Why low income households have more children

On social media lately, I’ve been reading this sentiment that people who are poor shouldn’t have so many children. The apparent reasoning is that if you can’t afford to bring children up properly, you shouldn’t have them.

This attitude is not just paternalistic and condescending, it also ignores the economic incentives facing the poor.

There are, I think, two main reasons for the poor having more children:

1. There’s the biological imperative of perpetuating one’s genetic heritage. This affects all income levels, but is probably more acute at lower income levels, as healthcare is less readily accessible and less affordable. As inroads have been made against child mortality, this has become gradually less important over the decades (with a corresponding decrease in fertility), but cannot be discarded entirely. Given that mortality is higher for children from poor families (and life expectancy lower), having more children is one way to mitigate the risk.
2. For the poor, children are effectively their retirement plan. Unlike upper and middle income households, poor households lack the capacity to save for the future. Against the day when one can no longer work, children are the main source of support. The more children one has, the more likely they will be able to provide for you, even if individually they might, through lack of investment in their upbringing, be poor themselves. Paradoxically, that inability to invest in each child is in itself a strong motive to have more children, as this spreads the burden of caring for ageing parents more broadly and makes it less onerous.

More children are effectively a perfectly rational, risk-diversification strategy of the poor against a cruel uncaring world.

Contrast that with households with higher income capacity, who have their own assets or savings, and thus have the luxury of investing in the health and future of their children, and can worry more about quality over quantity.

Given the above, the most appropriate policy response here shouldn’t be family planning for the poor, or scoldings from their “betters”; it should be the provision of a publicly financed universal healthcare and pension system. This would address both the concerns outlined above, and should reduce the socio-economic incentives the poor face.

[Disclosure: At this point, I should note that I am potentially biased with respect to that policy recommendation, given where I work. You have been warned]