How can one possibly ever get out of poverty if s/he can't even make it to an interview?
(a) Two working parents or a single parent family may result in children "being raised by wolves" to some extent. These are good parents/people but child rearing is a time intensive business.
(b) Lack of jobs for young people. In my neighborhood, a lot of lawn mowing jobs are done by services instead of the neighborhood kid. The "entry level" jobs are often taken by older people who can't afford to retire.
(c) Single child families where parents spoil their children resulting in a sort of learned helplessness. I can't think of anyone of my friends children that mows their parents lawn of shovels the driveway. The dad or mows the lawn and snow blows the driveway. My brothers kids are the exception.
(d) Lack of exposure to real world failure or responsibilities. How many parents are going to let their kids walk to school never mind use a chainsaw or go hunting by themselves?
Now I imagine explaining to my friends or wife that I hired a 13 year old to paint our house. With 0/0 stars on google, angies list, etc. It's hard for young people to "break in" to something as mundane as yard work and painting.
Nowadays, far fewer people get newspapers, and the newspaper deliver jobs are looking for someone with a car. And I assume they pay for them online.
In the vision of life that is projected for students, the trades do not find themselves anywhere in that vision. It should come as no surprise that we have a shortage right now, it should only surprise us that it's not worse. Immigrant labor has long hidden the fact that American's are raising their kids to avoid the trades, and we will all pay the price for it.
Your parent comment is also right that this lack of personal responsibility is cultivated or exacerbated by poverty. Personal responsibility is as much a skill as it is a trait. Therefore, if one has neither work experience nor a role model for responsibility, one tends not to have good work ethics.
IMO, the solution is thus both to praise personal work ethics and to break the trap through social programs at the same time.
My concern is that the "something else" might be counter-effective but well-intentioned policies intended to help.
The question is how much the rest of us are involuntarily having to provide for them, and more relevantly, whether or not society is even really being improved if the result is an increasing number of people so unable / unwilling to contribute to society that they can't even be bothered to show up for an interview.
It is very easy to spend other people's money supporting people perceived as downtrodden. It just might not be the solution proponents think it is.
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the outcome".
I see no moral hazard in coercing people
and that's the problem. Coercion is inherently immoral as it denies agency, which is the very essence of humanity. Agency / self-control is the fundamental difference between being a human being, and being a piece of property.
There's also the argument that the money you own isn't truly yours. It's the product of a large amount of investment on behalf of your parents (which varies for everybody) and the government in terms of education (of you and everyone else to create an economy where you're able to perform your current job) and infrastructure, with the end result of you being able to perform your job. So its taxation is not theft because you do owe that money back to the rest of society. I think preventing hunger/homelessness is in general a good way to spend that money
Living in groups--and people are very much social creatures--means there are rules you follow that you didn't necessarily decide on, or ultimately you get kicked out of the group and probably don't continue your genetic line.
Left unqualified, that's kind of a silly claim to make--it sounds good to some but doesn't really get us anywhere.