At some point perhaps the editors of The Guardian would like to club together and buy Afua Hirsch a clue? Sure, vain hope but where there is even that mustard seed of it mountains can be moved.
The claim is that we’re all beastly – all this stuff about personal responsibility is so racist you know – in pointing to single parent families as a source of poverty in our society. That’s not actually being beastly, that’s just taking note of basic maths:
All debates about poverty alleviation inevitably suffer from a myth of personal responsibility. The parallels between the 1834 Poor Law – premised on the belief that individual moral failure was the root of destitution – and the contemporary emphasis on single-parent families being to blame for poverty are striking.
So, how do we currently define poverty? It’s being in a household on less than 60% of median income – sometimes measured before, sometimes after housing costs. This is then adjusted for household size. 5 peeps need, obviously, more than 3 or 1 in order not to be poor.
OK.
The modal household in the UK is a two earner household – two adults therefore. The median (yes, mode and median are different things) household with children is also a two earner household.
A single parent household is, by definition, a single earner household. Therefore single parent households will have significantly lower earnings than two earner households. Single parent households, as a matter of basic maths, will therefore be much more likely to be in poverty.
Because of the way we measure poverty – household income and with respect to that median – and only because of the way that we measure poverty then yes, single parent households are responsible for much of the poverty that we measure out there.
Seriously Honey, get a clue.
And one more thing it would be fascinating to find out. Child support. Is this included in the household income which leads to poverty being declared or not? For there are some measures of income where it is and others where it is not. It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it? Anyone actually know so they can tell us?
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She has made a career out of being a s***-stirrer. She gets paid for stirring s***. Don't ask her to change that or she would be out of a job.
Merely another way of saying that all the rest of us must provide for the women and children of blacks.
It's worse than the halving of family income. One-parent families are mostly mother-run families. Not having a father in the home deprives kids of examples with which to escape poverty, such as how to deal with a white stranger even if you think they are all racists, how to deal calmly with a policeman even if you think he stopped you unjustly, and how to aim for lawful work even though prohibition makes pushing and pimping more lucrative. Many US state "anti-poverty" programs, to showcase leaders' pity, pay a bonus for having Dad sleep elsewhere.
It's way less than half - the primary child care giver in a 2 earner household is almost certainly on part time hours and on a lower hourly rate than the main bread winner; because they have to look after the kids outside school hours (aka taxpayer funded childcare).
So a single parent can manage at best say 5 hours per day, 5 days a week at the lower end of the wage bracket, lets say £10 per hour, that's a shade over £1k per month after tax. Try raising a family on that in the UK. Single parent families will always be a net drain on the taxpayer because being a parent is 1 FTE and you need a second to go out and fund it.
From the Joseph Rowntree Foundation:
"In evaluating most public social policies it is easy to assess the impact of
transfers because they are public. Although in the case of child support
we have data on child support payments and can assess their impact on
the poverty of lone parent families, we do not have any data on the
impact of these private transfers on the net income of non-resident
fathers, their families and children and the extent to which paying child
support to a previous family reduces them into poverty."
I'm concluding then that Child Support or Maintenance payments as they often get called are included in determining if the recipient is in relative poverty.
But they are not included in determining if the giver is!
This line is delicious from the JRF as it shows that with almost any government intervention, however well intended, you just cannot win:
". .an effective child support system might increase births inside
and outside marriage which would tend to increase child poverty"
The measure of poverty as a percentage of average, mean or mode, is a complete idiocy. If large numbers of people with an income above the average were to emigrate or down tools relatively there would be fewer poorer people, whilst in reality there would be many more.
Very few single parent "families" in the UK are actually poor in real terms, those who are generally suffer mental health or substance abuse problems. Relative poverty in single parent "families" is not the important issue. The biggest predictor for depression, poor physical development, criminality, incarceration, alcoholism, drug use and poor educational attainment is not having two live-in parents. Single parent "families" are unequivocally sub-optimal for physical, psychological and sociological development and it is that which needs addressing.
However, even in two parent families the issue of child care, especially in the infants early life coupled with the too often necessity for both parents to work, caused by high taxes (council, electrical etc.) and housing costs means that parental, usually maternal, care is not provided for an optimum period, leading to social and psychological problems.
With below population replacement levels of live births HMG might look at Hungary's increasingly successful and well thought out family friendly policies, which have increased the birth rate and are supporting parents to carry out the most important task of raising their offspring.