Your options when your child turns 3

When my son turned 3, I was moved into the Job Centre's intensive working group. The expectation was clear: find work, increase your hours, meet your commitments. What nobody told me was that there were options — real ones — that the system was not going to volunteer.

Self-employment was one of them. It was never suggested to me. I found out about it by accident, through another single mum in a similar position. For me, it turned out to be the only realistic path — the one that let me work around school hours, around illness, around the unpredictability that comes with being the only adult in a household with a small child.

What the system tells you

The default message from work coaches is: get a job, any job, as many hours as you can manage. The 16-hour threshold for Working Tax Credit has been replaced by the Minimum Income Floor under Universal Credit — a notional figure that assumes you are earning at least the equivalent of the National Living Wage for your expected hours, whether you are or not.

For self-employed claimants, this can mean your UC payment is calculated as though you are earning more than you actually are. It is a blunt instrument, and it hits people who are trying to build something sustainable particularly hard.

What nobody tells you

There is a 12-month start-up period during which the Minimum Income Floor does not apply. If you are newly self-employed, you have a year in which your actual earnings — not a notional figure — are used to calculate your award. That is a significant window, and most people do not know it exists.

There is also flexibility in how you report your earnings. Self-employment income is reported monthly, and the way you structure your work — when you invoice, when you receive payment — can affect how your award is calculated in any given assessment period. This is not advice to game the system. It is a note that the system is more complicated than it appears, and that understanding it matters.

What I wish someone had said to me

You are allowed to ask your work coach about self-employment as an option. You are allowed to ask what support is available. You are allowed to say that the jobs being suggested are not compatible with your childcare situation, and to ask what else is possible.

The system is not designed to make this easy. But the options exist. And knowing they exist is the first step to being able to use them.

If you are approaching your child's third birthday and feeling the pressure of what comes next, you are not alone. This site exists because too many of us have been through this without the information we needed. That needs to change.