The notion of maintenance refers to the act and result of maintaining or maintaining . This verb (maintain), for its part, has several meanings: in this case we are interested in focusing on the action of providing an individual with the necessary means for his subsistence .
Maintenance, therefore, consists of financially supporting someone or something . Whoever is in charge of maintenance provides the resources so that the subject or entity is able to survive.
A father, for example, must take care of the support of his children . This means that the parent has the obligation to ensure that his descendants are fed adequately, receive an education that provides them with tools for the future, live in an environment of love and protection, etc.
The characteristics and scope of maintenance depend on each legislation . The laws establish how each parent has to resolve this issue and guarantee support .
After a separation and subsequent divorce, parents must go through a very delicate stage in which to organize the support of their minor children. First of all, we must point out that the age limit to receive it is not the same in all countries, although it generally does not exceed eighteen years .
In an ideal family, where despite the breakup of the couple, parents do not put their own relationship problems before the health and happiness of their children, resolving issues related to support is not that difficult, even though it entails a series of procedures of varying complexity. However, conflict situations are more common, in which children always lose out.
Money has always been a cause of problems throughout history, and unfortunately it is also the same in this context. There are many cases of parents who try to evade their responsibility to financially support their children after a divorce because they do not consider the conditions of support to be fair.
Take the case of the maintenance of a non-governmental organization dedicated to caring for the environment. It is an association formed by activists who carry out cleaning days of public spaces and awareness campaigns to minimize pollution. To cover expenses, members of the NGO ask neighbors for donations and organize raffles with prizes provided by various companies . In addition, the entity receives a subsidy from the government. In this way, maintenance is possible through the collaboration of the people and the state contribution. This money is used entirely to cover expenses, since the members of the group do not get paid and the NGO does not seek profits.
Many times we confuse the meaning of the word maintenance with that of maintenance , especially when it is used with reference to a company or organization . However, their definitions are different. While the maintenance of a company is linked to the supply, storage and handling of spare parts, pieces and merchandise for later use, maintenance is a series of tasks and measures that seek to prevent or correct problems in the operation of machinery, among others. odds.
When we talk about the care of a person we do not say maintenance , but maintenance . We make this distinction intuitively, although we do not know how to define each term in depth, simply because in everyday speech they are never exchanged in this context. However, if we refer to their respective etymologies we notice that they share two of their lexical components, although with certain differences: both begin with manu ("hand"); They continue with tenere , a verb that for maintenance translates as "guard, defend " while for maintenance, as "dominate, retain"; Maintenance, furthermore, ends with the suffix -mento , which indicates "means or instrument."