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Fifty and more years ago, when I was a kid, that was true, for the most part. But times have changed, and wages have not kept up with the changing times, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. Housing costs are now so high that if you earn not much more than the minimum wage (and there are lots of people in that category, not just students and young people), the meagerest housing can easily cost as much as 50% of your take-home pay, way more than financial advisors think is a healthy fraction of one's income should go for housing.
What's been 'forced' on people is the expectation that one must live at a
level beyond the means of a single salary--pretty much regardless of how
high that single salary is. There IS a real problem at the lowest end of
the socio-economic spectrum, but there is also the problem that children
are produced by people who don't have the economic (and sometimes other)
means to raise them.