Golden Globes 2020: Full list of winners and nominees

The winners of this year’s Golden Globe Awards have been announced at a ceremony in Los Angeles, California.

Here is the full list of winners and nominees:

Best motion picture – drama

  • WINNER: 1917
  • The Irishman
  • Joker
  • Marriage Story
  • The Two Popes

Best actress in a motion picture – drama

  • Cynthia Erivo – Harriet
  • Scarlett Johansson – Marriage Story
  • Saoirse Ronan – Little Women
  • Charlize Theron – Bombshell
  • WINNER: Renée Zellweger – Judy

Best actor in a motion picture – drama

  • Christian Bale – Ford v Ferrari
  • Antonio Banderas – Pain and Glory
  • Adam Driver – Marriage Story
  • WINNER: Joaquin Phoenix – Joker
  • Jonathan Pryce – The Two Popes

Best motion picture – musical or comedy

  • Dolemite Is My Name
  • Jojo Rabbit
  • Knives Out
  • WINNER: Once Upon a Time In Hollywood
  • Rocketman

Best actress in a motion picture – musical or comedy

  • Ana De Armas – Knives Out
  • WINNER: Awkwafina – The Farewell
  • Cate Blanchett – Where’d You Go, Bernadette
  • Beanie Feldstein – Booksmart
  • Emma Thompson – Late Night

Best actor in a motion picture – musical or comedy

  • Daniel Craig – Knives Out
  • Roman Griffin Davis – Jojo Rabbit
  • Leonardo DiCaprio – Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood
  • WINNER: Taron Egerton – Rocketman
  • Eddie Murphy – Dolemite is My Name

Best motion picture – animated

  • Frozen 2
  • How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
  • The Lion King
  • WINNER: Missing Link
  • Toy Story 4

Best motion picture – foreign language

  • The Farewell
  • Les Miserables
  • Pain and Glory
  • WINNER: Parasite
  • Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Best actress in a supporting role in any motion picture

  • Kathy Bates – Richard Jewell
  • Annette Bening – The Report
  • WINNER: Laura Dern – Marriage Story
  • Jennifer Lopez – Hustlers
  • Margot Robbie – Bombshell


Best actor in a supporting role in any motion picture

  • Tom Hanks – A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
  • Anthony Hopkins – The Two Popes
  • Al Pacino – The Irishman
  • Joe Pesci – The Irishman
  • WINNER: Brad Pitt – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Best director in a motion picture

  • Martin Scorsese – The Irishman
  • Quentin Tarantino – Once Upon a Time In Hollywood
  • Bong Joon Ho – Parasite
  • WINNER: Sam Mendes – 1917
  • Todd Phillips – Joker

Best screenplay – motion picture

  • Noah Baumbach – Marriage Story
  • Bong Joon Ho, Han Jin Won – Parasite
  • Anthony McCarten – The Two Popes
  • WINNER: Quentin Tarantino – Once Upon a Time In Hollywood
  • Steven Zaillian – The Irishman

Best original score

  • Motherless Brooklyn – Daniel Pemberton
  • Little Women – Alexandre Desplat
  • WINNER: Joker – Hildur Gudnadottir
  • 1917 – Thomas Newman
  • Marriage Story – Randy Newman

Best original song – motion picture

  • Beautiful Ghosts – Cats
  • WINNER: I’m Gonna Love Me Again – Rocketman
  • Into the Unknown – Frozen 2
  • Spirit – The Lion King
  • Stand Up – Harriet

Best television series – drama

  • Big Little Lies
  • The Crown
  • Killing Eve
  • The Morning Show
  • WINNER: Succession

Best actress in a drama series

  • Jennifer Aniston – The Morning Show
  • WINNER: Olivia Colman – The Crown
  • Jodie Comer – Killing Eve
  • Nicole Kidman – Big Little Lies
  • Reese Witherspoon – The Morning Show

Best actor in a drama series

  • WINNER: Brian Cox – Succession
  • Kit Harington – Game of Thrones
  • Rami Malek – Mr Robot
  • Tobias Menzies – The Crown
  • Billy Porter – Pose

Best television series – musical or comedy

  • Barry
  • WINNER: Fleabag
  • The Kominsky Method
  • The Marvelous Mrs Maisel
  • The Politician

