Complaining even before the programme airs!

Well, they have to keep themselves busy somehow phoenix

However, it never ceases to amaze me how many people are on benefits - including disability benefits, often for a 'bad back' - and have one child after another.
When DH or I have had a bad back we ..... oh well, you know what I mean!

This programme is a repeat from last Monday. I didn't realise that this was her 5th baby. God only knows who is looking after the other four.They were dossing down with some other young man and a pet rabbit in his flat whilst they waited for the council to allocate her a flat because of her condition. They spent most of their time shoplifting. I felt sorry for the rabbit and was horrified at the thought of a young baby living there.

I daren't watch it, would end up throwing something at the TV.
I still fail to understand how, having lost my job through restructuring, I am ineligible for Jobseekers despite having worked for the past 42 year, yet there are umpteen freeloaders who've never worked in their lives....... And no, I don't have any savings, pensions etc

Are they strict catholics, perhaps?

I doubt it.

It's the children I feel sorry for....
They don't stand much of a chance in life.......l.

I do wish they would stop making these programmes, but failing that, I suppose we shouldn't watch them.I know a lot of these people are living a scroungers life but I can't help thinking also what a rotten life some of them lead, they seem such hopeless cases.I also think they put on an element of bravado for the cameras.

Well, they aren't going to make a tv programme about non-smoking, non-drinking, law-abiding unemployed people carefully budgeting their meagre allowance, making sacrifices for the sake of their children's well-being and assiduously seeking whatever kind of work they can get are they?

I must say that I ended up NOT watching it, for more or less the same reasons that loopy said in her post ^up there.

Perhaps that gives me even less right to post about it.

However, we did have to spend some time on JSA, and believe me, if you have got off your derriere and bought a house (albeit on an interest only mortgage) the amount of benefits/handouts/or other help you can get is zilch, zero nothing. If we had been renting, we could have claimed for help with that.

absent m'dear, you are right of course, sadly.

5th baby at 21 she must have been barely over the age of consent and had one a year ever since. Ruddy madness!!

Strange how attitudes change. Not long ago many GNs would have been insisting that the people shown in the documentary were victims of society and are deserving of our compassion, not our condemnation!

I don't have compassion for anyone who gets pregnant 5 times knowing they have nothing to give those poor children.
I do have compassion for anyone who through no fault of their own can't find work. Or is genuinely claiming disability or sick benefit.

I agree.

It's something you see all the time. Often it starts as a hard luck story about a family where redundancy or illness has left them living on benefits. You feel sympathetic and then you do the maths and realise that there are two or three children who must have been born while they were on benefits. Any one can slip up and have an unexpected baby, but, to misquote Lady Bracknell, to have more than one looks like carelessness.

Just think for a moment what sort of salary you would need to support five children without benefits!

There are very few people who have that many children these days. I steer clear of these sorts of programmes but from the description of the way these people conduct their lives I think it's reasonable to conclude that they have had dysfunctional childhoods, or have a mild learning disability or have some other sort of mental disorder - or a combination of all these things.

A few weeks ago I caught the end of a programme that featured a couple of very overweight, unemployed people. They seemed incapable of taking the simplest steps towards creating order in their lives, and obviously had some sort of learning disability or personality disorder. I think it's terrible that people such as this are used as some sort of "entertainment" for those who seem to derive much enjoyment from being outraged.

Dysfunctional families are a problem but I think they are much less common than the media would have us believe. I'm not quite sure how such families can be helped towards a more productive and responsible lifestyle but I'm pretty sure that exhibiting their inadequacies and failings on television is not the answer. Nor is it to "cap" child benefit - because their children would suffer.

So doesn't the unborn child deserve better than to be born into a life of parental ineptitude?

Why is it always the right of a parent over that of a child ?

loopylou As you say you lost your job (rather than being made redundant and receiving a redundancy payment?), on what grounds are you ineligible for Jobseekers Allowance?

So what's your solution, POGS?

I had applied for a return to nursing course that paid a bursary (£1000 in two instalments) and was silly enough to say I was enquiring about my NHS pension (very minimal £200/mth) which took me over the threshold as would equate to more than JSA when added together apparently.

loopylou Doesn't that come to the equivalent of £280 a month? Are you really supposed to live on that?

POGS There's a good chance that the parents have been similarly ineptly parented. How this is rectified I don't know but I believe that interventions by organisations like Homestart can help with practical and parenting issues. I feel that demonising people whose behaviour society disapproves of does not really help to solve the situation. Cutting child benefit and other benefits will only make matters worse and may lead to children being placed in care - also not an ideal situation when child protection services are cut to the bone and experienced social workers are thin on the ground.

People who live on the margins of mainstream society and who do not have the intellectual or emotional capacity to organise their lives in the way that the majority of people do are easy targets that provide a useful distraction from the real issue of the inequality of power and resources within society.

Eloethan

'Why is it always the right of a parent over that of a child'

I assume that is my view that you are giving a response to?

I do not see a child born to say a drug /alcohol addict as anything other than a child that has been born into a potential squalid existence.. I cannot see things in the way you do.

I see a baby that immediately becomes surrogately brought up by the state. The state will provide for, try to protect it's welfare but leaves the baby in the hands of a parent/parents whom the state knows cannot be responsible for raising the child . I do not understand how this is remotely acceptable.

You will see my words as demonizing parents, I see my words as speaking honestly. I get sick and tired to be honest of babies/children being born and viewed as a right of their parents to do so.

I am sick and tired of reading, watching stories of child neglect by parents who were never capable of raising a child in the first place.

How many people have seen a new born with drug addiction? It is awful! Then the poor little thing goes home with a parent/parents who will have one thing on their mind , 'How, where, when will I get my next 'fix'. If the baby is lucky it will have a parent that is trying to cope on a substitute so it will be wheeled off daily in it's pushchair to the nearest chemist for it's mum or dad to 'sign in for a methadone hit'. Am I alone in finding this an enormous sadness?

How on earth do we as a society condone so many things that we know are simply wrong on all footing? We will all , without question , say puppy farming, animal abuse is abhorant, should be llegal, an affront to a decent society , yet we know our babies/children are suffering just as much yet liberal thinking stops us short of saying, doing , acting to protect them from birth.

The best some poor little mites can hope for is they don't fall through the cracks and the state will protect them. Well the state could have a legion of workers, money thrown at the problem but the state will never, ever be there 24/7 but the state is blamed , never the parent/parents when things go wrong or a child is neglected.

Why, because the right of the parent topped the right of the child and excuse after excuse has been given as to why the parents should be exhonorated from parental responsibility. They didn't have the intellectual, emotional capacity to be parents. Their human rights to have a child was greater than the rights of the unborn child etc. etc. They are not acceptable excuses, they are reasons why society has allowed our babies/children to continue to be brought up in homes that are totally unacceptable to parents who are nothing short of irresponsible from the start of conception.

Yes it makes me mad.

Me too, POGS

They do not necessarily have a learning disability or personality disorder. Some may seem uneducated but are calculating, wily and clever enough to know how to work the system - and revel in their 15 minutes of fame.

Well said POGS
Yes, Eloethan, because it roughly equated to the same as JSA it was refused. DH is self employed with an irregular income but his earnings for the previous financial year (c£13000) were taken into consideration too - IMO it stinks......
We'd be far better off not working, not paying a mortgage and claiming benefits so it's no wonder that (I presume, because I won't watch it) those in the programme have zero inclination to do otherwise. There's no reward for having worked nonstop since leaving school......

.... and saving for your old age then having to spend it all on a care home ....