USA Today has this story today: Foreclosures’ financial strains take toll on kids.

A snippet:

Melody Morrow, a sales rep for a semiconductor company, never thought foreclosure would strike her middle-class family. But as her employer struggled financially, Morrow, a divorced mother of three, says she had to absorb repeated pay cuts. Eventually, she couldn’t pay her homeowners insurance. Then she put her home up for sale. She hasn’t found a buyer, and now it’s entering foreclosure.

“I’m trying so hard right now not to cry,” says Morrow, 43. “My daughters are going through a lot. They’re feeling the stress of everything. They ask questions out of frustration, like, ‘Mom, why did you get us into this situation?’ I just say, ‘God, what lesson do you want me to learn from this?’

“The girls are scared of what will happen. They don’t want to leave their school and go to an apartment. There’s a lot of guilt. I have days I cry and sob and say, ‘Why is this happening?’ and they see that.”

There are more than 250 comments on the board.

Some of the board members are quite critical of homeowners who supposedly bought more house than they can afford.

Hello!? When jobs disappear or pay cuts go into effect … the house you could have afforded may no longer be so affordable.

If you are among the few who have to deal with a personal financial crisis in an otherwise economically stable area, you can put your home up on the market, sell it and downsize to more affordable housing. Or if you had enough equity built up in the home from higher property values, you could refinance to another mortgage .

Problem solved.

But because of the housing and credit market that southeast Michigan and many other parts of the country are now dealing with, the solutions to a mortgage meltdown aren’t that easy.

Now, in regards to the 15-year-old in another part of the story who said she now has to babysit her younger siblings … well, at age 15, I also was babysitting my younger siblings. And that situation happened with no danger of foreclosure in our home.

Years later, my younger sisters paid back for the inconvenience I had as a teen-ager by babysitting my toddler daughter.