To understand why some women have children within a a short time with multiple different partners?

[Beautifulweeds]

Genuine question, arose in conservation today. An in law has 3 DC from 3 different Dads and is only 25 and is a single Mum to them. Their Dads are going about their normal lives, including sleeping with other women (probably more pregnancies) and don't have much to with their children. She's not the most invested Mum (meaning not at all) has to live off UC, leaves her kids with grandparents, who in reality look after them.

She has met another new fella, doesn't take precautions (oh I keep forgetting to take the pill) and it won't be long before she has another baby.

So, I guess my question was...hopefully you would learn from experience that you can and should take responsibility? Guidance doesn't always work, so same old patten repeated...meet someone, get pregnant, let someone else look after baby...taken away...fostering...adoption.

We've tried to help and intervene but a brick wall. X

The grandparents also have a choice to say no

@Coconutter24
Realistically no grandparent is going to say no are they!?

In theory yes, in reality no.

I wonder to what extent these mums make use of the GP when children are ill? I am guessing if you like the attention being mum you will access free healthcare a lot especially if you have the time to do so? Large families being a pressure on the state including health care and education so shouldn't we try and quantify this cost?

Some people are quite simply not that bright.

What on earth are you talking about?
You agree it was right to lock up women in mental institutions for being ' promiscuous' and women that have children to different partners are all psychopaths?
This thread was right up your street to air your ridiculous views.

@Yesiknowdear
I am so sorry to read this and I applaud you for sharing this . Despite all your adverse experiences you have managed to break the cycle by understanding that this is not the way to live one’s life .
You should be proud of yourself.

Your post could have been written by 1 of my dear friends although she was the eldest of 7 , she also became the “parent “ at a very young age .

Sadly she is the only 1 of the 7 who broke the cycle .

I wish you happiness , contentment and success in your life , you deserve it .

I think it's a really complex picture involving different themes for different women in this situation. Some women are repeating the dynamics of their own families (and those around them), some have really low aspirations/ self esteem and won't pursue a career but will find validation in having a baby, some seem to be hopelessly romantic and each time they have a relationship believe it's the one and want to sort of further validate that relationship with a baby.

I also think where single women (particularly poor women) have multiple children by multiple dads, everything they do is seen very differently by others. There are plenty of stay at home mums in traditional two parent middle class families who have their children watched a few times a week by grandparents for a bit of well deserved peace but no one cares.

Are the grandparents looking after the children all the time OP?

I think people forget, that the average iq across the population is something like 99-101.

That means for all the very intelligent folk with higher IQs, there are as many with lower IQs. You can have an IQ in the low 80s and be a functioning adult but you are probably going to have poor decision making abilities, weak judgement, inability to assess risk, no forward thinking etc.

If you just live in the moment and don't really think things through, its easy to see how it happens.

I don’t understand it, yes I do (silently) judge.

I know one mum like this and her whole family and the way she talks is really interesting. I think this thread is focusing/blaming the woman too much.

Once a woman has had unprotected sex, maybe briefly lived with a man and had his baby, even if this all took place under a year, the next guy will want "proof" that she loves him as much or more and push for the same. This is particularly hard for a fairly vulnerable woman to push against if he's being nice/tolerating her current DCs.

The way patriarchy affects those in lower socioeconomic groups is to encourage women that they have value based on their looks and being attractive to guys. Every child makes you less valued and attractive so there is a sense you need to give the guy more to make up for it.

Both Katie Price and Kerry Katona would openly talk like this and they weren't getting benefits. There's an issue in how love and relationships are seen for people who have grown up without really seeing healthy ones.

It’s grim

Well if they are going to enable the behaviour family shouldn’t be expecting her to change

@Bumpitybumper it's the rewarding this behaviour that grates on me most.

I read a news article a few months ago about a baby bank who are running out of items to give. Lots of the 'poor me' comments from those they spoke to at the baby bank but all were under 25 with at least 3 children. All complaining about how they can't cope and how the government is failing them. Yet several of them were pregnant again - if you can't cope don't have another bloody baby. It's ridiculous behaviour that needs to be stopped.

Why aren't they aborting these children they can't afford? Or properly using contraception in the first place? All were complaining about the lack of formula being provided free - why should someone else pay to provide this? I didn't produce any breast milk so had to formula feed and it cost me a fortune - it's not something I could afford to repeat 4 times within a few years.

I just don't understand the mindset at all. Why wouldn't they want the best for their children? Why don't they want to set a good example? Why don't they want to get off their arses and work for a living?

I'm from a poor background with a lazy mum who thought she shouldn't have to work and everyone else should provide for her. The rest of the family are the opposite and are hard workers who have worked themselves into the ground yet are far worse off financially than my mum.

This. In many cases it seems that the parents have created the situation that has created the problems, and they then try to put the blame and responsibility for the children onto everyone else. 🤷‍♀️

You again. You also disapprove of step parents and spout fake stats about stepfamilies being 100x more likely to have abuse within them. You have implied that Sara Sharif's murder and abuse at the hands of her father is somehow because a stepmother is involved, not because he's a vile child abuser.

Your views are absolutely abhorrent and you spout a load of spurious nonsense to try to back them up.

For the love of God, just pipe down and stop blaming women. Please.

Imagine genuinely writing, in 2024, that single mothers should be locked into institutions for being 'psychopaths'.

I have a male family member who has a low IQ, is nothing to look at, has been in and out of prison, finds it hard to hold down a job. He has been "engaged" 22 times.

He has 3 children to 3 different women - the only reason he doesn't have more is that his parents forced him to get a vasectomy after they were left to raise 2 of the children as none if the parents were deemed capable.

