"Because the welfare system in the US demanded that dads ***had*** to be out of the house" Was that a requirement or just a a rule that only familys with no dad could get support? It sounds like a reasonable requirement that dads support their family.

Nobody told my father to leave his family. He started up a business with my uncle and a few others in the basement of that house he built out of scrap lumber scavenged off of construction jobs. He made a machine to bend metal using railroad tracks and hydraulic bottle jacks. His big break came making housings for exhaust fans in army barracks because of the quantity. He used to go to a bank in Georgetown and borrow $200 at a time for operating capital. The interest was around 2 or 3 percent. Poverty back then was twice what it is now. He never went to school except maybe elementary school but he could read. When ever he needed to learn about something he would find a book at the library. He learned to speak German for some reason by himself.
He never even considered welfare. He never whined about anything. Never complained abut what other people had that he did not have. He just worked. The only thing I ever heard him complain about were Jews. He was raised in an era where Henry Ford had a whole hate Jews movement going on.
As kids we didn't have a lot of stuff to play with. I remember my Mom went to the dump and brought back a bunch of disgarded bikes. We took parts from some to fix others. Other that that we had rocks and sticks and old hound dogs to play with but we had great outdoor adventures being surrounded on three sides with farms and woods and creeks to go buck swimming in but we lived right on the edge of Alexandria that had some of the worst slums.
We had a family of Pollock Immigrants on a farm one side. Thier house was once used as a hospital for a civil war battle fought on the ridge to the west. A family of Hillbillies from Harrisonburg had on a farm on the other side. I used to go to visit and they would give me a Quaker Oats carton full of tiny banty chicken eggs. A German family moved in up the road and they built a shack that had a toilet consisting of a terracotta drain tile sticking up out of the floor in the middle of the room that led to a drainfield. Later they built a house and turned the shack into a ckicken coop. Now it is all condos, warehouses and shopping centers and those slums are history.
Our Dad supported us and provided a home starting with nothing in a very bad era. There are even more opportunities now than there were then for able bodied people who work for it. Back then only a few rich folks could send their kids to college.
Almost all the people who lived through the depression are gone now but people these days have no idea what real poverty and insecurity is like.