When I lived in the city I lived across the street from government housing (the projects).
I don’t know how much has changed, that was 20+ years ago.
Yes women did get pregnant on purpose so they wouldn’t have to work. The girl across from me had 4 kids by 4 men, told me I was stupid to go to work everyday and if my boyfriend didn’t want to get me pregnant her brother would. It seems her brother had gotten several of her friends pregnant, a service he was more than happy to offer.
Her kids were fairly close together, most women timed them to be 4-5 years apart because once the youngest could start school the the woman was expected to look for work.
These women would bitch and complain constantly that the government didn’t provide then with enough money to live, they never had enough money to feed their kids, however they always had plenty of money for alcohol and drugs, they had lots of parties.
They really got mad when some of the rules changed and if their children didn’t attend school or get regular doctor visits (paid for by the state) their portion of the welfare would be cut off. It’s really hard to get up early and get your kids off to school when you’ve been partying all night, that new rule was cramping their style.
The women could live with a boyfriend provided the boyfriend they were living with was not the child(ren)'s father. Every few months you’d see the boyfriend packing up his stuff and walking it to a neighbor’s house until after the city inspected to make sure he wasn’t living with the mother. Then after the inspection he’d move his stuff back.
Most of the fathers didn’t work, it’s hard to hold a job when 1) you’re drunk or stoned all the time and 2) your gf is a whore who can’t be left alone or she will be screwing all your friends. The men expected their girlfriends to get pregnant so they had somewhere to live and money for alcohol and drugs.
These people truly felt that they should not have to work, that the government owed them and that people who worked were stupid.
It is a whole sub culture that knows exactly how to work the system.
Not everyone living in the projects was that way. Some were disabled, some had hit a rough patch and were looking to get it together and get out.
At that time I was making close to $40,000 a year and while these people would tell you they only got say $700 a month, if you added up the cheaper rent, free utilities, food stamps, free health care, free breakfast and lunch for their kids they actually were making more money than I was.
She might just be deeply ignorant of birth control and how it and her body work. A lot of schools, even public schools, no longer teach much of anything about birth control aside from “it doesn’t work, it’s harmful to you.”
I had a former coworker who was raised Catholic and very ignorant of birth control. When she got married, she asked her husband about what they would do about family planning, and she said he told her he’d deal with that. What he apparently meant was “no birth control” and she ended up with a couple of kids before leaving him over his controlling, abusive behavior. She hadn’t left him sooner because it gradually escalated, and because her family actually stood behind her staying with him rather than divorce.
I had another former coworker who asked me, in all seriousness, how it was I’d managed to never get pregnant.
I really don’t think that adoption is an option for most married women. I mean, one day, she’s gliding along with a big belly, and a couple of days later, she’s obviously given birth, but there’s no baby around. Her friends and family are going to want to know what happened.
I’m just offering this up as a possible alternate explanation. All too often, humans do things because we’re either stupid or crazy, and if I had to place a bet on her motives, I’d bet most of my money on stupid, with a smaller bet on crazy.
Consider this: what is “sensible” behavior? I would define it as the action that is the most logical, realistic, and/or beneficial in a given set of circumstances. And in order decide which action is most sensible, one needs to be able to make an assessment of the probable outcomes of various actions, both in the short term and the long term. It may be that your coworker, being human, is not naturally adept at assessing long-term outcomes, or even short-term ones. This is a skill we have to learn. We learn it by watching and vicariously experiencing the actions of other people like us, and observing what their outcomes are. And we also learn that some outcomes just happen, through no action or inaction of our own.
So imagine you’re a woman and you grow up in a community of women who don’t go to college and may not even finish high school, who aren’t particularly bright or enterprising, and who receive public assistance in order to have babies (and perhaps, vice versa). Your mom, your grandma, your aunts, your cousins, all your friends do the same thing. You won’t see anything wrong or shameful with this behavior, because this is just what everyone does. And obviously, you’ll be well aware that there are other women who don’t have babies right away, and who go to college and work all the time, and you might feel a little bit bad for them. They don’t get to enjoy their babies while they’re still young - that is, if they have them at all! Yeah, they’ve got a lot more money and a lot more stuff, but if you’ve never really had that kind of money or been around people who do, you don’t really feel the need for it. After certain basic needs are met, people tend to be happy (or unhappy) with whatever they have, no matter how much or how little it is.