Best actress in a television series – musical or comedy

  • Christina Applegate – Dead to Me
  • Rachel Brosnahan – The Marvelous Mrs Maisel
  • Kirsten Dunst – On Becoming a God in Central Florida
  • Natasha Lyonne – Russian Doll
  • WINNER: Phoebe Waller-Bridge – Fleabag

Best actor in a television series – musical or comedy

  • Michael Douglas – The Kominsky Method
  • Bill Hader – Barry
  • Ben Platt – The Politician
  • Paul Rudd – Living With Yourself
  • WINNER: Ramy Youssef – Ramy

Best television limited series or motion picture made for television

  • Catch-22
  • WINNER: Chernobyl
  • Fosse/Verdon
  • The Loudest Voice
  • Unbelievable

Best actress in a limited series or TV movie

  • WINNER: Michelle Williams – Fosse/Verdon
  • Helen Mirren – Catherine the Great
  • Merritt Wever – Unbelievable
  • Kaitlyn Dever – Unbelievable
  • Joey King – The Act

Best actor in a limited series or a motion picture made for television

  • Chris Abbott – Catch-22
  • Sacha Baron Cohen – The Spy
  • WINNER: Russell Crowe – The Loudest Voice
  • Jared Harris – Chernobyl
  • Sam Rockwell – Fosse/Verdon

Best actress in a supporting role in a series, limited series or a motion picture made for television

  • Meryl Streep – Big Little Lies
  • Helena Bonham Carter – The Crown
  • Emily Watson – Chernobyl
  • WINNER: Patricia Arquette – The Act
  • Toni Collette – Unbelievable

Best actor in a supporting role in a series, limited series or motion picture made for television

  • lan Arkin – The Kominsky Method
  • Kieran Culkin – Succession
  • Andrew Scott – Fleabag
  • WINNER: Stellan Skarsgård – Chernobyl
  • Henry Winkler – Barry

CONGRATULATIONS!!!




Ozzy Osbourne: I’m Not On My Deathbed!!! Out And About With Sharon

tmz.com




Friends fans fuming as show is dumped from Netflix on New year’s Day in the US

 

 

Fans of Friends in the United States are having a meltdown after the show is no longer available to stream on Netflix .

The 1990s sitcom, which had been available on Netflix since Jan. 1, 2015, will disappear into the streaming ether until May, when Friends will be available domestically exclusively on WarnerMedia’s new HBO Max service.

According to reports, this will be a five-year deal estimated to be worth $425 million.

WarnerMedia is believed to have previously paid a combined $1.5 billion for The Big Bang Theory and Two And A Half Men.

Netflix, is widely credited with introducing the sitcom to a new generation, making sure the obsession continues almost 30 years later.

Friends was so popular – second only to The Office – that Netflix reportedly paid another $100 million in 2018 to keep the rights for another year.




Fauda series 3 debut watched by a million Israelis within 48 hours

 

 

The first episode of the third season of the hit Israeli drama “Fauda” was viewed by Israelis about 1 million times in the 48 hours after it first aired.

The Israeli drama, in Hebrew and Arabic, received a 12.6 percent share of viewers during its debut on Thursday night, according to a trade website, citing the YES satellite company.

The third season reportedly will focus its attention on Gaza.

The show was broadcast Thursday night on the YES Action Channel and then was available on YES VOD and on the YES YouTube channel.

Its creators are Avi Issacharoff, the Arab affairs reporter for the English-language Times of Israel news website, and actor Lior Raz, who stars in the show. Both men served in the IDF unit depicted in the series.

Last week the series was ranked eighth on The New York Times list of the 30 best international television shows of the decade.

 




Gay Parents As Good As Straight Ones

 

 

When the Supreme Court took up the issue of gay marriage , Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that experts debate whether same-sex parents are bad for children.

“There’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences are of raising a child in a…single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not,” Scalia declared.

Benjamin Siegel says Scalia’s contention is—not to get too technical—baloney.

Siegel, a School of Medicine professor of pediatrics, coauthored a report, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics the week before the court case, arguing that three decades of research concur that kids of gay parents are doing just fine.

