get a house does seem like the only realistic, sensible option for independence. Madness of course.

Roll on the crash - back to an era where people like my parents could buy a nice family semi in a lovely suburb in London (Zone 3) for 3 times the wage of one earner only (and my father was a manual worker at the time). Then ordinary young people might be able to see a future for themselves that actually meant work paid.