Down to the Bare Bones - Cutting (the fat of) Child Benefit

Let us take care of our children, for they have a long way to go.

Let us take care of our elders, for they have come a long way. 

Let us take care of those of us in between, for we are doing the work.

(Traditional Blessing)

This is my hope: in a culture of austerity may we not have a poverty of vision.

May we hold our values above our economics.

May we respect each stage in the journey of life as having value and dignity, and offer the support it needs, rather than resent each penny that is required.

May we not turn against each other in trying to find solutions.

Let us stop for a minute and look beyond the numbers, to the ambitions and basic needs of every family. Let us nurture the creation of healthy families, support their aspirations, regardless of their parental financial situation. Let us give every child, the same basic funding so that we know their basic needs can and will be provided, come what may. Let us value the next generation financially. Let us value the parents who care for them.

A hopelessly idealistic plea, you might think. But one for which I make no apologies, nor take any credit.

This is the vision of Child Benefit.  A Universal financial payment which has been supporting families for decades. (for a great explanation of what Child Benefit is and what's happening to it, see yesterday's post in our BlogMarch.)

And yet at exactly the time we need Child Benefit like never before, we are being chastened for being greedy and unrealistic in valuing what we have. What (in a good economy)  was thought of as a vital support for parents and children is now seen as a luxury (in a flat-lining economy), and one to which the rich are not entitled .... so nor should the poor or the squeezed middle be. We soon will have to prove that we deserve it, that we are poor enough, and jump through the hoops of the already creaking Family Income Supplement system to get less than what we already have...

How fair is that?

I am not going to give you a sob story about the choices we as a family make or the details of our personal finances. They are truly not your problem. Because I do not expect you, or the State, to take financial responsibility for me and my children.

Just like I do not expect to have to pay to bail out the banks. Or repay bond holders. But I have. And my cost of living has shot through the roof, as our means have declined. But market forces only work one way, it seems.


I want to live in a society which values - financially and morally - the needs and contributions of each sector of society from youngest to oldest - at their time of need. 

I thought I did. But I was wrong. 

I understand something: money is all that matters right now. The money for the party (of which my generation and my children's were not part of) has to come from somewhere. The bill has to be paid.

But why from those of us who are under the most pressure? Who are working to build our careers, care for small children and pay off mortgages?These children are our country's future and we the current economic powerhouse. We do not feel very powerful.

On Monday, the IMF admitted it completely underestimated the effects of austerity on the Irish economy. A new report showed that for every €100 of cuts, a knock-on €50 loss to the economy had been expected - through loss of employment and reduced spending.The reality was two-three times this.  

Let us not keep making these mistakes. Let us learn from the evidence.

The argument goes that Child Benefit is a luxury. Or that it funds luxuries. In a tough economy we need to learn to "man up" and realise that life is hard, which means cutting back the fat. Child Benefit is fat. Some are even suggesting that children are luxuries (I thought in Catholic Ireland they were supposed to be blessings from God, but what would I know?).

I see Child Benefit like this: if you benefit the family, you benefit the child, and you invest in the future. Cut the investment, limit the potential, pay later for the consequences... 

But we are so worried about now. About what if we can't pay the Troika, that we forget our future. We forget the value of our children and the families that are nurturing the future.

Children are one third of our population and all of our future.  

~Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, 1981

Meanwhile my children are aware that almost every time they ask for something the answer is always "sorry, no love, we just can't afford it right now." And so we focus on the luxuries that we can give them, the ones that money can't buy, and squash them into their shoes for a bit longer. And pray that no one gets sick in a way our skeletal medical insurance can't cover.

We are down to the bare bones. Our family. Our country. Where do we go now?

In the end it is down to numbers on a computer. Not lives or values. Just economic survival. 

And computer says no. 

So the numbers must be made smaller. What these numbers represent does not matter so much. The impact on lives, the hardship, the anxiety, the loss of opportunity...

Well computer, you know what? 

We say NO too.

10 Irish parenting bloggers have joined forces in a “BlogMarch” to raise awareness of the crippling impact that cuts to child benefit will have on Irish families if introduced in December’s budget. The bloggers are publishing a blog post each over ten days to highlight the negative impact that child benefit cuts will have, as well as spearheading a nationwide media campaign. 

