This Was Never About Broken Homes: Fear, Control, and the Myth of the Broken Family

Author’s Note:This piece is written from lived experience, historical context, and a deep desire for healing — not division.

At a surface level, the baby mama and baby daddy dynamic is framed as nothing more than two people who had children and weren’t married. That’s the story people lean on when they don’t want to look deeper.

But when you bring history into the conversation, that narrative collapses.

Because this was never about us being broken.

This Is Historical, Not Accidental

In early America, enslaved people and later immigrants were building lives from nothing. Despite unimaginable conditions, they formed families, learned trades, built communities, and created paths forward. Black families, in particular, demonstrated resilience in systems designed to break them.

When those in power realized that oppression alone was not enough to destroy that resilience, the strategy shifted.

Chains were replaced with systems.

After slavery, brief opportunities during Reconstruction allowed Black Americans to vote, own land, and build institutions. That period was quickly dismantled through Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and economic exclusion. Families were destabilized not by choice, but by policy.

Historically documented patterns include forced family separation during slavery, where marriages were not legally recognized and children could be sold, redlining that blocked families of color from home ownership and generational wealth, mass incarceration that disproportionately removed men of color from households, and military drafts and economic conscription that sent men to war while resources at home were stripped away.

Broken homes were not the result of moral failure. They were the result of structural interference.

Young Parenthood Without Support Was Conditioning, Not Carelessness

For generations, people were pushed into adulthood before they were neurologically, emotionally, or financially developed. Teen and early adulthood parenthood became common not because people didn’t care, but because survival left little room for self-discovery.

Education was inaccessible or underfunded. Healthcare and reproductive autonomy were restricted. Economic survival demanded labor, not healing.

Neurologically, the brain does not fully mature until the mid-to-late twenties. I’m 28 years old, and I’m only now fully understanding the depth of my trauma. So imagine generations raising children while carrying unresolved trauma from slavery, war, poverty, and systemic violence.

Trauma doesn’t disappear. It passes down.

Money, Resources, and Knowledge Became the New Weapons

Eventually, the most effective form of control wasn’t physical violence. It was restriction.

If you control access to money, food, housing, education, healthcare, and knowledge, people are forced to depend on the very systems that harm them.

Programs meant to help:food assistance, childcare subsidies, disability services, housing support are often intentionally difficult to navigate. Paperwork is overwhelming. Information is inconsistent. Delays are common. Knowledge is gatekept.

Not because people are incapable,but because access is controlled.

Systemic Failure Isn’t Theoretical: The Reality of IHSS

Navigating IHSS made it clear that the harm isn’t just personal

...it’s structural.

Common issues within IHSS and similar systems include long processing delays that leave families without income for months, inconsistent communication and changing caseworkers, complex documentation requirements that overwhelm already stretched parents, assumptions of incompetence or fraud instead of support, and minimal accommodations for families caring for children with cognitive or comprehension challenges.

When you are raising a child with special needs, stability is not optional. Yet parents are often required to repeatedly prove their struggle just to receive basic support.

That is not inefficiency. That is exhaustion by design.

Fear and the Bare Minimum as Tools of Control

They are playing on our fear.

Fear keeps people compliant. Fear keeps people grateful for the bare minimum. And when people are given just enough to survive , but never enough to thrive they remain stuck in dependency.

This is not accidental.

By distributing the bare minimum, systems keep people hanging on, hoping, waiting, and too tired to organize or demand more. Survival becomes the focus instead of healing, innovation, or growth.

Leadership without humanity fractures society. When power is driven by ego and profit rather than people, fear replaces trust and control replaces care.

History shows us that systems built on power do not require everyone to succeed

only enough people dependent to maintain authority.

And the truth is this: we the people built this country. The laborers. The caregivers. The parents. The educators. The communities.

“We the people” was never meant to mean a select few.

Anticipated Rebuttals — And Why They Fall Short

“This is about personal responsibility, not systems.”Responsibility matters. Accountability matters. But responsibility without access is not empowerment ..it’s abandonment. You cannot hold people to standards while removing the tools required to meet them.

“Government assistance is a choice.”Choice implies alternatives. When wages do not match the cost of living and childcare costs more than rent, assistance is not preference ... it is necessity.

“The system is broken, not intentional.”Broken systems that consistently harm the same communities are no longer accidental. Underfunding and over-complication are policy decisions. Predictable harm is not coincidence.

“This is about class, not race.”Poverty affects many communities, but not equally and not historically the same. Race and class in America are intertwined. Ignoring that context erases truth...it doesn’t create unity.

“Strong families used to exist. What changed?”Strong families didn’t disappear. The support systems did. One income once sustained households. Housing was affordable. Wages matched labor. Families didn’t fail: the conditions supporting them were dismantled.

“Fear is just media hype.”Fear has always been used to prevent unity. When people are afraid, they isolate instead of organizing. This pattern is historical, not exaggerated.

“If things were really that bad, people would revolt.”Exhaustion is often mistaken for apathy. Many people are surviving working multiple jobs, raising children, caring for disabled family members. Survival leaves little energy for resistance.

“Talking like this divides people.”Truth does not divide ..it clarifies. Division already exists. Naming it is how healing begins.

Conclusion: It’s Time for Fair Opportunity

It’s time for fair opportunities.It’s time for fair chances.It’s time for fair access.

Fair access to knowledge.Fair access to education.Fair access to resources, tools, and job opportunities.Fair access to community support.

People should not have to fight this hard just to survive. A fair system does not require people to prove their worth over and over....it recognizes it.

We should be able to trust the people in office at every level : local, state, and federal. These are supposed to be the people we see every day, the people who represent us, the people responsible for protecting our communities. When that trust is broken, especially at the local level, it doesn’t just damage policy.

It has damaged humanity.

A society that cannot care for its families, its children, its disabled, and its most vulnerable is not failing because people aren’t trying hard enough. It is failing because the system is not designed to serve everyone equally.

Fairness does not mean handouts.It means access.It means transparency.It means accountability.It means dignity.

This is not radical.This is human.

ITS TIME FOR CHANGE....NOW

-SHELBYB