Comment by Simon_says | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Simon_says | Hacker News Reader

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Of course everyone is going to focus on that sentence when I also mentioned many other poor choices this hypothetical woman is making.

Tragedies will occasionally come out of left field, so I believe you can find real hard luck cases where everything was sunshine and rainbows when the couple decides to have a kid. But based on the people I've known personally the people with messed up lives are a subset of the people make consistently poor decisions. I bet that 9 single parents who are struggling financially out of 10 have some identifiable poor choice you could find if they were totally open and honest about their history. Does she have a 6 month emergency fund, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, a large enough home, home insurance, a stable marriage, stable employment, flex in the budget? I think if you restrict to looking at parents who fit those criteria prior to the decision to have kids, the sliver who become this down on their luck is staggeringly tiny. And the parents who don't fit these can't afford kids.

> Does she have a 6 month emergency fund, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, a large enough home, home insurance, a stable marriage, stable employment, flex in the budget?

Are you proposing that only the top 10% most economically secure people should have children? Because if you check those critera you'll find it's a surprisingly small minority of people that meet all of them.

(Something like half of all Americans have no emergency fund at all. Is anyone who lives in an "at-will" state truly in stable employment, either? And so on.)

Not in those terms. But I believe that list is achievable by the overwhelming majority of Americans if they were to make better decisions. The ones who can't afford to save a 6 month e-fund when they're childless are living precariously as it is and sure can't afford the disruption to their budget a kid would entail.

I feel like I'm talking into the wind here. I guess I hold unpopular opinions around here. Is personal responsibility so unpopular? Or do people not believe that decisions we make affect our lives?

Ultimately it comes down to: knowing nothing else about someone's life other than that they are poor and have children, what is your default assumption? Blame the person or blame the system they live in? This is even more acute when we're talking about people in statistical terms - the individual stories and details vanish and you're left with pure statistical artefacts.

The presumption that it's people's own fault that they are poor often comes with a presumption that they're lying or evasive when it comes to explaining why they're in that situation when really they don't want to have to justify their existence all the time.

Doubly so in areas of reproductive choice. Not only is abortion extremely controversial in America, but access to contraception is hardly guaranteed and not necessarily free.

And again, I think you're vastly overestimating how many people could realistically achieve your standards just through their own decisions. Are your standards achievable at all on minimum wage?

(edit: think about this on the larger scale - an America where everyone has 6 months savings and no personal non-mortgage debt would have a financial industry with hundreds of billions of dollars in very different places ...)

6 month emergency fund? Have you seen how many people in the US are living paycheque to paycheque? I know many people who make six figures who would struggle to meet that requirement.

Having grown up as a military brat I know about poor and I know that this kind of self-serving look-down-your-nose "advice" is just rationalization for living well in a society that enables sociopathy

If you can't afford a 6 month e-fund, you can't afford kids. A 6 month e-fund is not even that hard; you have to re-arrange your spending over your lifetime and not even spend less in total over your life.

I'm sorry you had to go through that as a kid. My beliefs on this subject are rooted in an empathy and caring for kids who could have had better childhoods if their parents had their shit together a little more.

Different people take different lessons out of being poor. My parents were poor too. They struggled (and sacrificed) on their own to care for me an my sibling.

Having kids when not entirely 100% secure in your future is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the parents make sure things go okay for the family. But that's hardly the case most of the time, and people over-extend way more than they can conceivably manage/sacrifice-to-handle. That's where family planning should help (by sharing knowledge), not just giving out free birth-control.

People need to be damn sure that they can provide for the kids, or that they will give 110% in order to make it so. But, welfare is sadly pretty-much at a point where it's just paying people en-masse to have children rather than helping people that got into bad situations. That's not moving society forward, or helping the needy; that's creating/breeding generation upon generation of a dependent under-class that will just vote to reinforce said government handouts.

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