kev, I’ve only been able to look at the first few minutes of the first family in your video and it seems that they were/are chronically living on the edge and stressed out about it due to lack of education. Even though the parents seem to be millenials or MAYBE part of the tail end of Gen X, they were (IIRC) only HS graduates who married young.
I don’t know the part of the country in which the first family lived or the parts of the country in which both families were chronicled by Frontline. It hasn’t been the “norm” in large metropolitan areas and US coastal cities for at least 30 years for people to marry right out of HS and start having kids (at the very least, marry). But this practice is still common in rural and semi-rural flyover America (where it is typically cheaper to live).
At first blush, the problems the first family had, given that they appeared NOT in any way to be living a lavish lifestlyle, were caused from marrying and having kids before becoming established in a career (or at least with substantial savings behind them).
The order in which this couple lived their lives could have been followed successfully as late as the mid-eighties (yes, even in SD), but no more. Those days are long gone.