“Many studies have demonstrated that children’s well-being is affected much more by their relationships with their parents, their parents’ sense of competence and security, and the presence of social and economic support for the family than by the gender or the sexual orientation of their parents,” Siegel writes with coauthor Ellen Perrin, a Tufts University professor of pediatrics and director of developmental and behavioral pediatrics.

In an interview with BU Today, Siegel acknowledges the limits of all this research: none of the studies has been a randomized, controlled trial—the Holy Grail of scientific investigation—and all studies of gay parenting are necessarily small, since there aren’t many gay parents. The report cites estimates that gay couples and single parents are raising almost two million American children.

Those caveats notwithstanding, “the preponderance of evidence” says Scalia’s fears are groundless, Siegel says. Does he expect the report to influence either the high court or state legislatures debating gay marriage and adoption? “That’s my hope,” he says, “and I must say, it’s not a political hope. It’s a scientific hope.…That it will put an end to questioning that people who are homosexual cannot raise children or be foster or adoptive parents.”

Siegel says in the Washington Post, one of several major media that picked up his report, that “we’re never going to get the perfect science, but what you have right now is good-enough science. The data we have right now are good enough to know what’s good for kids.”

The best study so far, Siegel tells BU Today, is the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, begun in 1986. The study has followed 154 lesbian mothers and recently checked in on 78 adolescent children, comparing the mothers’ and kids’ self-reported status against national standardized samples.

The lesbian mothers’ reports of their children “indicated that they had high levels of social, school/academic, and total competence and fewer social problems, rule-breaking, and aggressive and externalizing behavior compared with their age-matched counterparts,” Siegel and Perrin write. If you might expect parents to say that, consider their kids’ testimony: “The self-reported quality of life of the adolescents in this sample was similar to that reported by a comparable sample of adolescents with heterosexual parents.”

Siegel and Perrin’s report also cites three studies done in the United States and Europe—two involving lesbian mothers and the third one involving men and women whose adult children reported they’d had a parent involved in a same-sex relationship. Those studies similarly found no difference in outcomes for the children as compared with children of heterosexual parents.

A dissenting Australian study, Siegel and Perrin write, interviewed teachers of 58 children who’d been raised variously by married heterosexuals, unmarried heterosexuals living together, and gay parents living together. Even that study found mixed results (the children of gay parents did more poorly in language and math, but better in social studies and attitudes toward learning, for example). Moreover, most children in the study wound up with gay parents because their straight birth parents had divorced, “potentially adding to the children’s stress,” Siegel and Perrin write. And the Australian researchers suggested the gay couples’ children “were severely stigmatized in their schools and communities,” adding stress.

Siegel cites another antigay parenting study by a University of Texas researcher that has also been criticized for its methodology. The researcher compared children in happy heterosexual marriages with children whose parents divorced after a gay affair. The researcher has admitted that his scientific work and Catholic faith are inseparable; Catholic teaching denounces homosexual acts as sinful.

A university investigation cleared the researcher of scientific misconduct while sidestepping the question of flawed methods, leaving it “to debates that are currently under way in the academy.”

 

bu.edo




50 shades of real BDSM

Im 28 years old,still pretty young but not too young to have not experinced some fun regarding sexual acts and play. I am miss reeves and i will be here to discuss many topics from erotic to how to cook a perfect sunday lunch, we shall make friends you and I, your opinion will be very important to me to make the blogs more fun and fab.

Dominant sex/BDSM

The real 50 shades of grey, what do men really think???

How do you please your dominant? What is a submissive and dominant relationship about? I will discuss and research many topics for you including best sex and how to improve quality of sex with a partner, but to start off this blog lets find out about the above questions. Good questions……..to start with I will introduce you to what the sub/dom relationship is about.

To be a submissive you have to get off on being empowered, excersised and expolited. Anything you do is for your master/mistress even if pain is the force being enflicted upon you, your pain is the doms pleasure, and the dom has to gain all pleasure before the sub can receive theirs. So if the sub is a good little slave, they can orgasm eventually.Being submissive can be like being a human doormat and like your a little puppet on a sexy string. Dominants always come first. Its a true case of having something happen to you what you may not really enjoy or like but you do it knowing that something better will happen if you play along. Naughty for your nice!!! I liked to be called domina, it sounds hot and is off the tv show spartacus ha! Domina meaning incharge.

