Reply #23: Single parents can become single for many reasons... [View All]

[haele]

Not just "casual sex". The incarceration rate and the mortality rate of poor men is incredibly high. A poor man who's incarcerated can't pay child support or support his family if he's married. A dead man who didn't have insurance can't pay child support or support his family if he was married.

Many single parents - not just women, but men also, are single because the person they thought they had married for life just up and left one day. They made an unlucky choice in spouse.

And unlike many "tough love" proponents, over the years I've had single mothers and fathers living with me while they were trying to get back on their feet. It was a bit of a hardship at the time - there was always a period where they couldn't make their rent obligation and I often "ate it" for a few months, but it helped keep a roof over a kid's head and a parent to catch their breath enough to get a decent paying job. And I'd always get paid back by the end.

Tell me this - how much credit debt do you have? How much does it take for you to live? Should something happen to you and you not be able to work for a month or two, could you make it back up?

Five years ago, I could be unemployed or have a medical emergency and bounce back up with little impact on my family. Two years ago, when I had an injury at work and couldn't work for three months, we still haven't recovered financially and any income problem will put us on the street.
Look, we're considered well into the middle class, making on average $40K a year, with one paid off vehicle, living in a low (for this area) rent apartment, living a no-frills lifestyle - I'm just paying off the credit we had to use a year ago to keep from ending up on the street. It's a vicious cycle - and the cost of living keeps going up.
There are very few jobs that pay close to what I'm making now; if I had to start over at even $10/$11 an hour, we would be out on the street.
Utilities, gas, food, and medical costs are destroying the middle class.

It's amazing how quickly you can fall into poverty nowadays once something happens. And blanket condemnations of those who have fallen, by accident or by their own doing, make no progress in solving the core problem - that the economic structure of the United States is shifting more of the costs on to those who can least afford it.

An educated, securely employed man or woman will be less likely to have a child out of wedlock, turn to crime, live off of welfare. They are more likely to have healthy, productive families and do quality work for their employers.

I hear you blaming the victim, while providing no solutions or insight to the actual problem facing the society that created the victim.

A sick and starving child with no future is a sick and starving child with no future, no matter what their parent did to get into that situation. There's your problem. So, do you just let the kid die or live in squalor, to grow up and continue the cycle, or do you look to see what can be changed so the cycle is broken?

I wish you good luck in your life choices - it seems that you'll probably need a lot of it, with that sort of knee-jerk reactive attitude.

Haele