I think more of African people would understand this better where economy system can be so hard and the people struggles to make living and add values to their lives while those opportuned to breakthrough those hard times are being overweighted to grow higher due to responsibility surrounding them.
Perhaps Africans have such a vision as a cold calculation about not being dependent on those people to whom they, in principle, owe. But in my country, there is a slightly softer definition of everything that the OP wrote.
The fact that parents should raise their children, teach them, and give them an education, the value of which children will understand when they become adults, is natural! This is normal, and this is correct. Telling children they are dependents? No. It was you who gave birth to them. And you owe it to them. And if children grow up to be slackers, it’s again your fault, not theirs.
Family involves relatives, and what kind of family relationships you have will be visible in the children you raise. The more successful they are, the more you realize that you gave them everything you had to give, namely love and the desire for a better life for them.
Dependency might be the word but, duty or obligation over rides it when it comes to the children you’ve got. Your job can never be referred to in that context and having a child means, it’s in your place to teach to that child all that he or she needs to survive in the real world as an adult and what ethics to live by. Let’s not forget, these little ones come to us as clean slates and begin to learn and unlearn through different thought patterns which involves mimicking what they see and hear as well as I been directly taught to them.
So also is the means to define what is important and not, how to be financially responsible for one’s self and the people around them. At some point in life, your ward gets to try being his or her own person and then you would find out what jobs you might have done well or not.
When it comes to friends and other family relatives, yes, it’s also a case of having to teach them what means it would be to fbe financially stable. A tree doesn’t make a forest they say and if all the birds in the forest are to nest on a single tree, you would have a sick tree that would weirder and dies. So does a human that doesn’t care about enriching his or her circle, you don’t get to grow financially as you directly or indirectly become responsible for a whole lot of individuals.