Id say being a submisive is a great responsiblity because its really up to that person whats going to happen, if they cant do as ordered and told then they simply may be denied any sex, so its easier to just obey your mistress……like a good boy!!! (or girl lets be real here any sex can be the dominant) Have you ever been denied a orgasm, its horrible, your body is crying out for a massive realise and then the dominant walks away and leaves you tied up so you cant even finish the job yourself. Trust me its easier to be spanked and whipped, which in turn is awesome fun. Many people will have opinions about this type of sex,s&m and bondage its not every readers cup of tea. It may appear silly or scary,but let me tell you guys if you find a partner who is not going to run away kicking and screaming, you will have some real bedroom fun. There are many online shops which offer so many toys and clothing to aid all this kind of sex. Gimp masks for example,odd or not??? Have you any opinions? Personally a mask to me is sexy, its freaky and strange but makes me want to try. Some people obviously would run a mile, what would you do?

Now bondage has hit the shelves big time after the book release of fifty shades, i think a bondage kit for begginers is a great idea before diving into the scary stuff like cages and chains. Ive enjoyed many a times being strung up and absolutley whipped to the point my bare naked body is red raw!!!!! why did i let some man laugh at me and grab my hair, because I knew if this 10 mins of torture made him happy, soon I woud come. I would be called a good sub and awarded praise in the style of sexual favors. And sometimes the whip of the leather or the feel of a gag being forced into your mouth is enough to make you excited in your pants anyway, by the end of it your begging him for the whip because you know what happens after the whip. I have been tied up in a japense style rope situation and restricted where i cant move, hands tied behind back, legs restrained, rope around my breasts and then gagged and blindfolded. Trust me, I was soooo nervous. I couldnt see where he was, he was silent, the anticipation was killing me. I didnt know what was going to happen or when. Name calling is a massive turn on during these kind of games, suddenly i felt his penis pushing into my back and he started choking me and whispered in my ears,

“im going to fuck your pussy from behind, dont squeal dont fucking squirm, infact just shut the fuck up little girl and then youll be set free. Ruin it and see that dildo over there…..” he lifted up the blindfold briefly. Basically if i ruined his time with my vulnerable little pussy he would stick that either down my throat and choke me to the point i wanted to vomit, or stick it into my bottom and watch me cry out with pain before pleasure.

I looked over and saw a very large big dildo, the size of it was worringly massive.

“I SAID CAN YOU FUCKING SEE IT?”

“Hmmmm yes.” I kinda grunted

“yes what?”

“yes master.”

Ive done the dominant role and have several stories, maybe we can discuss what I got upto but It all depends on what the readers want to insist upon, i have light simple antics and extreme naughty fetish style antics which would make you blush. But a good easy way of maybe showing authority is to use a strap on dildo and face sitting is also a good one. Tie the sub up is also a simple form of torture and tell them they cant come until you say so. Then you can literally tease them to the brink of orgasm and watch as they struggle to not come everywhere, the feeling that your doing that to a person, creating that intense feeling makes you a good domina. A personal favourite is to sit on a face and hold their nose but they have to still perform oral and gasp for breath, like a fish out of water, gasping because your whole groin and butt is suffocating their face.

Has any of you lovely readers ever done CBT??? (Cock and ball torture) id be so interested to hear about the tales or should I say tails…….hmmmm. Please dont be shy now…..you only live once right.

When in a fearful situation do you become a leader or a follower?? This could answer whether youd be a good sub or dom. If you get a thrill out of taking action and control, maybe being a dom is for you. If your heart tells you to listen to the the others and follow along maybe your a good submissive. Both roles are equally as satisfying and if in a relationship perhaps you could alternate these roles.

So what do we think our boyfriends who have never experienced s&m may think about our new domina fantasy.Well some couples will have been doing it for years and he will be used to the behaviour, but to a begginer its quite overwhelming and scary, I can talk you through whats happening with me. A new partner and me have just stared the s&m game, hes never done it before, so I in this case am the dom and hes the sub, until or if he wants to swap. Men LOVE the idea of being bossed about its like a woman who knows whats she is doing is a massive turn on, I dont think people want to admit they like to be vulnerable in the bedroom, but trust me, men seem to love it. Unless the male is the dom, i like to call the male dom ‘daddy’ its just hot and sexy, there is something great and pleasing about being daddys little girl who has pigtails and and gets her hair pulled in the act of oral sex…….can daddys girl swallow????

