Marriage Doesn’t Obligate You to Have Children

Having kids, then more kids, then more kids, on top of endless work, the same old routine, and neglected upbringing and education… Lately there’s been more talk about the subject of having children. I found myself surprised: is this a new problem? Is it something new that poor people keep having children non-stop and can’t manage to give them the same upbringing or education wealthier people can, because of their economic circumstances?

Marriage Doesn’t Require Children

On the face of it… yes, poor people often have children irresponsibly, and that’s true. Having children is something available to everyone, but it isn’t essential for everyone. How so? I’ll tell you. You’re a poor person who managed to get married… but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have children, because there are other questions more important than marriage and childbearing. If you can cover the basic costs of food and clothes and so on… can you provide a good education, a good environment, a decent amount of culture, and the capacity to listen? Whether the person here is a man or a woman, both bear the responsibility — no one is innocent here, just to be clear.

So, can you do that and provide it? If you can, and you don’t use the excuse of economic circumstances, fine, because it’s not just your problem alone. But some people have a shred of humanity and conscience that stops them from bringing a child into an environment unfit for life in the first place. On the contrary, some people’s selfishness and envy push them as if they’re in an auction: whoever has the most kids wins the prize! This isn’t a competition, and the being coming into this world doesn’t deserve parents this careless. In the end, the child never chose them.

Not Every Child Comes With Guarantees

So, marriage doesn’t necessarily mean having children. It’s entirely possible to wait for a chance at a better life, a better place, a better environment that makes it easier for you to care for a child. Not every child comes with their own provision guaranteed — go find the full explanation and the conditions behind the saying “every child comes with their own provision” before you waste your energy arguing endlessly with the people around you.

So, having children comes with specific conditions. So what should a poor, uneducated person do, or an educated person who simply doesn’t have the knowledge or ability to properly care for even one child? I think the answer is clear: don’t have children, and overcome blind selfishness and envy of others, because you might not have the same circumstances as them, and even if others’ circumstances are just as bad as yours, they’re not role models to follow. Be a better person for yourself first, before you think about something like this.

There’s an obvious objection to all of this, and it deserves to be named rather than waved off: the argument that people should wait until they can properly provide for a child has, historically, been used as a cover story for controlling who gets to become a parent at all, usually falling hardest on the poor, on unmarried women, on whichever group a society already wanted fewer of. That history doesn’t make the underlying question dishonest, but it should make anyone raising it careful about who they’re actually asking to wait, and why. The point isn’t that poor people specifically should have fewer children. It’s that anyone, regardless of income, who can’t currently offer attention, stability, and patience has the same obligation to answer that question honestly before answering it with a child.

It also helps to remember that no culture has ever really expected two parents to carry the whole weight of raising a child alone. Grandparents, aunts, neighbors, and older siblings have historically absorbed the load that a nuclear household now tries to shoulder by itself, on a single income, in a private apartment. Some of the fear driving this conversation may be less about poverty itself and more about how thin that surrounding network has gotten. A family with very little money but a house full of people willing to show up can still give a child something a wealthier, more isolated household sometimes can’t.

Which points to the actual failure in how this gets judged. Wealthier, careless parents rarely get called out with the same force, because money quietly buys the appearance of competence, tutors standing in for patience, nannies standing in for presence, private schools standing in for attention nobody had time to give directly. The poor parent with the same gaps gets no cover at all. So the honest version of this argument was never really about bank balances. It was about whether a person, rich or poor, is willing to actually show up for another human being who didn’t ask to exist, and plenty of comfortable households fail that test just as often, they just fail it more quietly.