This is a story of a family's financial decisions and hardships- there isn't room in a few hundred words to also include all of the compassion and love that the

This is a story of a family's financial decisions and hardships- there isn't room in a few hundred words to also include all of the compassion and love that they hold for each other. It wasn't foreseeable that demand for writers would be halved within the next two years and he would be completely unemployable. He left a strong job market with a very successful resume and returned to a to a job market with very little demand. Had he not left his job two years earlier, he may have ended up in this situation anyway. His family didn't abandon him. They made by, looked for jobs, kept the house as long as they could. They moved into an apartment and continued doing what they could to keep going. But once you can no longer pay for housing for your children nothing else matters. If you cannot solve that problem, the state will for you if you are lucky, or they will end up on the streets. It would have been impossible for him and his wife to have lived together at this point. There is simply no family or friend who is able to take in 2 adults and 8 children at once. They had very few options at this point, and housing is a much easier problem to solve for smaller groups of people. His wife didn't immediately abandon him for someone else. She stayed by his side for six years of no income, and then took responsibility for the younger children while he took responsibility for the older children. She moved around the world to provide for their younger children as best she could. As far as his children are concerned, it simply isn't age-appropriate to expect high school students to financially provide for their parents. Even if they could have, it isn't what the author would have wanted. He made it very clear in the article that at this point in time, the goal was for his older children to graduate from the same high school with good grades and go to a good college. At best, his older children could have worked minimum wage jobs part time. This would not have fixed the father's long term unemployment, and would place a high risk on his children's grades (and future educational opportunities), along with a huge amount of financial stress and responsibility on his kids. This article is a fairly accurate portrayal of how an upper-middle class family in the United States would handle poverty. The first priority is health (fortunately none of his children had major health issues), and after that maintaining education for the kids. Housing decisions are often made as a result of what is needed for education. The last thing you want is for the kids to drop out of school, leading them to work minimum wage jobs into adulthood. At that point short-term poverty can become generational. The fact that he and his wife provided good education paths for all 8 of their children throughout this story is an incredible accomplishment for him and his wife. While their marriage may not have ended in death, I would not consider it a failure.