I have three daughters. These are the ways the two-child benefit limit affects us every single day | Anonymous

As politicians go back and forth on scrapping the policy, four of us are barely getting by on the money provided for three

I’m a single parent from Bradford with three daughters, aged 15, 12 and four. I’m affected by the two-child limit on benefits and get no help for my youngest child. When you live in a situation for so long, when there’s not enough money, you get used to it. It’s almost become our daily routine. But as politicians debate removing the cap, repeatedly putting off change for a bit longer, I wish they could understand that every day it remains in place is another day that my family struggles.

My youngest daughter started school last year, and ever since then I’ve been looking for jobs. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to find an employer willing to give me a job between the hours of 9am and 3pm. When I go for interviews, I’ve had employers say to me, “If we were to allow all mums to work these hours, it would affect regular workers.” The school thinks my youngest daughter is autistic; she’s a very hyperactive child. That means I need to be around for her a lot, and I don’t feel able to ask my family to help with pickups. This makes finding work harder still. Even if I did find work, I’d still be affected by the two-child limit, because it hits those in work as well as those on benefits. So working mums on lower wages will still suffer unless it goes.

The writer takes part in the Benefit Changes and Larger Families project, a Nuffield Foundation-funded research collaboration between the universities of York, Oxford and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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