[pjonesdotca]

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

[Simon_says]

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.

[zo1]

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.