The £40k family

Fran

Curry_Queen wrote:

You mean the IR site calculates your actual figure for the remainder of the tax year? It did ask for dates of starting work etc so I set it to start next week and used the benefit figure already given as income for the last tax year.

Maybe someone who knows more about the TC system could give us an idea

I think someone said that IR calculator and Entitled To work it out differently, one until the end of the year and one for the whole of this year, can't remember exactly! (That's why it's important people don't rely on these calculators, cos you might miss something or apply it to the wrong dates.)

Bogof_Babe

Fran wrote:

Well we could do without politicians. If we did keep them, they could go and live and work in that street in wherever it was where the whole street is only worth about £12,000. That would also bring them closer to the less well off.

I suppose we need politicians (small "p") in a general sense, the alternative being anarchy and literally every man for himself. (Then let's see where the can't or won't work end up ). It is our responsibility to elect politicians who can balance the books.

Don't know about the street worth £12,000 - is that the bricks and mortar, or the residents? If the former, it is no doubt because the houses are uninhabitable due to vandalism and/or general neglect, which is a result of poor upbringing of the perpetrators, who couldn't care less about anyone else and don't have the intelligence to do something useful. If the latter, a whole row of homes where there is less than £12K between the occupants surely points to short-termism and lack of ambition, which again goes back to underfunded education programmes. I site these two scenarios as both would indicate there is more purpose in increasing general wellbeing via the tax system than in supporting one family in its idleness.

There are still areas of above average unemployment I believe, but in general there are more unfilled jobs than dole claimants in most of the UK. If we have to fill these with immigrants, we should ask ourselves where we are going wrong .

bridiej

Fran wrote:

When would you have time to work looking when you're bringing up 6 kids? As the mother has arthritis (and why should we doubt that the doctor is wrong in this case any more than in any other case?), the father has more than enough to do.

Well why on earth did she have so many kids then? These sort of people are so selfish, all that happens is that the older kids end up helping to look after the younger kids, thereby not having a chance to enjoy the "normal" childhood that they should be having.

Fran

I suggested in an earlier post the possibility that she has an obssessive compulsion to have babies which is one possibility. I just don't think people should be so quick to judge when we don't know the background of people.

If older children look after younger ones isn't that a good thing rather than bad? There are enough in this family to share responsibility and caring for the family and still have time for themselves too.

Ginger_Pudding

I'm sorry if this is not strictly on topic , but I just wanted to say how it irritates me immensely when programmes such as This Morning feature huge families with 15 or more children as if it's something wonderful and clever . It's not and they shouldn't be encouraging them and giving them publicity. :mad:

Spendless

I don't agree with the comment about older ones looking after younger ones just because they are a large family.

This can happen to any size family where there is a gap, such as the one between me and my sister where i am the elder by 7 year years and there are ony two of us.

Re - the family featured on This Morning. If its the same one i'm thinking of, isn't the father of this family working and it is he who supports them?

Fran

Spendless wrote:

I don't agree with the comment about older ones looking after younger ones just because they are a large family.

This can happen to any size family where there is a gap, such as the one between me and my sister where i am the elder by 7 year years and there are ony two of us.

Re - the family featured on This Morning. If its the same one i'm thinking of, isn't the father of this family working and it is he who supports them?

If you meant my comment, I was saying that with plenty of kids they could take part in the caring etc. but still have time to get on with life; with only two in the family this would be more difficult.... not impossible to happen.

I don't know which family this is, but I think the first post on this thread refers to the father not working because the mother has arthritis.

Spendless

bridiej wrote:

Well why on earth did she have so many kids then? These sort of people are so selfish, all that happens is that the older kids end up helping to look after the younger kids, thereby not having a chance to enjoy the "normal" childhood that they should be having.

This is the quote i meant i didn't agree with.

What i meant was that older siblings looking after younger ones can happen in a family size of 2 it isn't exclusive to bigger families.

jellyhead

no, i looked after my siblings more than the average child. when we talked about this once in the playground there was one girl who was really resentful that she'd spent most of her childhood looking after younger siblings, apparently her parents worked on a farm and they would put all the children in a pen where she'd be responsible for the others. i feel that my nephew needs time away from his little brother but he never gets any. i think that's probably worse, when there are only 2 children and the eldest doesn't want to spend all their time with the youngest but has to.

i suppose it's true though as fran says that if there are lots of children the burden of looking after the little ones doesn't all fall on the eldest child and can be shared throughout the eldest few. i can't remember which family i read about in the magazine but i do remember the older children saying they hoped their parents wouldn't have any more children because they didn't have time to do their homework because of all the childcare, washing, cooking, housework etc. - this was a huge family and the eldest 2 or 3 really didn't enjoy having so many little ones to care for. they all told the magazine they'd begged their parents to stop having more babies and that they thought their parents were selfish, putting their own desire for babies ahead of the unhappiness of their current children.

Sarahsaver

Ginger_Pudding wrote:

I'm sorry if this is not strictly on topic , but I just wanted to say how it irritates me immensely when programmes such as This Morning feature huge families with 15 or more children as if it's something wonderful and clever . It's not and they shouldn't be encouraging them and giving them publicity. :mad:

My nanna was one of 13 children, which I know she thought was wonderful. Sadly one of her sisters died in childhood. This was back in the days when your family was your security if you were working class (she was born in 1915), and also if, as they were, you were Catholic, birth control was a total no-go area, and probably not that available anyway.
In France you get a lot more help from the government if you have a 'famille nombreuse', they see children as a gift, and increasing the population as a good thing. This would not cauise so much controversy over there. Im not saying I agree with that, I would never want that many kids, but there are other points of view, other ways of life.
I was wondering yesterday though...
If so many people have religious objections to contraception, however, how come there are not more families like this?