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

100% this. I knew someone who had four kids by four different baby daddies by 25 social services became involved because she was neglecting them.
An iq test was done and if I remember correctly it was insanely low like between 70-80

This thread is asking about women specifically but can just as easily set up a thread talking about the men.

Feckless fathers who impregnate multiple women and don't raise the children are some of the lowest of the low and usually have a very archaic ideal of masculinity.

Thank you so much for your sentiments, no I'm not close with her. We haven't spoken in 10 years and I'm all the better for it.
Sadly my siblings have followed in mums footsteps so I don't see them either.

If she taught me anything, it was to be the opposite of her, and I am. ♡

Thank you, It's probably made me a better mother, as my life has sort of turned into, my kids will never feel as I did, and I will never be like her 😅

All very well IMO if you’re not 100% reliant on the taxpayer to feed, clothe and house them.
Personally I’d call it utterly irresponsible.

I think your spot on with what you've said

My friend had her first baby at 15 and I remember her saying to me, "now I have someone who will always love me and never leave me" she went on to have 6 kids in total with 5 different dads

Each time she just wanted that happy complete family and kept hoping this would be it.

Her own family is full of half siblings. Shes one of 11 I think.

Double post sorry

And everyone else's financial burden. Great show of independence there!

Attachment Disorder.

EUPD.

BPD.

Mania phase of bi-polar disorder.

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.

Its a vicious cycle. If you grow in a family that consists of half siblings, absent or disney dads, a mother who rarely or never works but is housed by the state & provided with funds, you are not really going to understand about earning money. You are going to grow up with a sense of entitlement that money and housing are something the government provides, that a decision to have children doesn't require consideration of how it will be afforded. Your expectation of parenthood may well be that mothers do not work outside the home & the state provides.

Its very, very hard to break that cycle without it negatively affecting some children - you have to place conditions/caps on benefits to encourage work, but you'll have a minority of people who just don't, and their children suffer.

To anyone who genuinely wants to understand, I would recommend the book Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. It's an incredible work of journalism following two women across fifteen years. It's not the exact social context - it starts in the Bronx in the mid-eighties - but the drivers of poverty, of aspirations and emotions as well as money, are the same. Both women followed end up with five kids, although only one is raising them. For them, constant unstable relationships and babies is just... what happens. Flirting and men are often the only bright spots in long grey days. It also shows the grinding, unrelenting effort it takes to try and get out of that life even by "going straight" and working constantly, and how easily all that effort can be overturned by forces outside yourself.

@DreadPirateRobots that sounds like something I'd love to read. I'm going to look it up.

I think some people really struggle to understand that the opportunities for some are just so stacked against them, the playing field isn't ever even.

I have often found in debating this subject with people I know, the ones who had the most stable upbringing, two present parents together, middle class earnings, are the ones who will say people just need try harder and can't comprehend the forces against certain people, certain groups.

I don't think the care and concern for the unwanted children is driving most of the outrage unfortunately.

I am sure many would be in favour of forced sterilisation which would be a horror film beyond comprehension. I don't really know how one solves this problem.

I would offer a financial reward for voluntary sterilisation after the second child. At least 10k. It would save the country £££ in the longterm.
Same for men but it’s more difficult to know how many children a man has fathered.

There are a couple of incidents in Random Family that I think about a lot. One is when one of the women's mothers gets a $30k windfall based on an injury lawsuit and she and her partner blow the entire thing within weeks taking cabs everywhere, ordering takeout for everyone, and so on. The author says people get really upset and frustrated about that one. But I think it's obvious that that's what they'd do. They have no context whatsoever for setting money aside. There's never been any money to set aside. There's never been anything realistically worth delaying gratification for. There's been survival, and, when times are good and there is a little extra, small comforts like takeout or a cab.

The other one, which deeply frustrates me, is when one of the women, Coco, get a job at a nursing home. She loves it and the residents love her, and if she'd stuck with it she could probably have got some nursing training and earned a bigger salary. But it leaves her dependent on her partner to get her five kids up and to school, and no matter how easy she makes it for him, he just doesn't. So her kids start missing school frequently, and she quits. And what else, realistically, could she have done? All the possible solutions rely on resources she doesn't have.

It's an incredible book.

Does it talk about personal responsibility anywhere? That often seems to be lacking where poor choices are the norm

Maybe not her children's choice?

Our birthrate is very low and I am guessing it would be even lower without these women. I married at 22, own my flat but due to fertility issues don't have any children despite being really irresponsible with contraception and using withdrawal method since I got married plus have been ttc for 15 months.

I am being referred to a fertility clinic but I don't think I want to go through multiple ivf cycles to be a mother. I have been far more irresponsible with my contraception than these women despite having only 1 sexual partner. I just think of these women as women who are picking up my slack.

I'd rather see it trialled on the men on a voluntary basis before any woman.

It doesn't "talk about" any abstract moral concepts or solutions. It's a portrait of reality, written with insight and empathy and care. I came out of it humbled.

There are people in it who took lots of "personal responsibility". They worked hard, kept their kids as safe as they could, tried their very very hardest to live stable lives. Almost without exception, the rug got yanked from under them at some point by the police or the benefits system or their health or some other factor beyond their control.

@DreadPirateRobots that's so tragic but so true. I believe wholeheartedly it's so much more complex than just being some feckless 'trollop' as your reference demonstrates.

This thread is unbelievable. Having children young as a result of serial relationships isn’t a sign of psychopathy, ffs! It’s the result of growing up in a culture that teaches young women that motherhood is the pinnacle of what they can hope for in life. Of course they do it young. And then they do it repeatedly because looking after small children when you’re poor and emotionally immature is not conducive to a lasting relationship, so they split up and meet someone else and want to show that the new relationship is the one that’s going to work, and the way they show that is to have another baby. And of course they aren’t developing more experience of the world and obtaining the things middle class women build up throughout their twenties and then don’t want to give up to stay at home and look after children, because by the time they’re 25 they’ve got three kids and nothing else. It’s a crappy, horrible cycle that far too many women get trapped in, but it doesn’t make them psychopaths, and saying it does just makes you sound unhinged.

But our cost! And pretty rubbish for her kids.

So what's your answer?

Forced sterilisation?

Forced abortion?

Lots of those people are here on MN. You see it time and time again. Someone will post and say should I have baby #4, or am I too old at 46, or I want a baby with my "partner" who I met 6 months ago despite already having 3 and you will get pages and pages of dippy fools saying go for it.

I suppose I am one of these women, I have 4 kids to 3 different dads (I'm married to the youngest ones dad and we have been together 8 years) I had my oldest 3 by the age of 22. The two dads of the oldest 3 are not the most desirable of people and are not good dads. I can't even really say why it happened, I had a good childhood and I'm not thick or stupid.