In short, if you’ve never really witnessed people like you working hard and enjoying the payoff, if you’ve never seen not just the result, but *all *the choices they made along the way, then how can you properly assess the outcome of hard work? How can you even consider it a realistic possibility for you? Isn’t it far more “sensible” to do what you know how to do, having seen it your whole life, than to try to reinvent the wheel? Why not have babies and live off assistance? What else are you going to do, become a movie star? An accountant? An astronaut? When you have no idea how to go about it, and no idea how to even find out how to go about it? That’s not stupid or shrewd, that’s just being realistic. And to be clear, I’m certainly not saying that having babies and living off assistance is all your coworker is capable of, or that she has no other choices. I am saying that, given a certain environment, it may be perfectly logical and reasonable for *her *to believe that.
Also, about birth control specifically:
And in addition to this, almost everyone knows that no birth control is 100% effective, and some people with a poor understanding of math and probabilities interpret that as simply, “Well, nothing works; it’s all basically up to chance anyway”. And that perception is deepened when they hear about Rhonda, who got pregnant even though she was on the Pill, and Tina, who always used condoms and still got knocked up. What they don’t know is that Rhonda took her pills when she remembered, but she missed about 4-5 days every month, and she was also on antibiotics at the time; or that Tina only almost always used condoms. So you’ve got ignorance about BC, plus lack of belief in its effectiveness, plus a sense of babies being an inevitability because that’s what happens to everyone. That pretty much adds up to “baby”.
So the first child was unplanned. That’s not an unusual circumstance. Accidents happen, and sometimes people decide to make the best of things. Pregnancy is not a something you can turn on and off like a switch and there are no guarantees. If a person wants children in the near future, if they for whatever reason become pregnant, it can make a lot of sense to have the child.
Once you have had one child, having a second increases expenses, but only incrementally. A second child can share a bedroom, wear hand-me-downs, share toys, etc. If you have family-provided childcare, expenses really won’t rise that much at all. If you wait a few years, however, to have that second child, you start loosing out on the hand me downs, needing to buy toys and the like for different age groups, and significantly extending the period of time that you will need that childcare. So if having two children is your goal, and you have a situation that is working in whatever sense for you with one child, having that second child soon after is actually a pretty smart choice.
Some women “need a baby” emotionally, not for financial gain. My cousin always wailed on about how her life would be so much better/different if she had a baby to unconditionally love her. Now she has a kid, and yeah they are on welfare but she was already on welfare way before the kid (she’s crazy and can’t work).
I wanted unconditional love too, so I got a dog. I said I needed a dog. Some people need a baby.
I remember a conversation I had with a girl in my high school. She was going on and on about how much she hated her mother, wanted her dead, and couldn’t wait to get away from her, and said, “…and* that’s* why I want to have a baby, so I can have someone who will love me no matter what!”
They got married and it seems like the “next step.”
They want someone to take care of them when they get old
They are getting pressure from their parents to have grandkids
They want someone to mold into their image
They want to carry on their blood line and family name
They hope it will strengthen their relationship
They are getting a little bored and want a new challenge
Nobody, of any social class, has kids for one reason and one reason alone, and that’s always going to be a mix of reasonable, selfish, and irrational reasons. In the end, having kids in any circumstances is a ridiculous amount of responsibility, and is almost always objectively not the most rational idea. But, we have a drive to reproduce and it is what it is. Somehow humanity has made it this far, despite all of our flaws.
There may be something to her wanting something to love her unconditionally. And she didn’t have the best model - AFAIK, her mom was pregnant twice in high school, and she and her younger brother are only two years apart and have different dads. As I said, I’ve heard her TMI for a few years now, and her home life has always been full of drama.
But this isn’t all she knows. Long before this all happened, she joked that if she got pregnant, her mom would kill her, then bring her back to life so she could kill her again. And she’d mentioned being on the pill for medical issues, so it’s not like she doesn’t know about contraception.
The two words that come to mind fastest when I think of her are “entitled” and “passive”. There’s a common thread in her comments of wanting to be given things without having to earn them. It’s very frustrating to work with her because she takes no initiative to figure things out on her own, and blithely accepts bad situations with question. And every time I ask for her opinion, I get a shrug and a blank stare.
