It boils down to responsibility and whoever they look up to as mentors.
However, the real truth is, in the US babies = $$$.
In a lot of states, a person that is unemployed and has no kids can only receive food stamps.
By the time they’re up to the 4th kid they have real Louis Vuitton, manicures, IPhones, even nice cars…usually still live in section 8 but doesn’t seem to be the priority.
US gov assistance in a nutshell.
Must be something you got from a radio/cable show.
Wrong.
See it first hand at work.
Perhaps this isn't the case, in your case. Perhaps you have additional information on all those that receive assistance in your community. But since the anecdotal door has been flung wide open in this thread let me add my observation.
I worked for the administrator of our town's section 8 housing section at one point. I was hired (on a temp basis) to help the kids that lived there learn to use the internet in a computer lab setting on site and to use it for school related projects. This was an advantage they heretofore did not enjoy, comparatively to kids with such in their homes, to date.
One family was a single mother with three sons. She was widowed the previous year when her husband was killed in an accident at a cotton coop mill. He was temp contract and there was no life insurance/benefits other than government assistance. The boys were 12, 10 and 8. She worked as a house cleaner for less than minimum wage and was not literate enough qualify for most other better paying jobs nor did she have the time and energy to improve that circumstance.
She was regularly visited by a social worker that gave her a lot of assistance (rides to the grocery store, help in using food stamps or whatever sources were available, etc.). The social worker did own a Lexus (I'm not sure if she was married or, if so, what her husband did for a living - doesn't matter, anyhow).
I happened to be grocery shopping for the family one day (our little town had one supermarket) and bumped into a friend from my high school days (he was a plumber at that time). We were in line behind the social worker, the mother and her sons who had two very full carts. My friend sidled up to me and expressed his disgust in hushed words. I convinced him to tell me more after we finished checking out.
Once outside (our grocery load was smaller than the mother's) he motioned to the Lexus and fed me the oft erroneous viewpoint that this was a prime example of welfare fraud (the family and the social worker were black, again, not that that really matters). 'Look at them! Two generations of welfare leeches filling their Lexus with groceries you and I pay for!' I explained to him that the owner of the Lexus was not a relative but their social worker and the details I knew of their circumstances. 'Well, how the hell do you know that?' I explained that I knew who they were and how then I asked him how he arrived at his own conclusions. He hasn't talked to me for over twenty years now.
Two of her sons graduated college and all three have good jobs. The mother eventually remarried, took night school, got a better job but died from cancer five years ago (I found out recently from another friend). She never owned a Lexus.
