Why do poor people have many children even though they cannot afford to raise them well? by Kyle Phoenix

• One: Everyone thinks they’re a genius. Which is why geniuses often eschew being called a genius, unless there’s cash involved like a MacArthur Fellowship. Being the biggest, the smartest (for awhile) can feel good.
• Two: Sex feels good but nobody talks about it to children as much as we should. Like at 4 years old before the machinery starts working, an ongoing conversation. There aren’t many productive things to do in poverty, work can feel like a trap or a prison. Luxuries are non-existent or so generalized that they become normalized—-smart phones, giant screen TVs, digital music and TV, clothing. And your hormones are pressing for sex. Sex becomes akin to entertainment because it is a place to lose one’s conscious self for a period of time. Unfortunately all that loss time generally means birth control is lost too. Or you’re in a social setting where birth control is not discussed. A few years ago teaching a GED Biology class, I stapled varying sizes of condoms, dental dams, a female condom, a cut out of an IUD, a picture of a pill to a piece of cardboard and passed it around the class as I talked about HIV and handed out pictures of male/female genitalia-reproductive diagrams. Was I teaching Sex Ed? Maybe. Was I teaching Biology? Kinda. Was I teaching something they already knew? No. It was the most giggly, chatty class and there were dozens of questions about bodies, safe sex, positions, etc.. Poor people are not taught about their bodies, especially the males. One young lady, about 27, who was a studious student and already had one child, said that she was going through a list in her head of things she didn't know that I had explained in that 2 hours. She knew that her life would’ve been different if she had known this before 18. She wasn’t happy with that realization and she said she was also a little miffed that it was a man who told her about her body, more than her family had.
• Three: Poverty does not feel good. Children are a joy, until they’re not. There is a lot of energy and parties and such around having a baby. That generally wears off about a year after the baby is born.
• Four: Children attend to you, pay attention to you, idolize you…for awhile.. and that can feel good.
• Fifth: If you’re poor there’s very little that you may create in your life that will go on past your lifetime, except for children. That can give you a good feeling…in poverty.
• Sixth: There are very few ways to validate Womanhood and Manhood. How do you know when you’ve crossed the line? We have artificial, arbitrary age and licensing lines but not necessarily socially conferred spaces where the whole of society now views you as an adult. Children confer this even if society judges you on a sliding scale, it still stamps you an adult—-a woman, a man. Motherhood is venerated in poverty. You’re a real man when your “seed” is born….now apply for Welfare and Food Stamps, momma. That real seeding man left 75% of single mothers. Without organized rites of passage, how is a person to know or manage afterwards?
• Seventh: No one thinks that their children do it. They do it about 14x more than you think they do. They’re doing it right now. Go look at some kids, start at about 9 years old. They’re fucking and sucking and Frenching and licking and mastering oral skills that they’ll deem passe by 16. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I worked at a Middle School, 6–8th grades. That’s about 11–13 years old. The children would leave every day and a group of them, a significant percentage of the 100 entering student body, say a dozen a day, would congregate at a latchkey kids house and they’d have a sex party. An orgy. They’d bang lovely for hours. Another boy was 13 but held back a grade and sexually active with the boys and the girls of the school. He would watch the incoming class and choose who he was going to seduce. He didn’t mean it in a bad predatory way, he was just very healthy sexually without boundaries that comes with informed knowledge. Another girl, her mother came up to school one morning and asked where she was? We assumed she was with her. The girl would regularly go out at night, all dolled up at 13, looking like a woman, to meet her date, a 30+ year old man. They had extreme issues yes but they were the students in a highly attentive charter school that had the resources to address the issues that was rapidly slipping by parents. Imagine all of the schools, all of the places across the country, that don’t have those kinds of resources and patience to actively re-mold the children’s identity/sexuality?

Now bundle all of this mentality together, pick and choose which is predominant and it becomes more evident why “poor” people continue an act that doesn’t make sense. Validation and entertainment, basically.

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