To find out more about the campaign, see my post here

You can join us on the new Irish Parenting Blogs Facebook page here

And on Twitter with the hash-tag #blogmarch 

You can contact Joan Burton, minister in charge of child benefit: joan.burton@oireachtas.ie

You can find the email addresses of all current TD’s and Senators here

You can sign the petition against Child Benefit Cuts here

There is a march organised against cuts to Child Benefit planned for November 3rd in Dublin. Starting at Parnell Square, D1 at 12 noon here

Read the other Blog March posts

The post that inspired me to start this whole campaign off: Ciara @Ouch My Fanny Hurts: Where her mother says we all need to speak up 

Day 1: 'Child Benefit Stole My Child's Allowance' at  
The Irish Rhymes

Day 2  (Tuesday 9th):          The Clothesline Blog    
'Stuck In The Middle- No To Child Benefit Cuts' 
http://theclotheslineie.wordpress.com

Day 3  (Wednesday 10th):   Mind The Baby  
Leave Child Benefit Alone, Tax Maternity Benefit Instead          
http://mindthebaby.wordpress.com/

Day 4  (Thursday 11th):       Dreaming Aloud    
Down to the Bare Bones - Cutting (the fat out of) Child Benefit       
http://www.dreamingaloud.net/

Day 5  (Friday 12th):          The Daily Muttering        
http://thedailymuttering.blogspot.ie/

Day 6  (Saturday 13th):       Kate Takes 5                
http://katetakes5.blogspot.ie/

Day 7  (Sunday 14th):         Wholesome Ireland      
http://wholesomeireland.com/

Day 8  (Monday 15th):        Ouch My Fanny Hurts 
http://ouchmyfannyhurts.wordpress.com/

Day 9  (Tuesday 16th):        Wonderful Wagon      
http://www.wonderfulwagon.com/

Day 10 (Wednesday 17th):  Mama.ie                   
http://mama.ie/

BALANCING WORK AND PARENTING

An alternative to the work and parenting dilemma 
1500 WORD ARTICLE- published in JUNO

“The future is not inevitable. We can influence it, if we know what we want it to be…We can and should be in charge of our own destinies in a time of change.” 

Charles Handy, 1989

The road to parenthood is often littered with tough decisions, compromises and abandoned dreams. One common stumbling block is the eternal tug of war between paid work and parenting. It is a clash of well-made intentions and hard realities, with few alternatives offered by our working culture. Evolving a life where we can balance our children’s needs for breastfeeding, love and plenty of hands-on parenting, with our own adult needs for recognition and engagement with the outside world, whilst meeting our financial needs, is a quandary that many families can face.

As a society, we are improving in our provision of parental leave; maternity allowance and child care options. But we are still putting the economic role of parents in the workforce before the very real needs of children for parental carers. There is a great pressure in our culture right now, both socially and financially, for both parents to hold full time paid careers outside the home. Something has to give and it is usually our energy and sanity as we get busier and more money rich but time poor. As house prices and child care costs rise, and our material expectations increase, it can feel as though there are fewer choices open to us.

This article is about creating alternatives to the either/or boundary so commonly laid down in our culture between the career women and stay-at-home mums. Making your own way requires some redefinitions: of our roles and titles, of financial needs and wants, of concepts of work, of success and achievement, of possible jobs and of how daily life can look. It requires a greater degree of self reliance, adaptability and the courage to live out your values and take risks. There is no blueprint, no how-to manual; we each must find our own way that works best for our families and us. This is challenge enough for two parent families and twice as much so for lone parents who have already had to learn to be creative and flexible in their roles. My hope is to inspire you towards a way of living which complements, not compromises, you and your family’s ever-changing needs, allowing you and your loved ones flexibility, togetherness, autonomy and creativity in your lives.

Decisions, decisions

Before having a child, I used to know clearly which side of the fence I would be: the divide clearly laid down in our culture between the career women and stay-at-home mums. My own mother was a stay-at-home mum: she had a hundred interests but her role did not include paid work. And I thought that I would be the same. I was outraged when asked, whilst I was still pregnant, when I would restart work. I was committed to being a stay-at-home mum, with all that it entailed. This was my baby and I didn’t want to pay someone else to bring it up for me so I could have a career.

