A 17 year old single mother in Sweden, Canada, Norway, etc. are going to have a better quality of life provided by the state than a single mother in the USA....yet the USA has HIGER, not lower rates of teen pregnancy. The issue in th USA is generational....no willingness to break the cycle. ...half-assed health care and half-assed education.

Believe what you want, but I'm the one that has been there, seen that. I have 30 plus years as an auditor & undercover investigator for gov't assisted programs.

...Better yet spend an afternoon in a welfare office or low income housing office & listen to them talk. They actually do encourage each other to have more babies so they will get more monies.

...But the money is gone now and it's time to pay the piper.

We don't have the same mindset as some of them. When you are in a household where school has absolutely no priority & no one to encourage you to get educated you do what you can to survive. You do just like your uneducated mother does, you have babies. Having babies is a way to survive. Unless you have been there it is extremely hard to believe.

Hard to believe? Everyone knows the welfare system is a catastrophic mess encouraging teen-age girls to reproduce. As a child I saw what was coming. The educated were slowing down to approx. 2 kids per family whilst welfare recipients were on the bonus plan losing count, a matter of simple mathematics. Family structures disintegrate with baby mama/who's daddy dramas.

The availability of welfare plays an important role in influencing a woman's decision to have a child out of wedlock.

Lessons Learned
The AGI study also provides valuable insights into the reasons pregnancy and birth among teenagers are so much less common in other developed countries.
Childbearing regarded as adult behavior. There is a strong consensus in the European study countries as well as Canada that childbearing belongs in adulthood, generally considered to be when young people have completed their education, have become employed and independent from their parents and are living in stable relationships. The study concludes that in the United States, this attitude is much less strong and much more variable across groups and areas of the country.
Clear messages about sexual behavior. While adults in the other countries strongly encourage teens to wait until they have established themselves before having children, they are generally more accepting than American adults of teens having sex. In France and Sweden in particular, teen sexual expression is seen as normal and positive, but there is also widespread expectation that sexual intercourse will take place within committed relationships. (In fact, relationships among U.S. teens tend to be more sporadic and of shorter duration.) Equally strong is the expectation that young people who are having sex will take actions to protect themselves and their partners from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. In keeping with this view, state or public schools in England and Wales, France and Sweden and in most of Canada teach sexuality education and provide comprehensive information about prevention. In addition, the media is used more frequently in government-sponsored campaigns for promoting responsible sexual behavior ("Promoting Contraceptive Use and Choice: France's Approach to Teen Pregnancy and Abortion," TGR, June 2000).
For adults in the United States, on the other hand, the fact that young people are having sex is more often considered to be, per se, the "problem." Because teens are often regarded and portrayed as being incapable of using contraception effectively, having sex is often equated with becoming pregnant and a teen parent; the slogan of one state's current teen pregnancy campaign is "You play, you pay." Moreover, the United States is the only country with formal policies directing state and federal funds toward educational programs that have as their sole purpose the promotion of abstinence. Over one-third (35%) of all local U.S. school districts that have policies on sexuality education require that abstinence be taught as the only appropriate option for unmarried people and that contraception either be presented as ineffective in preventing pregnancy or not be covered at all. Among school districts in the South—where birthrates are significantly higher than the national average—that proportion is 55%.
Access to family planning services. In countries that are more accepting of teenage sexual relationships, teenagers also have easier access to reproductive health services. In Canada, France, Great Britain and Sweden, contraceptive services are integrated into other types of primary care and are available free or at low cost for all teenagers. Generally, teens know where to obtain information and services and receive confidential and nonjudgmental care, the study reports.
In the United States, where attitudes about teenage sexual relationships are more conflicted, teens have a harder time obtaining contraceptive services. Many do not have health insurance or cannot get birth control as part of their basic health care. A high proportion turn to family planning clinics, where the cost of contraception is less and where, under current federal law, confidentiality is guaranteed. (There have been numerous attempts over many years to reverse this policy.) And even the guarantee of confidentiality may be a double-edged sword. It protects teens (research has shown that confidentiality is essential to many teens' willingness to come in for services), but because it is not necessarily the norm in more "mainstream," private-sector care, it may also reinforce the notion that by seeking services, teens are doing something "wrong."
Youth Development. The study found that the other study countries are all committed, although to varying degrees, to the idea of the "welfare state," and several provide considerable assistance to young people across-the-board to ease the transition from adolescence to adulthood. France, Sweden and to some extent Great Britain and Canada seek to help all teens with vocational training and education and help in finding work and unemployment benefits. These supports, say researchers, increase teenagers' ability to plan for the future—and their motivation to delay pregnancy and childbearing.
The U.S. approach, on the other hand, emphasizes individual responsibility for one's own welfare. Education, training and employment are generally up to teens themselves, with the help of their families. In keeping with this tradition, government assistance for teens in the United States is targeted primarily to those who have already dropped out of school or otherwise "slipped through the cracks." These programs may be critical to the well-being and outlook for the future of small numbers of highly vulnerable teens, but they are unlikely to play much of a role, if any, in the reproductive behavior and decisions of U.S. teens generally.

I wish I was more knowledgeable about other countries success with their assistance programs, but I am not.

However, in my post I was referring to kids that grew up in the welfare system, your Lessons Learned references children in general, big difference. Again, it’s the mindset of welfare career recipients.

AA how silly of you to resort to personally attacking me. But this is a typical example of why things don’t get done. There is always one or two in the group that when their opinion is not agreed upon they resort to referring to others as ignorant. Oh well, such is life.

We all understand that with financial wealth comes opportunities - opportunities which are not available to those who do not have financial independence. Even basic differences like the child not being able to be involved with organized sports have a negative impact because through such activities a child learns about team work and setting personal goal and striving to achieve them. It becomes a cycle with no route out.

here in ontario, welfare works out to be $15, for a single mom, add union style benefits

add union style benefits

yes they all get great housing.

school and vocational training is free,

So these winnere are doing real good..I must say they have a good racket going for theirselves..

IMO the US welfare system encourages dependency on gov’t handouts & encourages illegitimacy.