Hey, that might have been me on Scarymommy! I instantly regretted it, because people just went all Debbie Downer on me with "oh, well my parents did LITERALLY NOTHING for me besides give me life". I was just trying to let them know there were other ways to try, and that they should keep looking for new solutions, not lord it over them that my parents were supportive and I tried to make my life decisions wisely (and subsequently got lucky).
I keep typing and deleting things here defending myself, lol, I'm obviously still really on edge about it and it's been like 3 weeks.
The whole "did LITERALLY NOTHING" line is generally codswallop.
There are sometimes cases when severely defective bio-parents who do a breed-and-dump stunt and drop a newborn baby off at a police station or fire hall, and there are cases where kids are snatched out of abusive homes and raised by foster parents, however if those noises are coming out of the mouth of a teenager or adult the speaker is overlooking the fact that *somebody* invested a ton of time, effort, and money in him or her to allow him or her to survive to that point. Otherwise the speaker would have died in infancy. Those individuals (be they grandparents, a string of foster parents, or other relatives) did indeed provide food, clothing, shelter, and access to education. If the education was subsidized in the form of public schooling or if the child made use of the school breakfast and lunch program, the resources for those publicly funded forms of help came from taxpayers. As in, other humans. The whole village helped raise that child.
The "did LITERALLY NOTHING" wail generally comes from people who received a ton of help, but it wasn't the specific kind of help they wanted from the specific source they wanted. If Mom or Dad dies young or walks out, a lot of people carry around hurt and resentment for the fact the parent wasn't there later. So they ignore the contributions made by, say, Granny. They also get so accustomed to other people stepping in to fill the gap that they take it for granted and end up believing that the extras they get in the form of lunches, tuition, grants, and need based scholarships just don't count. They didn't get what they wanted from the person they wanted it from, and so nothing else they receive from that point forward counts.
Early loss or trauma has a flip side: the person who experiences it often creates an internal narrative that tells them that it's their fault they weren't, say, born into a family that can afford expensive private schools and college educations... or their fault that they lost a parent to drugs or a car accident. So they convince themselves they're bad and unworthy, and they trash the good things and the opportunities that come their way because they don't think they deserve good things to happen to them. They ignore or sabotage education opportunities, and don't take advantage of opportunities that are set before them. This self-sabotage, which takes many forms, often comes across as a character flaw because instead of acting on opportunities to advance their educations or make themselves more employable, the former traumatized children spend time and resources either practicing a compulsion/addiction or running around wiping other people's butts by providing caregiving services to adults who don't function like adults. Then, when they reach adulthood, they don't do what is natural to non-traumatized people and create an environment that protects their own children from similar tragedy. Forget looking ahead 20 years and realizing you will one day have a child that will need college help or an insurance policy if you get hit by a bus... the paralysis is so intense that even something like applying for a better job (or any job) feels impossible. It creates an ongoing source of major stress in their lives. So like most people under stress, they focus on immediate problems that can be dealt with and solved right away: the chickenshit "high urgency, low importance" crap that Stephen Covey rightly identified as time-wasting nonsense. Solving that kind of immediate problem gives them temporary reassurance that they are in fact competent, and it lets them ignore the low-urgency, high-importance tasks that produce actual long-term success.
Amid all this drama (much of which becomes self-generating after a few years), it's hard to think clearly or see clearly. That, I think, is what's really behind "did LITERALLY NOTHING".