I haven't posted here in ages, but this thread is interesting because my parents have been in that situation. Due to an undiscovered disease and its symptoms, my father was unemployed for a few years when I was little and during that time, my parents had my youngest siblings. There was a bit of criticism even in our church. And yes, my parents received benefits from the government.
However, they did their best to put that money to good use. They taught us to be happy about small things, they educated us extremely well (we all could read before we entered school and we all went to Grammar school and did our A-levels) and they taught us to always work hard. My dad wasn't lazy during the unemployment and neither was my mother. She gave private lessons to pupils for many years to add a bit of money and my dad tried to establish his own business. We learned to work hard, worked while studying at university or doing our training for a job and so far, not one of my siblings has been on umemployment money. My family needed some financial support for a while, but due to the way they raised us, I think we have given all of that back to the country by now, by paying taxes, doing voluntary work (my father did that for a while and helped teenagers whho were in trouble) and helping to educate others. Three of us are working now, one sister and I have a university degree, another sister has a degree as a speech therapist and is working. My youngest sister is studying and working to earn her own money, as well as doing voluntary work for the Red Cross.
The problem in this country is not just families on state benefits, it's families on state benefits who are not motivated to learn and to change their situation, it is parents who have one child after another and let them grow up in front of the TV, parents whose kids can't even go to a cheap sports club because the parents rather use the money for cigarettes and and the mothers for getting their nails done or another tattoo. The kids never learn about the value of education and hard work because they lack the role models and often enough, they are the ones having unprotected sex early and bringing more children into the world who will grow up the same way.
My parents did deprive themselves to a certin extent to bring us up well and my parents invested a lot of time and energy into bringing us up, taking us to the library regularly, hardly letting us watch TV, making us learn an instrument, saving money to let us take part in choir activities and exchange programmes in school and letting us do small jobs when we were teenagers that helped us to earn some of our own money. They also taught us not to buy things on credit and not to get into debt.
Many of my friends with children have said that if you wait until you can afford them, you will never have them. There is a biological limit for women and if they all waited until they were certain they could afford having children, the wouldn't have any at all. Already, in this country, people don't have many children. I don't mind if a family is on state benefits for a while, as long as they work hard to bring up their kids well and to get them educated, and try to change their situation. My dad found work when I was 7 and when the company was broke and he couldn't find a job again due to his illness, my mother had started working and she is now earing the money. Some of the kids I tutor are on scholarship programmes, one of them is from a large family where money is often tight. Others have families who earn very little, often immigrants with good qualifications from their home countries that don't count here, but they scrape together the money to pay for extra tutoring for their children and these children often do very well in school, go to university and get good jobs and give so much back to the country. If all these families didn't have children, this country would be in an even worse state.
Bottom line: I think being on state benefits for a while and having children in itself is not the bad thing. The bad thing is not making an effort, not working hard to give the children a good home, not being role models for the children, but raising them to not care about learning things, not caring about school and an education and turning them into adults who have dropped out of school as well and have no motivation to change anything about their situation.
