why the poor have many children

Well, it might be to compensate their lack of money, that is why they want to be rich with having many children. That is true in many poor villages in many countries. I was hearing a lot of discussions from peers and the adults of the plight of these considered poor people having so many children, yet they cannot afford to provide for their necessities. Some of the reasons given was that, when they will grow older, they have more who can help their brothers and sisters, including their parents.

It depends on the culture, but in third world countries the poor have many children because their children can work and earn money for the family or help around the home. Also, the poor have no other means of social security for when they themselves are not able to work: they need children to care for them. Children are an economic benefit for those in poverty in the third world. From listening to interviews, many of the poor families would like their children to go to school, but it is simply not a financial option for them. Once you move up to a different economic class, there becomes a social responsibility to send your children to school and pay for the best medical treatment and give them good clothing, toys, and adequate food... at that point, children become a financial liability and it doesn't make sense to have a lot of children.

This is going to sound awful, but here in the U.S. I know people who have a lot of children because they don't want to work and they want to go on Welfare. So basically they have lots of children and get everything paid for. A lot of these women that I know are single moms - so they have the excuse that "they could never afford to leave their children at home to go to work" YET the boyfriend LIVES with them. So just because they're considered single moms with all of these children, they won't have to work...It's really unfair.

I think, and I am saying I think, because I obviously don't know, that they lack the knowledge to know better. How to use birth control properly, know when they are going to ovulate and more likely to have a baby. I think education is the key here, yet you never know they may just want large families.

hi there cutepink... nice posting. People who produce lots of children are not necessarily poor. Although most of them are. In a catholic country such as ours, people go to church and are taught "to go to the world and multiply". Even the priests do not allow their church members to practice birth control.
I also believe that their lifestyle has something to do with this. They love to get drunk and when they are, they make out and children are born. They don't think ahead, that's the reason why they have less.

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Wow, look at the classism here. A few problems I have with this discussion:

1. Cute, I have no idea what your line of work is. For all I know you're a manager at Mickey D's. Even if you tell us what your job is, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, as the saying goes. Who are you? None of us know.

2. If you work at a welfare office, then you still don't know everything about the poor and how the poor behave. You only see the people who come to you for help. That's not all the poor by a long shot. So you hardly have a representative sample from which to draw conclusions.

3. Quit encouraging stereotypes about poor people. I only have a high school diploma, but I was in gifted class a few times as a kid and I've been in the Army and have self-educated myself since then. I have often run circles around college-"educated" people in debates, although I don't get into it so much anymore because it's the same old arguments over and over and that gets tiring. And yet I've been poor for most of my adult life. People are amazed when they hear this. They say, almost accusingly, "If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" Because wealth is about how much money you have, not about how many IQ points you have. There are dumb rich people, and smart poor people. It is what it is, so stereotypes don't exactly help.

For that matter, I've only had two kids. Yes, two different fathers, but the first was from my one marriage and the second was born almost nine years later--I mean gee, if I'm DIVORCED, why in the world would I go back to the same man and breed again. Stands to reason, doesn't it?And it's not like I couldn't have gotten pregnant again in all that time. It just didn't happen, through a strange combination of carefulness and luck.

If you're talking about the poor in developing countries, that makes this whole discussion even more vile because they can help their circumstances even less than the poor in the United States can. It's not kosher to kick people when they're down, in any case, no matter what country they're in.

I could ask a counter-question here, too: Why do the rich think the poor are breeding-animals to make children for them? This is National Adoption Awareness Month in the U.S. and the rich have really ramped up their "poor widdle ol childless me!" propaganda to guilt-trip young women into relinquishing. It really is disgusting. You know, I can't run a four-minute mile and I'm not demanding that the gold medalists in running give me their feet...

There's a joke over it really and it goes something like this.

People who are poor cannot afford to pay there electricity bills. Also people living in rural areas which are very remote and are poor don't have electricity. And lastly those who do not have children have nothing to go to and always stays at home. Now there joke is "since there is no electricity, no light or any other appliances that they can enjoy to, what else would this poor couple do during the night. Yes, they would enjoy making babies".

But in reality, you are true that majority of people who are poor don't have enough education about family planning and the like.

Here in our country it's the same situation as you mentioned because poor people had many children to support and feed everyday, maybe because some of them don't realize the importance of having enough money to use for their needs or maybe because some of them just want to have many children related to old beliefs that having many children means many blessings something like that, so it's important to learn about family responsibility and the proper planning.

Apropos of all this, are you aware that Russia is so underpopulated that the government there has been offering perks to people who will produce many children? They aren't the only countries who have a birth dearth, either. This isn't popular to say (but then, most people don't know how bad the situation is getting in places), but people who believe the world is overpopulated simply don't know the facts.

You know, lots of folks don't see big families as a curse, but as a blessing. I wish I'd come from one. I was a very lonesome child...

Maggiepie
IMPEACH THE IMPOSTER!