Does he want to be dominated? Chances are he does but wont speak up about feelings, its important to communicate about whats funand new in the bedroom, dont let your sex life mush awayto nothing from fear, fear of what might blow your mind from vanilla sex. Men are so used to be alpha males in all situations, its normal, so to have this seduction occur by a sexy strong powerful female changes dynamics. Dont be shy to express fantasy,this has to be somebody you love or are comfortable with,somebody who you knowwants the same style love making. Although done into extreme sexual content i wouldnt call it love making at all, its rude and horny fuck fest of fun.

Sex doesnt have to be scary even if your new to the bondage world, take it slow, dont rush, find a perfect match who wants to try it too, get a starter kit, you may of heard of a safeword, choose one. Always use it if your body cannot take anymore, but please dont be too rough if this is all new. I will discuss with you soon different interesting things to do in sex, watersports maybe or getting frisky outdoors.

We will talk about sex and in turn go have sex with our partners and I will promise you by the end of all our discussions we shall all have learnt a little if not alot. Ladies , i promise you to initiate sex and remember there is a physical factor and a mental factor to being a dominant.You need to assert yourself and learnwhere your inner confidience comes from, once you do it once you wont feel so doubtful, so put that red lipstick on and impress your partner to the brink of orgasm, then maybe deny him or her of course, and have them beg,beg you to let them come. You have to sound a bit mean a bit aggresive but you dont have to do anything you arent relaxed with. Get your verbal tongue working and watch what it does to the submissive it will drive them wild, anting to please you. Mentally be aware ofw hat your doing and saying,maybe choose some good commands and know what you want to happen that occasion.

Some tips before I go

  1. Dress sexy, it doesnt have to be leather but dress so you feel awesome.Its like supermans cape you will automatically just feel powerful.

  2. Text the submissive throughout the day to start the game off even if they are working. Say you cant wait for them to come and kiss you or nibble you, send eroitc images.

  3. Get into boss mode, have ideas of verbal commands. Think before the sex occurs.

  4. He has to worship every inch of you

  5. Start with tying him/her up and make that person frustrated. Teasing each other is the best foreplay.

  6. NO MASTURBATION it enhances this occasion making both orgasms better

  7. Its only fun if your both happy

Questions welcomed …………………………………………………………

Miss Reeves




Are 36 questions enough to find the love of your life?

