I’m currently reading an ethnography called Promises I Can Keep by Edin and Kefalas. It’s about marriage and childbearing in poor communities in and around Philadelphia, PA and relates the findings from interviews with women of all races.
I’m finding myself blown away again and again by the content and the revelations of the authors, but as an economist, I’m particularly interested in this extent to which fathers are said to encourage pregnancy early in the relationship. Many mothers report their boyfriends saying “I wanna have a baby by you”, with seemingly little regard for the costs and responsibilities that come along with childbearing. I think having a child in general flies in the face of a rational agent that can plan forever regardless of class, but the discount rate seems particularly uncoupled from reality in these respondents.
One of my thesis chapters is on promises of financial support and how that affects investments in children. My original thought was that a promise of support would be just as effective as additional income in motivating mothers to invest in their children, particularly in financially-constrained decisions. In my data work, I came across the problem that controlling for race (and essentially class in this data set as most of the well-off mothers are white), strips away most of the variation. That is to say, that black mothers who receive a promise of support are not much different than the very few black mothers who don’t receive a promise of support. Edin and Kefalas’ work indicates that the promise of support is almost a prerequisite for childbearing, even when all circumstances–availability of drugs, lack of good jobs, the father’s tendency to “run and rip” with his friends, etc–point to the statement having no credibility whatsoever.
It’s puzzling that women, ultimately knowing that they won’t get financial support, through a legal arrangement or otherwise, would choose to have children with men in the hopes that he might turn around for the baby. It certainly flies in the face of models we use where we can assign realistic probabilities to future events and make our decisions based on our expected utility. The number of reform stories is stiflingly small, but apparently enough to encourage the dreams of so many.
ERIN K. FLETCHER 
2 thoughts on “The Promise of a Baby”