Any talk of “goals” or “decisions” or even “wants” gives her far too much credit. I really believe that the “decision” to have the first child went something like this -
buoyed along - buoyed along - buoyed along - buoyed along - Oh I’m pregnant, I guess I’m going to be a mom now - buoyed along - buoyed along - I’m only getting 15 hours a week? Oh well, I’ll just get WIC and medicaid - buoyed along - buoyed along
There may have been a moral agent in there once, but not anymore. She fails the turing test daily. It makes me sad.
And there you have it. This is the kind of life she grew up with.
It’s actually incredibly common - I’d even call it cliche - for a teen mom to grow up and tell her daughters, “Don’t do what I did; I’ll kill you if you get pregnant; etc.” and then the daughter goes on to become a teen mom herself. Why? Well, “Don’t be like me” is a pretty vague instruction. What should the kid do instead, then? Who should she be like? If there are no other family members or close friends to serve as a different role model, she’s left rudderless. And even though the mom may tell the daughter not to get pregnant, and may school her thoroughly in the mechanics of birth control, she’s probably still going to bring her up in a way similar to the way she herself was raised, i.e. in an environment that’s highly conducive to getting pregnant:
She’ll let her daughter sleep over at boyfriends’ houses (or at her own house, “so at least I can keep an eye on them”). She’ll also have her own boyfriends over, and those relationships will more likely be negative and volatile than positive and stable. She’ll tacitly or explicitly allow drinking and possibly drug use. She’ll try to act like her daughter’s friend, rather than her parent. She’ll tell her daughter - again, tacitly and/or explicitly - that spending quality time with friends and boyfriends is more important than school work. She’ll complain constantly about her job, and how much working sucks. She won’t have any goals of her own, won’t have any discussions about what her daughter’s goals are, and won’t have any idea how to help her achieve any goals she does have. She’ll display no curiosity about the world in general, and when problems crop up, she’ll just say, “Welp, life’s a bitch.” She’ll tell her daughter - in so many words, over and over - “High school is the best time of your life! Enjoy it as much as you can!” And most importantly, if and when her daughter does come to her and say, “Mom, I’m pregnant,” she won’t, in fact, kill her (and deep down, her daughter knows this). She’ll probably yell and scream and tell her how stupid she is, and then finally she’ll say, “Okay, well - we’ve got to make the best of it. Let’s start planning the shower!” There will be no talk of abortion or adoption, and she’ll probably agree, or even offer, to “help” take care of the baby.
And yet all that said, in your coworker’s case, she didn’t get pregnant in high school. She’s 21. I’m assuming she didn’t go to college, so she’s already spent 3 or 4 years out in the “adult world”. She probably feels more than ready to move on to whatever comes next.
Well, again - there you have it. You’ve figured it out. She’s passive. When someone grows up in a home that’s “full of drama” like the one you describe, they often develop a severe case of learned helplessness. They learn from the adults in their lives that bad stuff just happens (and there tends to be a lot of it, too), and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just bad luck, or because you’re a bad person and you deserve it. In the same way, good stuff just happens. It’s just good luck, or because you’re a good person and you deserve it. There’s no connection made between working hard and the good stuff that results. As I said:
The only way we can learn to take responsibility for our actions, to make good choices and trust that they will have a positive outcome, to be active and not passive, is to have adults in our lives who value these things, who do these things, and who praise us for doing these things. If she didn’t have that, then is it any wonder she didn’t learn it?
Sure, I’m sad for her, but I’m also sad for you. You think she fails the Turing test? She’s not human, in other words? It sounds like she grew up in a really sad situation, and learned from it that she basically has no control over own life. But that makes her pathetic, not immoral. And it makes her very, *very *human.
Oh, sure. And I knew her mom; she was indeed slightly turdy. So was this girl, but that’s not the point. I’m just saying there’s a bit of a disconnect between hating your parents and expecting your own kids to love you unconditionally. If you don’t love your own parents unconditionally, why would your kids? And the real irony is that, knowing the mom, I think it’s pretty likely that’s a big part of why she had this girl in the first place - so she would love her unconditionally.
I think you’re onto something, Heart of Dorkness. Near as I can tell, her mom tried to be the cool friend rather than the parent.