He has 2 brothers who are say a teacher and an accountant. But he was born with learning difficulties which weren't really picked up or accepted in the 70s/80s and he was raised as the thick one compared to his brothers. In quite a strict home.

But the whole situation baffles me. He's never been single. I don't know how many women have moved him into their homes and with their children as a father figure (he doesn't see his own children who are now adults) until the relationship fails and he immediately moves in with the next woman and her family.

Could it be that some of these women struggle with the transition to being an independent adult supporting themselves with a job? It's a way of showing they are an adult with responsibilities and possibly their own home and money? The idea of being a mother with someone reliant on them, makes them 'grown up' and an adult?

And her children?
This is a pretty silly thing to say.

This was my situation too.

I was undiagnosed autistic which contributed alot for my feelings towards myself, and being vulnerable but I've never had help raising my children, from other people or society. I've managed to work, go to university and just manage my life.

I am now happily married for over a decade to a wonderful man.

I don't know anything about benefits and I think in many ways that's a bit of a red herring.

But I do know for a fact a woman that has two primary aged DC and does a very un-demanding job for which she works 14 hours per week and earns £179 per week or thereabouts. She also has an older DC at home who has just turned 18 and now she is under pressure from the benefits people to do more hours (she's actually taken a second job now for a few hours a week in addition to the £179). She receives no maintenance, and no board from the older child.

So basically we have a family of four living on only £179 or a bit more each week. They're housed in a three-bedroom house with a garden front and back. They use public transport. The DC are clean and well enough fed and dressed dressed. Sometimes the younger ones are probably not properly supervised, sometimes they run out of electricity.

It costs a LOT more than £179 a week for all of this so someone (i.e. the state) is paying for it, in subsidies, if not in cash. Food and clothing banks etc. are involved.

But here we have a 'single mother, working two jobs to make ends meet'. I know for a fact she doesn't do much when she's not working... daytime TV and cuppas with the neighbours sort of thing.

So it's not exactly an exciting life choice but for many young women in particular this is how life is and what they aspire to. They have no conception of working hard, breaking the cycle, going it alone etc. Having children is the key to being housed, and they're housed close to existing families and friends in close-knit communities. They simply can't aspire to anything else because they don't know it exists and they have no one to lead them towards it.

Angela Rayner might recognise this but my view is that the policy makers and politicians have absolutely NO idea.

No it isn't. This thread, in the sense of the OP, isn't about the impact on children. It is asking why women do this.

The answer is they choose to, there may be multiple reasons that they do this ,but unless you advocate forced sterilisation it is up to the woman ultimately. You can't enforce abortion any more than you should have the right to force a woman to give birth.

And as others have pointed out why isn't their equal ire for the men involved in producing these children? Lots of feckless fathers who fail to provide for their kids either financially or practically.

This thread is sexist and sneery.

A thread talking about how we, as a society, can support children born into poverty or into families who don't prioritise education would have provoked a very difference response from me because it would not be sneering at women who for reasons of their own choose to do this.

If you look at Katie price, Kerry katona, ulrika Johnson and Natasha Hamilton they all seem to be ever optimistic about love and believe that the next relationship will be different, although it never is.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that, merely pointing out your “her body her choice” argument doesn’t really apply when her choice is impacting on other humans… every time she chooses to have another child, that child has no choice about being raised in a situation with restricted opportunities, an absent father and a disinterested mother.

Do the grandparents really have a “choice”? Sure, they could turn their backs on their child and grandchildren and watch them all suffer and struggle, but that’s not really a great position for them to be in either

This is definitely true. I've read a lot on people making poor life choices continually, usually their parents did too. A portion of society have an IQ so low that they genuinely cannot understand the link between their poor life choices and the poor outcomes they produce. They simply are not intelligent enough to understand causation and the predict the outcomes of their choices accurately. This low IQ is usually inherited from parents who couldn't understand the consequences of their choices so it's a double whammy, they inherited inability to predict the outcome of their poor choices but they also grow up having poor choices modelled to them by their parents as normal behaviour. It's a massive element in intergenerational poverty and makes it.so difficult to break out.

My ex husbands parents were always in debt, the shower didn't work and the bath leaked but every two years they went on holiday to Disney land Orland and saved every penny that they desperately needed to spend on something else for that instead. If they came into a bit of money it was instantly spent on crap instead of improving their home or financial situation. They make endless poor choices about their health and food choices and they constantly told ExH as a child education was pointless so he put zero effort in at school expecting to be a manual labourer for life but that work dried up so he was unemployable and useless with the money he did have. They were also constantly complaining about everyone having more than them and that they didn't deserve it as if it just fell into everyone's laps because they couldn't see that their own situation was their own fault. By age 30 he still could not make sensible adult decisions or even look after 5 quid so I cut him loose. It's a shame because they were lovely people, just completely useless. He's since had a baby with his new wife and I feel desperately sorry for that baby, the cycle will repeat. Whilst being a lovely man and having lots of love to give ExH has no skills or insights to teach that baby and the cycle will continue.

This is why education for all is so important but sadly people like this don't make use of it even though it's available.

The thing is, SOME women do choose to go it alone and not have the father/s involved. They often break up with the father/s for brittle reasons. I'm not getting into the ins and outs of relationship breakdown here, but I know this to be a fact in some cases.

In that way, whilst the burden of child rearing is on them, they have their own house indefinitely, their own entitlement to benefits, maybe maintenance, maybe some completely child-free time if dads are somehow involved or if family help out.

Men are less involved because they don't have resident children, they have to work, they're less likely to be independently housed so live with family or a new partner.

It's really alien for a lot of reasonably well-educated people who've been well-supported in life to understand.