I’m not sure there is a sensitive way to word this question, so forgive me if I sound ignorant or naive. I’m not trying to offend anyone.

A little background:
I grew up in hardscrabble Upstate NY, in a country village about an hour west of Albany where white poverty was pretty common although some inner-city blacks had migrated 3+ hours up from the Bronx and settled in some of the more urban areas. The area I was raised in was a smattering of rural communities and depressed old rust belt towns like Schenectady and Gloversville. There were a few pockets of affluence like Cooperstown and Saratoga, etc. but those were the exception and not the rule.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a middle class-upper middle class household and (by CNY standards at least, but probably not by Westchester, NYC, or CT standards). While we were far from rich and I wasn’t spoiled, there was never any concern about paying bills or having what we needed. Money was rarely discussed because it wasn’t an issue. I’d say about 20–30% of my peers were from low-income backgrounds and received free lunch, lived in subsidized housing, and their parents received food stamps and other government benefits. Some of them worked low-wage jobs; some didn’t work at all for any number of reasons. (Sometimes working meant losing benefits which were often more lucrative than a minimum wage job.)

One of the things I always noticed was that these families tended to be much larger and the parents had started having kids much earlier. One girl whom I used to play with’s mother was 15 when she had her, and she went on to be a young mother too. It was also common for their mothers to have children by multiple men and for their fathers to have children with multiple women, and very rarely within the context of marriage. As time went on, I noticed many of my peers had followed the same path. I’m now in my late-20s, and it’s not uncommon to see my former classmates living on public assistance and already on child number three and counting with God-knows-who.

I moved to NYC seven years ago and have noticed the same pattern but this time, mostly with inner-city people of color. Obviously not all, but many. (BTW, I’m specifically talking about low-income, not middle-class or more educated.) My friend is the director of an after-school program that mostly serves kids from less well-off backgrounds, and she says it’s not uncommon for them to come from households with 5+ kids. And she’s not exaggerating either. Today on the train, I saw an ill-kept, obese woman who couldn’t have been older than 45 talking about how she had 11 children and that her oldest was 30.

I know that sometimes sh*t happens. Sometimes you have kids when things are going well in your life, and then something happens, and your circumstances change. I also know that sometimes “oopsies” happen—birth control fails, you have a drunken one-night stand, and you don’t agree with abortion. Okay, fine. I would never call someone’s kids a “mistake,” but we all make them.

But my partner and I have an alright combined income but with our debt and lack of savings, we would never think about bringing another human being in the world until we felt more stable. Why do some people choose to do it a dozen times instead of working on improving their own lives? Sorry, this post has rambled on more than I intended but it’s something I’ve neve been able to wrap my head around.

And before anyone answers, I’m not necessarily saying poor people shouldn’t have kids (though I wouldn’t), but why do so many of them have well…SO MANY?

Topics: economics, psychology, sociology, human behavior, reproduction