When you're thinking clearly that's easy to see. But when you're living a hard life, my observation is that people generally take what solace they can in more b

When you're thinking clearly that's easy to see. But when you're living a hard life, my observation is that people generally take what solace they can in more basic elements of their humanity and don't think much about the future, if they're capable of thinking about it at all. 'Auburn is a pit stop,' according to her mother. That seems a silly belief, but if you take that as the context in which her choices are made you notice they become more reasonable? Your options for dealing with the consequences of those choices are limited by both the lack of preferable alternatives and the need to act with humanity in enforcing them. If you throw the kids into the care system, it's not clear they're going to do any better. As for stopping people making those choices in the first place, I don't think people who view it as not the parent's fault really disagree with you there. But how? Making a good choice with respect to employment and the law and so on, and sticking to it, requires that you be a certain kind of person. You need the ability to draw motivation from distant goals, the abstract knowledge to see the path to the goal in the first place, it requires - to a certain extent - that others around you share those qualities, it requires self-control to deny yourself short-term rewards. And if you don't have those things, you can't make those choices - at least not to start off with. The choices we make are made within the context of our lives, and our beliefs about those lives and where they can be going. What sort of choices would you make if you had their capabilities and their beliefs? You have to make smaller choices, that make you more the kind of person for who those choices would make sense and be practically achievable. And you have to see those smaller choices making you happier, having a positive effect on your life - to try and develop some sort of self-confidence and motivation. That latter part is a very complex problem that impacts areas of life beyond just homelessness. It's no particular surprise that unemployment, teen pregnancy, low educational outcomes and so on tend to group together. They're all influenced, to lesser and greater extents, of to be somewhat pithy for a moment, 'Not having your shit together.' Well get your shit together then. Yeah, okay, how do we create an environment where that's gonna happen? Given that choices determine the sort of person you'll become and that determines your later choices, early intervention seems likely to be a part of it - perhaps through improving education to the poor. Maybe breaking up communities of homeless people and rehousing them into richer communities so they have better chances of falling within catchment areas of good schools - and aren't subject to a culture of generational poverty. I don't know, those are just a couple of things. But, however it's done the basic act of assigning blame seems largely immaterial. The world is what it is, people make the choices they make. What matters is that people are suffering - and what's important is what can be done about it within the bounds of compassion and practicality.