And yet, when the time came, I felt very clearly that I wanted to be able to contribute something financially to our family in addition to being my son’s main caretaker. I had no interest in being a career woman, but I also did not want to be confined to the domestic sphere. I had a strong desire to continue to contribute to society in a broader sense and continue finding avenues for expressing my creativity as I always had done. My devotion to caring for my son was absolute, and yet I was not prepared to put being me on hold for ten years or more, neither was I willing to try “having it all” as has been so popularised recently. And so we have evolved a new way of living and working, making and finding our own work from lots of part time jobs and self-employment, whilst parenting in partnership. Practically speaking this has meant me taking the majority of the child-care and my husband the majority of the earning for most of the first year, and into the second year the pendulum has started to swing the other way. However, at times when I have had a glut of work he has the flexibility to shift into stay-at-home father role. Generally I work outside the home one-and-a-half days a week and he cares for our son just as I do when he works. We both also take on work that we can do from home in the evenings. Many people envy us, and say that we’re lucky to spend so much time at home with our son and not “go to work” at full time jobs like they “have to”. But this is all about choices, we have chosen not to have careers in organisations which organise our lives for us, we have chosen not to have a big mortgage which stretches us to breaking point. We have chosen to put one of us being home with our son first, and with those priorities in place, our need to earn our living falls in around that. We have chosen to think creatively about our working lives. As I see it you can hand over your time or money for security or live more self sufficiently, taking responsibility for this yourself.

Charles Handy, an influential and visionary business writer (author of The Age of Unreason and The Empty Raincoat amongst other books), talks of new ways of working, which will become more commonplace as our economy moves away from providing nine to five jobs for organisations. He talks of your portfolio of work, a far broader definition of work than we currently hold. There are five categories; the paid work consists of wage work (money paid for time given) and fee work (money paid for results delivered, e.g. professional freelance or artistic work). There are three “free work” categories, which are just as important but undervalued in our society and therefore omitted from peoples’ current portfolios: Homework encompassing caring, family responsibilities and domestic work, gift or voluntary work and study/ hobby work:
“If, rather than think of life as work and leisure, we think of it as a portfolio of activities - some of which we do for money, some for interest, some for pleasure, some for a cause - that way, we do not have to look for the occupation that miraculously combines job satisfaction, financial reward and pleasant friends all in one package. As with any portfolio we get different returns from different parts and if one fails the whole is not ruined.”

In this model our lives and our work are not seen as two distinct and separate things but rather intertwined and each allotted equal significance in maintaining our lives as individuals and society. Rather than having your ‘job’ to which you go to for eight hours a day, your portfolio of work may consist of both paid and unpaid work, maybe in many different roles or capacities over the week or year and certainly over a lifetime. Work can be a far broader, more diverse and fulfilling prospect than we might imagine!

We have found that this approach has worked well for us. We are certainly not rich in financial terms, but neither are we poor in any sense. We have a far wider range of experiences, locations, activities, co-workers and roles on a weekly basis than if we were going to work every day at the same job or only staying home doing childcare. We are in charge of our time to a far greater degree, and so more flexible. We feel in control of our own lives: they are full and satisfying. For paid work we mark exam papers, edit and proof read, teach yoga, creative writing and drama, do hours in a shop and office when needed, sell bio-mass boilers, tutor secondary school kids and make Christmas wreaths for sale. Our other time is spent parenting, gardening, volunteering at La Leche League and on a local arts festival committee and on hobbies and learning. There is never a dull moment! We are rich in time some days and over-worked on others. There is always seasonal work, always times when someone or other needs an extra hand. Living and working this way doesn’t give you the company car, the fast track promotion or the pension policy- but it gives you priceless things such as time – to care for your child yourself, to breastfeed in an extended manner, to build or renovate you own house, to integrate yourself far more into your community and the seasons, and crucially, to develop a sense of trust and surrender to the world. Working in this way makes you more realistic about your abilities and skills and far broader in categorising yourself. It also means you have to learn to name your price and to label your worth, which is often a real challenge. Rather than the never-ending fear of ‘what if’, you face it day after day and learn to live with constantly being open to opportunities and trusting that where one door closes another opens. 


My guiding mantra and starting point on this journey is Theodore Roosevelt’s wise words: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” My yardstick for success is based on the words attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.

This is to have succeeded.”

Get creative

Take a big sheet of paper and brainstorm what the good life looks like for you. Try to steer clear of infinite money and desert islands! Maybe it is being able to pick up your kids from school, being self-employed, working with horses, cooking professionally, growing your own organic vegetables, being less reliant on the car, using your creativity to earn money.

Redefine the concept of a job

Keep your old job but go part time, job share, flexi time or temp. Take advantage of technology to make the place of your work more adaptable and e-commute. Revive cottage industry and work from home. Choose your business and co-workers and work with or for partner or friends. Or go out on your own and be self-employed. Or go with the seasons and temp or do contract work. Or combine lots of bit part job roles.

