Thread by @RoadsideMum

Can we talk about the mental health impact and the social stigmatisation that results from callous mockery and rank dishonesty, such as the piece below.

Poor parents (more of whom are single mothers than any other arrangement) experience real, lasting, and serious impacts.

https://twitter.com/RoadsideMum/status/1428691561076957186

Let's set the benchmarks. £15 per person per week (£60 for a family of 4) is pretty low. Good job, if you get your family fed healthily on this.

£10 per person per week (£40 family of 4), healthily, is an extreme challenge. If you need to honestly learn how, see @BootstrapCook.

This article claims to "almost" feed a family of 4 on £2.50 per person per week.

I am still confirming the nutrition (@MiniMealtimes app is helpful) but I am going to say this diet barely makes the calorie need of an infant school child if they ate the entire lot solo.

I am also going to say a secondary school child would be writhing from the pain of starvation, as the gap is so huge.

Vitamins, minerals, fibre, all aren't looking good. That's before you consider the fat and salt content.

Toddlers cannot eat the meats here. Salt kills.

From bitter experience, I know how it feels to be scorned and derided by an out of control press, feeding a paranoid society... I was a teenage single mum in the late 90s... Y'know... At the height of the teenage single mum moral panic.

Such was the national obsession with single parents, I was abused by strangers on busses, criticised by members of my own family, cut loose by friends, rejected by employers.

I used to go to 8 different shops every Weds- inc. Iceland- for their prices on bread. Yes really.

Articles like this, endlessly making impossible standards, setting impossible demands, pushing the expectations harder and harder, weaponised the British people against their own daughters, sisters, and mothers. Barely a day passed without another red top outrage.

While we aren't having a flat out moral panic now. I would expect a teenage mum to be able to get a 15 minute bus ride over and done with in almost all cases, without incident, we are feeding a similar beast, and that's the war on the poor.

A war of attrition is going on. Benefit rates uncoupled from any pretence of meeting living costs, debt made near-mandatory, every form of support including NHS provision and housing quality driven down, school meals undermined, foodbanks relied upon. A constant onslaught.

As crap as it was to be a young single mum when I was, it's as bad now if you are in poverty. The hate, mockery and cruelty is neverending.

I grew up, I am, I am told, a bit of a fucking battleaxe now. It's fully a learned defence.

2 decades of hurt to get this hard.

The impact of popular ridicule, gaslighting, dismissal, and (by far and away the worst) a constant equation of malnutrition/ starvation with yours or your children's needs, heaps misery upon misfortune to the extent it's a certainty there will women on psych wards now over it.

It's not a laughable article, if you are taking it to heart.

And you will be taking it to heart, if you are finding that you are on the foodbank AGAIN, even though you are trying so hard, because resources.

So it's not nothing. It's robbing families of their mums (and dads).

I just costed up the refugee challenge, you know the one where people live on what a Syrian refugee gets in a camp... Even that was over £60 for 4 for a week.

£10 family shop bullshit is cancerous. It needs to die from the inside out, like the parents who are tainted by it do.