Yesterday’s BBC headlines were so full of reports of Dickensian style child poverty that I half expected old Ebenezer Scrooge himself to leap off screen into my lap as I was typing this post.
I mean living in rat filled houses is no joke but is the author of said article expecting toddlers to ring Pest Control to complain about rodent infestations? Nope that’s definitely a job for mummy or daddy.
Having read the article, two questions swirled round the old noggin like a lump in a saucepan of Bisto:
1) What is meant by the term ‘child’? Are we referring to the legal definition of minor ie a person under 18 years of age or is there another benchmark being used by the Government to outline the hideous deprivation encountered by the youth of today?
2) What is meant by the term ‘poverty’? Since most minors own few tangible or financial assets in their own right then I struggle to understand how children can indeed be poor.
Dr Google’s Dictionary shows the below as a definition of the word ‘poverty’:
Poverty is generally defined as the state of being extremely poor, lacking sufficient resources to meet basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing. It can be measured in both absolute and relative terms. Absolute poverty focuses on the lack of resources to meet basic needs, while relative poverty looks at an individual's or household's income in comparison to the median income within a society.
So, in my mind, it’s not really children that are poor in themselves but it’s their parents/guardians who lack wonga. Looking at the above definition then it’s more a case of Relative Poverty than Child Poverty but using the term ‘child’ is likely to carry more gravitas and stoke up the outraged a lot more than just reporting on the fact that some families can’t make ends meet.
Part of me feels for these people. Decades ago, I was a single mother raising 2 children with an oversized mortgage to finance and a job paying slightly over the threshold for benefits. No Government assistance for you, lassie - maybe God will provide? Of course, no heaven-sent cheques ever landed on the doormat.
I soon realised personal wealth was the result of choices made in life and one would need to look closely at what choices families affected by ‘child poverty’ are making because as I discovered in my years of hardship, you can cover most bases by just making a few sacrifices.
Here are a few financial life choices we all face – if you were on the bread-line, what would you choose?
Do you choose to have a smartphone that might be on a contract plan costing £30 per month or do you choose to scale back your phone to an old-fashioned pay-as-you-go brick style one and use savings to pay off your energy bill? Same goes for expensive gym memberships or other monthly subscription services. There’s a lot to be said for free exercise in a local park, on the beach or buying DVDs in a charity shop that you can re-watch. It’s a £1 for 4!
Do you choose to go to the hair or beauty salon for a regular cut/blow dry, waxing or shellac nails which cost you around £25 or more or do you choose to grow your hair, paint your own nails, use a lady razor then blow the savings on kid’s shoes/school uniforms?
Do you choose to smoke, drink or gamble every week - £16 packet of ciggies, £5.50 for a pint and £10 for a punt, estimated expenditure of approx. £31.50 or do you choose to spend this cash on school lunches for your hungry little darlings? Same goes for designer coffees, meal deals or takeaways which often add up to a significant sum every week. You can live without! Better still – just make your own!
Do you choose to follow the latest fashions or drive a top of the range car or do you choose to wear the same old glad rags and pootle about on the bus? Kids usually go free or half fare on the bus or heaven forbid, you could actually walk to school which would be good for both physical and mental health. OK so demographics may rule out buses in a lot of rural areas but I’m sure you could do with a lot less cheap tat from Temu, Shein or other such websites.
As a struggling ex-single mum, I even went as far as getting rid of my telly and using cardboard inner soles to make my holey shoes last longer in order to make sure I had enough to keep a roof over our heads. Even changing the telephone landline so that it only received incoming calls made a big financial difference (no smartphones back in the 1980s).
I have two wonderful grown-up kids who lived through thick and thin yet have managed to survive into mid-life with not a single mental health issue. Both know the value of working hard to earn money.
Personal wealth or poverty is one of those Schrodinger’s Cat conundrums because we are all both rich and poor at the same time at every given moment. What? It’s true. Let me elaborate further on this point. Elaborate me!
Supposing that personal wealth was calculated based on the present value (PV) of all the tangible assets owned plus money held by an individual. Add it all up and we’d arrive at a total value (TV). Now imagine we’ve done this for everyone in the UK. Compare your own PV to the PV of anyone else on this list and you’ll see that you’re both richer than some and poorer than others at the same time. Who knew?
Bear in mind that the total value of all your worldly wealth also fluctuates pretty much on a daily basis because the underlying present value of tangible assets such as houses, cars or shares changes according to market valuations and loads of other factors. This means that rankings on a list of rich or poor people are like shifting sands pulled about by a daily tide. It’s all a matter of where you end up when the tide's in or out.
Without wishing to sound smug or preachy (I am?), at the end of the day what I’m trying to say is it all comes down to choices. We’ve also got to remember that there’ll always be HAVEs and HAVE NOTs in life – not every child can have Nike trainers or holidays to the Bahamas. It’s just the way it is.
And as for lifting the 2-child benefit cap – I have to vote NO on that one. Having children is most definitely a lifestyle choice and one that should be made according to the means you have available. If you can afford to have 3 or more kids then great - the more future taxpayers, the better but it shouldn’t be a case of popping out sprogs just to get paid so you can avoid going to work or live a life on benefits. The taxpayer cannot be expected to foot the bill for your personal Spice Girls line up or football team.
In any case lifting the cap will do little to remedy the situation for some families because again, it all comes down to looking at the choices being made and if parents are not prepared to make changes/sacrifices then giving them extra benefits is quite frankly a waste of time and taxpayer money. Come on, we all know it won’t be spent on school dinners or uniforms.
What’s needed are better mechanisms to identify families who qualify under this ‘child poverty’ banner then provide them with dedicated debt/lifestyle counselling so they can make the right choices then stand proudly on their own two feet.
You’ve got to cut your cloth according to how much you ACTUALLY HAVE and not how much some society profiling bureaucrat sat in an air-conditioned office thinks you should have.
You’ve got to cut your cloth according to how much you ACTUALLY HAVE and not how much some society profiling bureaucrat sat in an air-conditioned office thinks you should have.
And as for the bacon - price of a packet generally under £2, packet of bread is about £1 so for less than the cost of a pint, kids could have bacon butties if their parents wanted them to.
Shame on you BBC. This is not NEWS! Just Government propaganda guaranteed to pander to those do-gooding campaigners who probably have never been 'poor' themselves.