Give or take a month either side, I’ve been single for three years. One thousand and ninety five days of doing whatever I damn well please and shaving only when common decency demands it. If my relationship status were a child, it would be wearing big boy pants by now.
It’s not for want of trying. There have been Tinder dates – many, many Tinder dates – some good, some bad, some as interminable as double maths on a Friday afternoon. There have been colleagues. Friends of friends. Holiday romances. The guy I met at a house party. The guy I met at a bar. The guy I met at a bus stop. As it turns out, how you meet is really neither here nor there; they all ghost you in the end.
So when an email dropped into my inbox, inviting me to participate in a “social experiment” that promised true love in return for divulging some highly personal information to a complete stranger before gazing into his eyes for the duration of your average pop song, I thought: What do I have to lose?
The experiment would be based on a study conducted by Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which explored whether intimacy could be established between two people over a period of 90 minutes during which they ask each other a series of increasingly probing questions, then wash it all down with a pint of 100% proof eye contact. The study is some 20 years old but came to prominence in 2015 via an essay written by Mandy Len Catron for The New York Times’ Modern Love column, entitled “To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This”. In the essay, Catron recounts how she and a loose acquaintance spent an evening asking one another those same questions – and subsequently fell in love.
Despite Catron’s endorsement, I’m sceptical. Perhaps it’s that very British fear of discussing anything of any consequence with someone you’ve known inside of five minutes but I find it difficult to believe that enforced (over)sharing can be a substitute for those first tentative weeks of a relationship, where you delicately brush away each other’s layers of self-preservation like archaeologists on a dig. Nor can I silence the inner voice that whispers, What if they pair you with someone awful? At most, I hope to come away from the evening with a hilarious anecdote and my dignity intact.
The day of the experiment rolls around and after checking in (“Just like at the airport!” trills the host, somewhat unromantically) I grab a large glass of wine and hover awkwardly in a corner, awaiting kickoff. A half-hour wait stretches into an hour, by which point the bar is littered with single people staring at their phones while simultaneously scanning the room out of the corners of their eyes.
It’s time to begin. We line up and everyone is given a number – mine is 42 – and instructed to find the table with the corresponding number, where their partner will be waiting. (I should mention here that the only information I provided on signing up was my age, sexual orientation, and what I was looking for romantically – a casual fling, dating, a long-term relationship.) Bracing myself, I stride confidently into the room. The man sitting at my table is – thank you Jesus – really rather handsome. We shake hands, introduce ourselves and get down to business.
There are 36 questions, divided into three sets, each set designed to be more probing than the last. The questions are available online but I resist the temptation to look them up in advance.
Question one: Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest? I hate this question. I want to say my friends but I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed so I find myself embarking on a tortuous (and, frankly, unoriginal) argument that you should never meet your heroes so the wise choice would be to invite someone you detest and before I know it, Katie Hopkins is coming round for Sunday lunch. My partner (let’s call him Mr X) looks confused. This has not started well.
Question three: Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? “Yes, all the time, because I’m deeply socially awkward and find silence over the phone even more excruciating than silence IRL.” Question seven: Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? “Sleep paralysis. Or a sinkhole.” Question 11: Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
In her aforementioned essay, Catron makes this remark: “We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative.” I beg to differ. Mr X answers this question first and, when it reaches my turn, I follow his lead and talk about my upbringing, school, my parents’ divorce, university, travelling and work. I leave out anything to do with previous relationships. For the first time in the evening, I am editing my response, revising and redacting before I speak. This is where Mr X and I discover we have a surprising amount in common: we went to the same university, we both spent a year in France, we have a similar family dynamic. But I can’t help feeling that I haven’t been entirely honest. Then again, Mr X didn’t mention his romantic history either.
We’re into the second set now and it’s getting rocky. A precedent has been set and from this point on my answers veer from astonishingly frank to not-telling-the-whole-story. Question 18: What is your most terrible memory?
By the time we turn the corner into the final 12 questions, I’ve had three glasses of wine and am feeling chuffed with how this whole social experiment is going. For question 30, we have to share when we last cried in front of another person. I answer honestly that it was at the cinema with a close friend, although, again, I can’t help feeling that a truer answer would have been, “In front of a guy I met on Tinder last year; I was a little bit in love with him but all he wanted from me was sex.”
And so we come to the four minutes of eye contact. I’m ashamed to say that Mr X and I agree we don’t want to do it, which technically means we don’t complete the experiment. By this point, though, Mr X has moved his chair to sit beside me and we’ve swapped numbers.
Fall In Love With A Stranger took place at Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen.



Best Jobs For Single Parents

When it comes to being a single mother, the two most important characteristics of a job are flexibility and salary. And while those elements are found on a company by company basis, there are certain industries that lend themselves to being more flexible than others.

The most flexible professions include sales, public relations, health care and real estate. As an added bonus, employees who work in those fields have the potential to make decent salaries. Education is also on the list. Although the hours are set, they’re likely to be the same as their school-age children’s.

Of course not all companies in those professions are ideal for single parents. That’s why single moms must do their research to find out how family friendly their potential employer is. Among the characteristics they should look for (aside from the ability to control their own schedule) are flex time, job sharing and on-site child care.

One place to start is Working Mother magazine’s annual list of 100 best companies for working mothers.

From there, moms shouldn’t be shy during the interview process. There are ways to tactfully learn if their potential employer allows its staff to work from home and adjust their schedule according to their child care needs. Of course it can’t be the first thing asked in a job interview. But it is reasonable during the second or third meeting to say things like: Tell me what it’s like to work here; how do you find working here personally?; tell me about the opportunities to make use of here in terms of flexible environment.

Another way to learn about family friendliness is to ask if there are any affinity groups, says Jennifer Owens, an editor for Working Mother. Those are groups of employees that meet regularly on specific topics. For instance, many companies have working parent’s affinity groups or parents of special needs children.

