So much about wealth is reliant on luck. For example, if you are lucky enough to be born into a family that values education and spends time with you encouraging to maximise your potential, live in a postcode where the schools are good, where you parents can afford to enrol you in and take you to extra-curricular activities that broaden your horizons. You really do have a head start in life, and not enough credence is given to that.
Some children grow up in households where parents aren't as available or encouraging, sometimes because they're shit parents, sometimes because they're simply ground down by a life spent working all hours for minimum wage and yet still can't afford a holiday or even to send their child on the school trip. After years of that with no promise of any improvement, it grinds you down.
In an ideal world, we'd have measures in place to try to redress some of these inequalities, so that every child has the same opportunities regardless of the background they are born into. Unfortunately, many school trips have become more expensive than those available to individuals online (when part of their original purpose was to make these sorts of trips accessible to children who wouldn't ordinarily be able to afford it). Free extra-curricular actives have been cut to the bone and simply don't exist in many places. Libraries have been closed across the country.
People may be poor because of their own choices in many cases, but how are they going to encourage the next generation to do any better if they aren't taught how? Someone needs to break the cycle. It's not fair to lock people in cages without a key and then criticise them for not breaking out of it.
I don't subscribe to the "it's not true poverty it's relative poverty" argument. No one is dying in the street of famine, but that doesn't mean it's an acceptable state of affairs in such a rich nation.
When my DC were small and I left their abusive father, I did so as a full-time employee in a good job with no debt. I was fortunate that I had saved enough to cover childcare for a while as DC were planned. I also bought a house with a smaller than average mortgage, so my housing costs were lower than normal too. Despite those advantages, thanks to no maintenance from my X (self-employed) and the cost of two children in full-time child-care so that I could keep my job, my financial reserves quickly disappeared and I had to sometimes put food or fuel on credit card. I built up debts. I regularly went without food and sat in the cold so that I could afford to feed the DC. I sometimes had to scrounge lifts because I couldn't afford fuel in my car. I could only dream of meeting a friend for coffee, let alone affording a night out, and I actually had to embroider flowers on my shoes to cover the holes because I could not afford to replace them.
Do I count myself lucky compared to say a mother in Sudan? Of course, I do, but quite frankly at the time I was too bloody cold and hungry to spare them that much thought. And unlike Sudan, my country has the wealth and infrastructure to combat these problems.
However, instead of subsidising childcare, or providing tax breaks to people with young children, or making it unacceptable for absent parents to avoid paying maintenance for their children, this country has currently chosen to blame it on poor people making poor choices. And maybe I did. I made a poor choice in my children's father. I'm still bemused by the notion that making my children pay for it will somehow make it better for the next generation.
As it turns out, I'm now doing fine and that's in the past, but it could have been a very different story. I won't judge people for being poor. I've been there and know how much it depends on luck.