And she learned to be helpless. Forget challenging the boss on business decisions, she won’t even ask questions about basic concerns. When she’s scheduled outside her availability, does she gently remind the boss? Nope - she show up to her shift without arranging transport home and assumes that our other coworker will give her a lift. She’s given bad instructions that she knows will yield bad results? Follows them and shrugs off the outcome.
And no, I don’t think she is human anymore, not in any meaningful sense. Humans are supposed to have feelings about the things that happen to them, and I see no evidence of any. There’s no investment, no care, no disappointment when things don’t go right. She clocks in, follows instructions, takes breaks, clocks out. No one’s home.
I don’t think she was always this way. She went to baking school. She wrote a business plan for a bakery in high school. At one time, she may have been a human being with wants and dreams and goals. Now? Pod.
She called out today. I was relieved. I hope she calls out again on Saturday. A little bit of me dies on the inside when I’m around her.
I totally agree with all of this. I think that’s probably the biggest factor in why she is like this. I doubt that she consciously planned this out, but probably just was raised in an environment where unplanned pregnancy was the norm and she doesn’t know any other way to be.
As for the fact she used to have dreams of accomplishing something more in life, well, everyone has dreams in high school. Another theory: Sometimes I think that women retreat into identifying themselves solely as a mom because they’re afraid of failing in the real world (or maybe due to the environment they were raised in, they don’t even really believe it’s possible to be successful in life in any other way besides breeding). Even if you do things right, you can still fail in work or education pretty easily. Businesses close and people lose jobs every day. However, while being a good mom is hard work, being an adequate mom is easy enough. Child Protective Services doesn’t take children from you unless you really, REALLY screw up.
One, there are persistent rumors about people have more kids to get more benefits, and frankly, poor people are as likely to believe this as anyone else. So it’s quite possible for a poor person to believe that a second child will somehow increase their standard of living, only to discover that it doesn’t. This is aggravated by the fact that people tend to be very bad at evaluating other people’s lifestyles: it’s so easy to look at so-and-so who is [situation whatever] and seems to be doing okay, because you don’t know the entirety of the picture.
Second, the relative costs of a second baby are very low if you are poor. My son in 14 months, and he’s cost a fortune, but 90% of that is 1) daycare (or dad’s lost earnings, in our case), 2) medical care (~$150 in premiums a month, plus $3Kish for the birth) 3) formula ($300/month: we needed the good stuff). Everything else is chickenfeed. Diapers? $30/month. Clothes? They don’t need that many, and even new we are looking at less than $3 an item: used, if you aren’t picky? They are cheap or free, especially if you are part of a community with tons of babies. The same for highchairs and cribs and car seats and bottles and toys: it’s not like they wear out.
If you are very poor, two of the major expenses–medical care and formula–are provided. You may be eligible for low-cost childcare, or you may be part of a community where it’s likely to be provided for free. You aren’t taking a hit to your professional trajectory because you don’t have one. You aren’t giving up time spent on hobbies you love because you don’t have any: those cost money. It’s not like you could afford to go out to the movies or dinner or bars before.
Children are a deep and abiding joy. I don’t think it’s any wonder that someone would want more when the relative costs are so low.
I’ve known many people like this. They be-bop through life and believe things just happen to them. Nothing is their fault. They believe they have no control over their life.
They’re always surrounded by drama. They think bad things spontaneously erupt around them. In reality, of course, they create the drama.
They believe they are totally helpless. They can’t do anything without help from others. Their victim mentality fosters an entitlement mentality; they believe they are entitled free food, housing, and medical care because they are victims. Victims of what, you ask? Everything and everyone. They are victims of their parents, boyfriend/girlfriend, boss, friends, neighbors, teachers, police, children, society, racism, etc.
Suffice to say, these people are not like you and me. They don’t have goals, and they don’t know how to take responsibility for their actions. They can’t be helped.
As for the question of whether or not it makes economic sense for her to have a second child…
Many people are illiterate when it comes to finance and budgeting. They can’t do the math. If assistance increased $10/week for an extra child, many would do it even though it may not make economic sense. And as pointed out by Mandy JO, it may actually pay to have a second child, depending on what free services are available.
Gosh, I can’t imagine why this woman wouldn’t be confiding all her hopes and dreams to a coworker who thinks she’s a subhuman pod person and can’t stand to be around her. Do you not have anything better to do than obsess about this woman’s life?