If you don’t feel comfortable asking the interviewer, ask someone else within the company. Also, check out the company’s Web site to see what it says about values and work culture.

Much of this depends on where a single mother is in her career. For instance, Margy Sweeney’s two daughters were 2 and 5 when she got divorced. Sweeney was age 29 and still wanted to explore different careers. She was a marketing manager at a real estate firm and wasn’t convinced she wanted to do it forever. It became clear when her boss yelled at her for coming into the office at 9:15 a.m. after staying up until 4 a.m. to finish a presentation. It was particularly frustrating because she left the office at 5 p.m. the previous day to pick up her children from school. She continued to work on the presentation after they went to bed so she could meet her deadline.

“A single mother should look at a company and say, ‘Do they appreciate the work I do outside of regular working hours?,’ ” says Sweeney, who, since then, worked as a freelance writer and is now happily settled in her job as a PR professional in Chicago. In other words, find out if they’re results-oriented or if they simply want employees at their desks.

Some jobs, like nursing, require employees to be on-site. But there are lots of shift options so they can work while the kids are at school–or sleeping. The average national salary of a registered nurse is $49,534, according to CareerBuilder.com. Another well paying and flexible job in health care is physical therapy. They set their hours according to patient need, and there are many offices that allow them to work part-time. Their average national salary is $53,508.

Still, single parents need to prioritize their needs. Companies that provide the most flexibility don’t necessarily offer the highest salaries. Think medical transcription. They listen to dictated recordings from doctors and transcribe them into medical reports. The upside is they can work from anywhere; the downside is they often make less than $30,000, according to data from CareerBuilder.com.

It’s a balancing act–something single parents are very familiar with.

Forbes




BREXIT and the single mum

An independent thinktank predicts the Government of  Brexit Britain will slash spending on benefits that affect the poor working class. Single parents and disabled Brits will lose thousands more each year in the event of a Brexit, research has suggested. Brexit is widely expected to trigger at least a short-term economic shock, which could hit Government finances.

And this is likely to result in slashed welfare spending, according to the independent think tank the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Much of this could affect poorer working families. Passing 25% of the cuts onto welfare will leave a single working parent with two children £1,386 worse off a year by 2020, the NIESR said.

Meanwhile, the same cut to the budget would leave a disabled single person with no children surviving on £1,096 less a year. 25% of public spending cuts passed onto welfare, NIESR predicts.

And that’s not the worst-case scenario. If the Government passed ALL of the cuts onto welfare, a single parent with two kids could be £5,542 worse off a year. While Leave campaigners have argued migrants drive down wages and take benefits meant for Brits, NIESR said it had considered the effect of a tighter immigration policy.




My little shadow…. – Being a mum and best friend

So we all have a shadow, generally only when the sun projects one…
But us mums and maybe even more so, loan parent mums, have a shadow following us around pretty mum 24/7 especially if they are a loan child..

We are not only their mum, but technically their best friend, their mum, dad, brother, sister all rolled into one.

They want to understand every little thing we do and why we do it, how we do it and what happens next.

I find I often tell my little dude to go over there, just to be away from me in fear of learning tasks he shouldn’t know how to do as they may be dangerous for such a curious little mind.

I remember when I struggled to grasp the loan parent duties, due to exhaustion, not enough hands, trying to work from home so that I was able to mind my son and the weekly visit to my family home… That’s when you either felt proud that you were doing good or that you looked like you were struggling, all because of the look on your own mums face.. And when leaving, my mum would say to my little dude, ‘be a good boy now and look after moma’.

Well, my little man took that totally to heart, took it as his duty to look after me as much as I do him.
If I let something fall, he rushes in and says, I’ll get it!
If I have a headache, he becomes ‘doctor dude’ and puts his little hand on my forehead…
If I look sad, his little eyes looks at me and gives me a kiss and a cuddle,..
He always wants to help make dinner or carry the shopping bags after filling the trolley!

He loves photos of us together, he loves me and I him!
Walking down the street with his little hand in my hand and him saying, ‘because I love you’!
Makes him the best shadow I could ever wish for 🙂

Claire