Create paid work

Really take into account ALL of your skills, not just qualifications when thinking how you might create paid work in your portfolio.

What skills do you enjoy using most? What activities use these? (See Bolles, What Color is Your Parachute?) What work is there a need for in your community or region? Can you provide this? What are you good at? What do you do already that you could turn into a profession? What was your dream job before you started to compromise? What paid work could you do from home which complements or is an extension of stay-home parenting? What hobbies or interests could you turn into earning potential by teaching to others or selling the product of your hobby?

Reassess your markers of success

Are they monetary, to do with career prestige, or are they more in line with sustainable happiness? Money cannot replace time with your partner, time in nature, your babies’ smiles and seeing first steps. What really makes you rich? What has value for it? List all the things other than money that work provides you: self-esteem, using your creativity, spending time with like minded people, challenge… make sure that between your various types of work you meet all of these needs.

Off-load unnecessary expenses

Downsize, barter skills or products with friends and neighbours, reuse, recycle, share, start a LETS economy in your community or an unofficial skills swap. By doing this we swap babysitting time, baby stuff, clothes, handy-manning, professional services, garden produce and preserves between our support network. We share lifts, grocery shopping, club memberships and various media amongst our friends. Our society is pitched towards private ownership, but it has large financial costs and excess material clutter. Maybe you don’t need to own but can share, borrow or rent your house, holiday house, book, laptop…

Books:

The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future by Charles Handy, Random House Business Books, £8.99

The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy, Random House Business Books, £8.99

What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Guide for Job-Hunters and Career Changers by Richard Bolles, Ten Speed Press, £12.99

Coming home to ourselves

(1500 word article, first published in JUNO)

I am an old-school Romantic. At university I fell in love twice: first with my husband and then the European Romantics and American Transcendentalists: Emerson, Thoreau, Schelling, Coleridge etc. Through their nearly 200 year old words I discovered a vision of the future so fresh, so relevant that it could have been written yesterday: a belief in the transformation of society, of self-reliance, on the importance of spirituality, of the wonder of the human experience and natural world. ‘Him the past instructs, him the future invites’ wrote Emerson in 1837 – “mankind must go backwards to achieve inner unity before he can progress further”. This I believe is key to any transformation. Not a top-down political manifesto, not a one size fits all global solution, there could never be one. The answers we will find will be different. It is a modern western myth to believe in a universal panacea. To find the solutions to how to live, we must first return to our roots: our human roots, our ecological roots and our ancestral roots. Solutions less deeply based will be merely rooted in reaction, denial or rejection. We have run away from home and lost the keys along the way. I invite you to come home…

We have been taught that in leaving home we find our independence. Maybe so, and maybe not. We have become a rootless, isolated society of individuals wandering from relationship to relationship, chasing high paying jobs across the globe in a society serviced by professionals. In returning home we recover the true meaning of eikos, the Greek word which forms the root of both economy and ecosphere in English. These strands have been separated for too long in our culture, alienating the economy from the environment by removing both from the domestic sphere. We begin to notice that once we focus on our microcosm (our individual homes) we become more aware of our macrocosm (the Earth as our home). Back and forth the awareness of one naturally infiltrates our awareness, sense of responsibility and deepening commitment and love for the other. People are beginning to recognise this through deep reflection. Gradually more and more are turning away from institutions, with their anonymity and lack of human scale, and returning home. So many of the movements we see emerging now are offshoots of the same desire: a desire to come home to ourselves, our roots, our families and communities, to imbue the basic act of living with meaning and depth. Supporting local producers, growing organic food, energy self-sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, home birth, home education, self-employment, self-building, all these and more are ways of coming home.

With this people are (re)discovering…

Interdependency, family, rootedness, community, simplicity, self-knowledge, involvement, exploring and creating, self-sufficiency, self-empowerment….

This is what I believe deep human fulfilment is based on. This is the well-spring from which we draw our joy and comfort. This should be the yardstick to judge any social change by, rather than material possessions or financial “security”. If we are rooted in ourselves, in our families, in the world and in the ever-changing cycles of nature then we are truly rich.

