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Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

I was sitting here trying to figure out how to say basically the same thing. Growing up my dad had a good job but we never were able to afford to live in $NEAREST_METRO_AREA, so we always lived a commute away -- sometimes a long commute away.

Charity idea: provide moving & job placement help to get homeless or nearly homeless families into lower cost of living areas.

I always have mixed feelings about stories like this. Like the woman from the first video: homeless, just got a garage for her and her 18-month-old. Pregnant again. Kids do not make your financial situation better or life less stressful.

The kids didn't ask for poverty and it's not their fault -- all true. But what do we do, enforce reproduction strategy at gunpoint?

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Being a parent I have tons of empathy for how hard life is for single parents.

That said, I really lost a lot of sympathy for the woman in the garage though, kids are hugely expensive (about a quarter million dollars to raise them to 18) and I just can't understand how she thought having a second kid would improve her situation. Obviously it could have been an accident or similar, but damn, maybe now isn't the right time for a second kid!

I'm probably just a first world asshole with no sense of what it must be like in her position.

The striking thing to me is that it seems it's rarely one major event that plunges someone into a bad situation like these (consider that none of these videos had one "this is what happened" sound bite). It seems like it's the snowball effect of bad decision after bad decision.

Living in a garage while trying to look after an infant is likely to be a big drain on cognitive resources. It's easy for you and me to sit here and say what a bad idea this is - obviously we all enjoy enough economic freedom to sit here chit-chatting about economic policy for a few minutes in the middle of the daytime. When you don't have existential anxieties crowding in on you, such things seem so simple and obvious.

It would be a very different calculus if any of us were in that woman's situation. Maybe she made a bad decision. Maybe someone told her she'd be much more likely to get public assistance with two children than one, and she's ashamed to admit it. Maybe she was coerced into sex in exchange for money or because her personal safety was threatened. I very much doubt that she just decided it was a Friday, and a good time to get her sexy on.

Surely those children have fathers?

> But what do we do, enforce reproduction strategy at gunpoint?

No need for gunpoint. Making access to reproductive options legal, safe, widely available, and well-publicized is probably good enough.

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