Reddit reviews Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City

If you're seriously interested in this subject, I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0520274067?pc_redir=1410758834&robot_redir=1

It's called Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City. The authors are a married couple, two scholars of intergenerational poverty at Harvard who moved to Camden, NJ in an attempt to essentially answer your question by living among (serial) single parents and hearing their stories.

The gist is that a significant number of low-income men and women in urban areas simply don't see a reason to avoid having kids. They don't necessarily set out to have kids, but if it happens, it happens. This seems astoundingly irresponsible to a lot of people, and in many ways that's certainly true.

Yet it's not completely irrational. These young people grow up in broken communities. Their parents are absent, or incompetent (mental illness, drug addiction, etc.), or simply overwhelmed. The schools are in disarray. Jobs are scarce, let alone good-paying ones. Are there paths out? Sure. But a lot of kids don't see them, or think themselves capable of them.

So they don't expect to get fulfillment from education or employment. What else is there? Raising a child. It's a way, perhaps the way, to make your life matter. Plus, as another book by the same authors explores, young black women are not inclined to wait around for the perfect man to have a kid, simply because so many of the men of their generation are unemployed or in jail or otherwise not marriage material.

Add it all together and you get a culture where having kids at a young age out of wedlock is something of the norm. Multiple kids with multiple partners is common, because if women want to have more than one child, that's often the only option they have.

And, heartbreakingly, these young men want to be good fathers, they just have no idea how. So they have their first kid at, say, 19, completely unprepared for what they're getting into. Then say they lose their job and can't provide, or get into legal trouble, or have a falling-out with the mother. All of a sudden, they're cut out of their child's life, getting time/visits entirely at the mother's discretion.

Don't worry, these guys are painfully aware that this isolation is largely self-inflicted. But they still have a desire (like most people), to be a parent. So with their next girlfriend, they tell themselves that this time will be different. And they mean it! And hey, sometimes they can get it together. Lost in the single-parenthood statistics are the surprisingly high percentages of fathers who remain active presences in their child's lives, they just don't cohabitate with them.

Anyway, I don't know how much of this applies to AP. 7 kids is still pretty crazy regardless of your background. And obviously he has a lot of money now, but I'd bet that his experiences growing up (though I think it was more rural?) were not dissimilar to what Edin and Nelson describe.

(I should note that this phenomenon happens in other communities as well, of course, but this book is interested in black urban single parenthood specifically.)

The authors of this book interviewed 'deadbeat dads', one of their findings was that:

> When the men learn that their partner is pregnant, they don’t panic, or lament all the freedom they are going to miss. On the contrary, three-quarters of the men in Edin and Nelson’s research were joyous at the news. The men are less likely than the women to want to end the pregnancy with an abortion.

They usually leave in the first year after the kid is born, well after the abortion ship has sailed. They like the idea of being a dad, but not the reality.