20% of school kids malnourished...
- Thread starter realBabelfish
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Caporegime
give them a sandwich
Whatever gets you through the night...
Just ignore all the stats about pensioners deaths in cold winters etc etc.
Do we also ignore the number of pensioners not claiming the winter fuel allowance too as you seem to be doing?
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oooh. put that handbag down. im not suggesting anything im just asking the question.
why do people always assume poor people blow their money on fags and booze? benefits certainly dont give you an easy life and rent is much more than it used to be. maybe some of them arent on benefits and are just low earners.
eating healthily is actually much more expensive that eating ****. we eat proper food at home: organic, no frozen meals and the wife cooks a proper meal every night and separate food for my 11 month old. but that costs much more than buying frozen chips and ready meals. fruit and veg has gone up loads recently.
maybe they were home owners and became unemployed and now struggle to keep up the payments? or they were in debt? not all poor people are on benefits.
obviously some parents are **** poor and shouldnt have kids as they are drunks and some feed their kids **** too but you cant tar everyone with the same brush.
they were talking of people like where the mother couldnt afford to eat as well as the kids so the mother didnt eat (she worked 2 jobs btw - both min wage). they were also saying how kids are queueing up for free meals at charity shelters.
remember almost everything has gone up a fair amount over the last few years:
unemployment
house prices and rent
energy prices
food
childcare
etc while pay has pretty much been frozen for a good few years.
i wouldnt say im a wet lefty liberal. im certainly no borderline fascist though. im surprised you want any cash to go to overseas aid since you obviously only care about yourself.
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you cant live very well on benefits. you can survive. maybe if you have 5 kids and feed them **** you might be able to.
its not even VERY EASY to live on average wage these days, if you want to feed your family right.
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Do we also ignore the number of pensioners not claiming the winter fuel allowance too as you seem to be doing?
or skewing the argument. maybe lots of them dont need the money? there are plenty of well off pensioners (my parents' pension income is triple what me and my family have to live on and they dont claim any allowance)
Soldato
This sounds like the kind of thing somebody who has never been on benefits, or even knows anything about how much benefits are would say.
I wonder, is this the case....
Pretending that people on very low wages have more than enough money to pay for rent/council tax/water/heating/transportation & high quality food is utterly stupid & just shows how little you know about the subject at hand.
Indeed, the amount of middle class parents claiming child benefit, or well to do pensions claiming the free bus-pass/winter fuel allowance, who then have the gall to go on about "entitlement" amuse me greatly.
The typical "Socialism for me, capitalism for everybody" else kind of folk I utterly despise - who claim everything the law allows them, but berate anybody else who does the same.
It's nice when the odd few don't claim (as they really don't need it) but I've yet to meet one in real life.
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I'm glad, i was worried i'd get red arrowed
to be honest i think maybe we should. if you arent working and cant
im not sure how you would implement it but i hate seeing chavs constantly popping kids out. i feel so sorry for the kids as they will really struggle in life.
of course you have the human rights issue and it would have to be carefully thought out. but IMO the most important thing is that kids are ok and healthy, which at the moment many arent.
i just think its important that kids dont suffer due to poor/bad parents as it isnt the child's fault.
There are a number of issues here from genuine poverty (yes it does exist in this country), to poor and ill-informed parenting, forced situations eg both parents in low income jobs leaving early having to give the kids nothing nutritious because they haven't got time before getting them to childcare, to rising levels of mental-health problems in both boys and girls, etc the list goes on and neither the Daily Mail bad parents or the Guardian evil Tories is the real answer.
Yes parents are accountable for this occurring, yes the social support structure is accountable for this occurring and strangely enough yes the government and their policies are accountable for this. To single out any particular group in isolation is rather stupid and likewise to deny the culpability of any of those groups is either naive or an indication of prejudice.
Strangely enough if you chose to have kids you kind of have to be prepared to forgo pretty much everything else and strangely enough if you rule a country and implement policy to create something you should damn well think through the consequences.
Yes parents are accountable for this occurring, yes the social support structure is accountable for this occurring and strangely enough yes the government and their policies are accountable for this. To single out any particular group in isolation is rather stupid and likewise to deny the culpability of any of those groups is either naive or an indication of prejudice.
Strangely enough if you chose to have kids you kind of have to be prepared to forgo pretty much everything else and strangely enough if you rule a country and implement policy to create something you should damn well think through the consequences.
You don't actually know what you are talking about do you? Not all people are in the same situation, and the benefit system is not always adequate or targeted in the right direction.
Have a read of what someone who does know what they are talking about has to say, and compare that to your contribution:
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also on r2 was talk of a guy dying from cancer who has had his benefits stopped now, even though he cant work.
lots of people fall through the cracks and its the kids who suffer
Precisely.
Come on guys, which is it?
To be honest my rather flippant reply was more to do with the emotional rubbish I was replying to than anything else. Quick, throw in some pensioners dying in the winter that will win the argument! Totally ignoring the fact that old people die more in winter anyway even if the benefit system was perfect and the fact that quite a few pensioners do not claim what they are entitled to. (Obviously all the rich ones do...)
Or they see it as a method of getting some of their taxes back as currently the system does not differentiate on children. Someone earning £50,000 will pay the same in tax if they have children or not so why not get some of it back as child benefit?
If one in five children are malnourished for reasons like this then that is an awful lot of cracks, some would say it is a veritable chasm!
Too many parents struggling to make ends meet who have neither the energy or time to devote to cooking a meal from scratch due to economic situation, their socio-economic status, their specific job. Try actually putting yourself in their shoes and what they have to cope with and you may develop this remarkable little thing called empathy.
On one hand you could have a young-single mother who rarely gives her child breakfast, spends little time on promoting early learning or pushes social interaction and on the other hand you have a young mother who has a partner in Afghanistan and is trying to hold the fort together with working shift patterns and using whatever childcare she can afford. Really depends how you look at the particular situation - it's the same person though.
Soldato
Personally, when I was a child at primary school we had 2 large areas set aside, one for a wildlife area/pond and the other was a large vegetable patch where we used to go out and learn about growing veggies and they would then be used in the canteen.
I can't see why schools can't be doing this sort of thing again.
We all know there are rubbish parents in the country, we need to be doing as much as possible at schools to help out while trying to educate the kids and parents.
I can't see why schools can't be doing this sort of thing again.
We all know there are rubbish parents in the country, we need to be doing as much as possible at schools to help out while trying to educate the kids and parents.
Too many parents struggling to make ends meet who have neither the energy or time to devote to cooking a meal from scratch due to an economic situation that was beyond their control, their socio-economic status that they were born into which was beyond their control, and their specific job which quite often can be beyond their control. Try actually putting yourself in their shoes and what they have to cope with and you may develop this remarkable little thing called empathy.
On one hand you could have a young-single mother who rarely gives her child breakfast, spends little time on promoting early learning or pushes social interaction and on the other hand you have a young mother who has a partner in Afghanistan and is trying to hold the fort together with working shift patterns and using whatever childcare she can afford. Really depends how you look at the particular situation - it's the same person though.