Changes introduced on Monday have cut child benefit for more than a million households in which one earner is paid more than £60,000 per year. I do not live in one such household. My partner and I have cunningly arranged things so that we each earn £49,999.99, just under the cut off point. Ha! And once we've outsourced the childcare, there's plenty left over all those luxury items that single-earner households, on their paltry £60k, can no longer afford.
Only kidding. The benefit changes were introduced too fast for us to set up our special "screw you, traditional families" earning arrangement. Indeed, right now we're both working full-time yet have a joint income below that of the single-earner households who will be losing their piece of the benefit pie. And with nursery and after-school club fees coming in every month, it's hard to pity households on a higher income in which one person can devote themselves fully to the care we're paying others to provide.
I don't mean to sound bitter. On the contrary, I'm not; I haven't just lost my child benefit in a capricious, badly thought-out cut that seems to have been planned on the back of a postage stamp and then doggedly stuck to despite the obvious inconsistencies. I'd be bitter, for instance, if I were a higher-earning single parent who found him or herself penalised in exactly the same way as a couple. As it is, I think it's possible to chop up what various couples could earn between them and find endless ways in which to feel aggrieved. And also possible to argue that no one should receive child benefit at all. After all, it's not really in keeping with how we'd generally seek to distribute wealth in austerity Britain.
All the same, Tuesday's Telegraph ran the front-page headline "Full-time mothers are being penalised". I have to admit, for a brief moment this did provoke some old-style mummy wars hackles-rising in me, a mother who, since she doesn't even have the decency to work part-time, probably can't even call herself a "part-time mother" (am I therefore a "working mother"? Or a "skiver mother"?).
Apparently, the benefit cut targets mothers who are doing the right thing (unlike me). Tory MP Tim Loughton speaks of "an army of parents who work hard at home to bring up their children who are losing out on child benefit and other allowances". Meanwhile, writing for the Daily Mail, Kathy Gyngell refers to the "married mother at home" penalty. And yet it's not all that clear-cut. Stay-at-home mothers whose partners have earnings beneath the threshold won't lose their child benefit. Still, I guess if you're a stay-at-home mother from a lower-income family, you somehow morph from angel of the hearth into scrounger (it's the lack of piano lessons that does it).
There appear to be many on the right who would like to turn the child benefit reform into a socially conservative call to arms (certainly useful for ushering in transferable tax breaks for married couples, of little benefit where both partners work). Yet, whereas to them whether or not Mummy earns appears to be a moral issue overlaid with superficial financial constraints, for those of us actually raising children it's not so simple. It would be easy to say that all stay-at-home mothers have made a noble sacrifice, albeit one which will be ever more difficult to make without incentives, whereas working mothers have taken the more selfish option, albeit one which they feel "forced into" by pro-childcare policies.
Yet usually there's a mixture of things going on. Sometimes the cost of childcare means women can't afford to go back to work; sometimes the cost of living means they can't afford not to. Sometimes a return to work doesn't seem financially viable; sometimes the job insecurity of one or both partners makes it necessary nonetheless. Some women have more reason to fear financial dependency and economic isolation than others. Some women form a better relationship with their children when they also have time away from the home. And sometimes we just have to accept that women, men and children form thriving family units in different ways. Unfortunately we haven't yet found the political and economic worldview that supports this.
We don't value the work stay-at-home mothers do by pretending it is of no economic worth to the individual family unit. Of course it is. That's why £60,000 plus a stay-at-home parent goes a lot further than £60,000 without one. All the same, if the sacrifice a stay-at-home mother has to make involves exclusion from meaningful financial independence, this seems to me a sacrifice too great. It is our tacit acceptance of this that suggests we don't appreciate stay-at-home mothers, and not any changes to child benefit, which has never granted mothers the freedom available to some other earners.
The changes to child benefit are capricious, but no more so than the ways in which we reward work beyond the domestic sphere. Despite a narrative of ever-growing equality, the gap between rich and poor is growing. The frustration of the middle-class stay-at-home mother is a mere drop in the ocean compared to broader imbalances, but perhaps it's symbolic of a need to challenge our whole concept of value.