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Comment by PantaloonFlames | Hacker News Reader

> I am not trying to blame the parents in all the cases either, a lot of the time there are single parents just trying to get by and make ends meet and don't know what more they can do.

If there is a household with one parent, 5+ children, and not enough beds for them, the problem has occurred long before. One cannot blame the parent for "that day", but certainly the adult bears some responsibility for creating such a household. Having 5 kids without planning for beds, or income, or stability, is a decision SOMEONE made. It doesn't just "happen" like weather. There is human responsibility here.

In my view, "I Promise" is making up for those mistakes. Its a good thing, but let's be clear about why it's valuable.

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Why should we be clear about that? You know it is just turtles all the way down right? The goal here is to break a _cycle_ which this school is hopefully going to do by focusing constructively on what works to help these kids be better parents themselves one day. Beyond deepening our understanding of helping these kids I'd actually argue scrutinizing the parents has only negative utility and should be avoided at all costs (unless vilifying poor/uneducated parents feels useful to you as an end unto itself).

Life is full of much more complicated scenarios. A friend of mine recently passed away from cancer. Her 2 kids will now go live with someone else, who already have kids of their own, and are now taking on a very significant financial burden that they could not have planned for. How would you view this family that suddenly has more kids than they can afford?

Some things actually do just "happen", like weather.

The problem with pinning responsibility on that parent is, the original decision that led to this situation may predate the parent. Maybe they were raised by a single mom with many siblings and not enough resources too. Maybe they live somewhere deeply conservative where contraception isn't taught about. To act like the parent is wholly responsible is unrealistic and naive.

They are responsible though. Unless you want to take away decision making power from a person.

This realization does not have to incur any sort of "well you deserve this outcome and sucks to be you" sort of logic, however. It is the parent's fault for creating the situation, but society can choose to bail one out for poor decision making.

I haven't seen anyone say anything about not being responsible. I have seen people say something about not being wholly responsible.

Are you trying to bury your head in the sand?

My situation is probably drastically determined by some stranger 200 years ago who decided hopping in a pile of potatoes on barge headed for the US was a good idea. Thank you distant relative, that was a genius idea!

The point isn't to act like people aren't responsible for their own actions, of course they are. The point is to be realistic about how much of our situations are attributable to our personal decision making. People don't exist in small vacuums where they control everything.

And that stranger 200 years ago made a decision somehow. Most african-american people in the context of this thread are descendants of enslaved individuals brought to this continent against their will.

>a decision SOMEONE made

Ohio (where this school is) lacks quality sex education and access to abortion. Ohio law doesn't require teaching at all about contraception. Ohio law allows parents to block their kids from having an abortion. Ohio law doesn't require teaching students about consent.

So there is a huge swath of people in Ohio schools who are totally uneducated about sex. Certainly SOME of the blame should go to the decision of the Ohio legislature to withhold information about birth control from students.

> Its a good thing, but let's be clear about why it's valuable.

It's valuable because the American Right has been making a sustained and successful attack on the integrity, stability, and viability of poor families for at least three decades (and other powerful forces, whose modern incarnation is also part of the American Right, has been doing so to families of color, who are disproportionately poor, since America was colonized.)

It is true that addressing that cause is useful in thinking about more complete, comprehensive long-term solutions.

Isn't it possible that "income, or stability" experienced a sudden drastic change at some point after birthing the 5th kid? It is conceivable that the parent did not have full control over that change.

They made the choice to have the first, second, third, and fourth kid before the fifth one. Each child is a huge lifelong expense: everyone knows this fact. Condoms, birth control, abortions: these are all available tools to give people control over human reproduction.

The availability of abortions can be severely limited depending on which state you live in.

Just gonna drop this here, re: the availability of abortion services: https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/state-facts-about-abor...

But birth control, condoms, and abortions are NOT given as a tool to most young people in America. Looking at Ohio specifically (where Jordan's school is),

Schools don't have to tell kids that birth control exists, let alone show them how to properly use a condom (which is a non-trivial skill: condoms are 98% effective when put on properly but 85% effective in real life)

Schools don't have to tell kids abortion exists. Even if kids did know, their parents can block them from getting an abortion. Also, getting an abortion requires traveling to a clinic, which often requires a car.

> everyone knows this fac

And you can be completely fine and have plenty of resources for all 5 kids until your wife gets cancer and you drop 1 million dollars of medical expenses into that money pit and then she dies anyway. Now you have 5 kids, single income, and way less than no money.

Strangers on the internet say it’s your fault.

Enjoy

Well I guess it’s your fault for having kids in a country with scant social safety nets. So you’re kinda right

That sounds like an edge case to me. What proportion of single parent families are formed by death of a married parent vs. other options?

The other option still takes away 50% of your net worth and 1 salary so it’s not like that’s ideal either.

This is such a privileged view point... And I don't even like that word. But really, the idea that someone shouldn't have kids unless they have their entire life planned? Unless they have a stable (jobs | spouses | families | friends | environment | culture) that can be relied on? Not everyone has that opportunity. And it sounds very much like victim blaming to then tell them that they should be denied having kids because their life isn't perfectly stable. And let's be very, brutally honest: It's not like stable households don't also occasionally produce broken children. Incidence rate is dropped, but decidedly not zero.

I mean, hell, I have an extremely stable job at an extremely stable company. And I still fear losing my job, and the effect that would have on my family!

Ok let's be clear about that. Now what? There _is_ a household with one parent and 5+ children. Unless you have a time machine you can't undo that. What do you do about that household? Telling the parents that they made bad decisions actually doesn't do much to help the children. How do you help the children?

Right, and the best way to fix that problem is by taking away easy access to contraceptives and eliminating sexual education from schools. And while we're at it let's overturn Roe vs. Wade.

If we just pray a little harder, people will stop having kids! Teenagers will stop having sex! Condoms will stop breaking!

> If there is a household with one parent, 5+ children, and not enough beds for them, the problem has occurred long before.

Yes, perhaps the husband/wife that was the single/primary earner in the family happened to die and thus the family found itself in hard times.

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