Homes are status symbols in our present culture. We pay them lip service as being the heart of family life, but this is not the reality for many. All the major events of our life: birth, marriage celebration, illness, death, food production, learning and work used to take place at home. Now they are looked after in institutional settings, saving us the bother of doing them ourselves; we hand ourselves over to the experts in professional surroundings. What was previously a place built with our own hands with local materials, according to local custom, with the help of the family and community is now constructed by contractors. We pay with money for what we used to do ourselves. When we commute for our shopping, our services, our work and schools, communities become shells, places where people sleep and pass through, but not where they live out the fullness of their lives. We no longer have communities, but networks. As Gatto observes in Dumbing us Down “Networks [rather than communities] do great harm by appearing enough like real communities to create expectations that they can manage human social and psychological needs. The reality is they cannot.”

Through institutions we have created taboos, great fears of birth, death, even learning, as these activities become hidden away, no longer a part of daily family life. They become great mysteries which we are no longer initiated in and so we hand them over to the experts. Institutions have taken over so many of the roles previously served in our homes. Modernity has given us hospitals, offices, schools, nursing homes and orphanages. They play the same role, but without the depth of human connection that we receive at home.

We cannot change society from the outside, we cannot force others to change. Our institutions and culture are the way they are because of what we believe about the world. We live what we believe. We believe we are vulnerable and need protection and so we have armies to save our bodies, churches to save our souls and insurance companies to save us from fire and theft. We believe we are what we have, so we accumulate more and more money, possessions, diplomas. We believe that we are separate so we have ghettos and classes and the chosen few in all areas of our lives. We believe that there is not enough, and so we will fight tooth and claw for what we deserve. We believe that education can be made compulsory. None of this will or can change until we, the people who create and support this system with our energy, change. There is no other way: anything else is superficial tinkering. When we give our energy (be it time, money, creativity, thought or in any other form) we give our support to its existence. We currently expend vast amounts of energy racing about serving and fighting the needs of others: commuting to jobs, children to schools, endlessly travelling, exhaustedly chasing our own tails in the rat race. To change anything seems impossible, just getting through the days is hard enough. We are at the beginning of an energy crisis in more ways than one.

Now, what if we were to conserve this energy and focus it on what really matters to us? What would this be? For most it would be their homes, families, friends, communities and local environments. If each of us were to look after our own patch, not out of fear as we currently do, but out of love, honour and gratitude. Not for us to worry about the rest of the world: not save the children, but our children; not condemn the hoodies but engage with the teens in our village; not refer to the problem of the elderly but our parents. We need to start not with economics nor policies, but real people on a human scale, working “as if people mattered”. As John Taylor Gatto says: “Networks of urban reformers will convene to consider the problems of homeless vagrants as real people, not abstractions. Ron, Dave or Marty – a community will call its [homeless] by their names. It makes a difference.” Then real progress might happen. This progress would deeply rooted in caring and compassion for real people, by real people. With the political and financial pressure and “the ills of bigness” removed, real reform for institutions might be possible. Less energy will be needed because we are not racing around all the time, we will be locally based and responsible for ourselves rather than the responsibility of the state. Earning less and spending less, our lives will not be dictated to such an extent by the vagaries of the global economy. Then we will have enough time to breathe, and to see perhaps a little more clearly where our futures lie and how to move forward. When we withdraw our energy, take back our power then we are free to choose how to use it creatively. By living Gandhi’s motto, “be the change you want to see in the world”, we can make our contribution and pave the way for others to follow. More recently Gregg Braden wrote that each individual who lives change, however small, “becomes a living bridge – both the pioneer and midwife - for every other person with the courage to choose the same path. Each time someone makes the same choice, it’s a little easier because another person did it first.” By living an example we shine a light for those who might fear breaking out of their old ways of living, but if we have no other effect than doing no harm to ourselves and those we are close to we have done well. The biggest step we can take is the smallest one that we think impossible.

Coming home might feel traumatic or mundane. Whichever it shows us the best and worst of ourselves and others. Coming home means no more running, nowhere to hide. It is a letting down of pretence and illusion. Not every community or home of origin is a haven or nurturing place. But then we are free to make communities of intention which will nurture and support us. Families, whether consciously formed composites or blood relations show us in miniature the struggles of human interaction and diversity. Home might seem a utopian concept, but it is the crucible of human interaction, a literal and metaphorical shelter from the storm, amongst people who are, for better or worse, our people. Families are a common bond between all cultures and faiths, the basic currency that opens out to embrace the world as we are, rather than manipulating us to drop our differences for the pretence of homogeneity which a nation state requires. If we do not start from the bottom up, from our beginnings, to build a strong foundation for a brighter eternal now, where then shall we start?