And I have 0 kids, 0 grandkids. But I am a granduncle!
Posted on 06/30/2008 4:18:23 PM PDT by SJackson
There are four things in America for which there is little forgiveness. The first is killing your wife, as O.J. Simpson discovered. The second is allegations of child molestation, as Michael Jackson found. The third is being old, as John McCain is rapidly discovering. And the fourth is having too many children, as I have found.
Looking down at primitives with "too many" children is one of the last acceptable prejudices in the West. With our ninth child expected imminently, God willing, I find myself pitied and pilloried wherever I go. "Wow, that's a lot of kids," is a refrain I constantly hear. What a shame I didn't have instead, say, eight antique cars, or better, eight homes around the world, for which I would have been thought a success. But eight kids? That proves your either a religious kook or someone ruining the environment by overpopulating the earth.
Enter The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday with a cover story called "Childless Europe" which claims that the Germans, Italians, the French and the Bulgarians are disappearing off the face of the earth due to a shockingly low birthrate, or what demographers call "lowest-low fertility." This truly ominous article relates that for the first time on record, birthrates in parts of Europe have dropped below 1.3 per family.
"For the demographers, this number has a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country's population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover." In Germany "where the births-to-deaths ratio now results in an annual population loss of roughly 100,000, the government's family minister declared that if her country didn't reverse its plummeting birthrate, "we will have to turn out the light."' Italy is dealing with the crisis by paying parents to have children, and Russia has national make-love days where they encourage couples to go home and conjure up a child.
Pope Benedict summed it up best. "Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present."
WHILE THE article blames the falling birthrate on poor government policies that do not enforce maternity leave or subsidize post-natal care, as well as inflexible working conditions for women, a far more important reason is growing Western narcissism. As the West becomes richer, it is also becoming more self-absorbed.
Children consume time and resources both of which young adults would rather focus on themselves. Better to have the freedom, and the cash, to jet to Paris for the weekend than push a kid on some dumb swing. Not that we don't love kids any more. We do, but in an abstract, as-long-as-it-doesn't-interfere-with-our-freedom kind of way. Having them in our thirties, and about one or two max, minimizes the disruption.
Never before in history has a civilization skewed more away from the needs of the community and toward the aggrandizement of the individual. In the US, a warrior class consisting of about two percent of the population fights bad guys in Baghdad and gets blown up in Kabul while the rest of us go on Facebook to update our "friends" as to our emotional state. The regular flow of Facebook status updates telling us that "Jane feels like shopping today" or "Mort misses his ex-girlfriend Linda" feeds the Truman Show mentality of American youth who are taught to believe that the whole world revolves around them. Sacrifice be damned.
The most powerful TV show in modern American history is American Idol. The title is telling. It promises that you too can grow to be a puffed-up celebrity. Meanwhile, when I approached several television executive friends and pitched a family healing show for the brave military families that have to be re-integrated after a hero returns from Iraq, I was told that the military doesn't rate on TV. We simply don't want to be reminded of the selfish lives we are leading by watching the selfless lead theirs.
When you ask twenty-something Westerners to contemplate parenthood - with its diapers, school runs, and estimated $250,000 cost of raising a child to adulthood - they think you fell off the moon. Spend my life focused on someone else, even if it is my own child - have you gone mad?
When you later tell them that the very future of their nation depends on it, they gaze with the same incredulity. The idea of doing almost anything for their country, baby-making included, is utterly foreign to them. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Jewish singles continue to attend a truly staggering variety of singles events in Manhattan in a never-ending quest to find the best. Do they deserve any less?
BUT LOOK at what is lost when young people delay having children until their mid-thirties and then have one kid. At risk is not only the morbid disintegration of once great nations like Japan and South Korea, both of whom average 1.1 child per family, or half the replacement rate, but something far more fundamental. When children have no siblings, they don't learn to share as much and they don't assume responsibility for taking care of one another. And the condition of being an only child runs the risk of fostering the very narcissism we decry, as the child becomes the epicenter of his parent's life with no other children to distract them.
And is it good for boys to grow up without sisters, given that one of our society's greatest problems is growing male disrespect for women? The boy who feels a filial connection with a girl who is his sister remembers the feeling of how he wants her to be treated when he dates someone else's sister.
I know the complaint that too many kids in a family means that each will get less parental attention. The simple response to this absurd argument is that attention is a poor substitute for real love. Celebrities get attention, while family members get love. A child who is immersed in an environment where he is surrounded by the love of both parents and siblings is a child who never feels alone.
Everywhere you look these days, people are becoming grandparents at about 70. But how many years does that leave a child to grow close to his grandparents, learn from their wisdom, and connect with an older generation? By the time the child is 10, his grandparents are already octogenarians who are often growing more physically dependent and infirm.
The Western cult of narcissism is spoiling our kids, making us neglectful of our elders, spawning an out-of-control material insatiability, and destroying us - quite literally - by having us die off without a replacement generation.
And of all the many remedies available that might free us from our growing self-absorption, having one more baby than we originally planned for our marriages is the best remedy of all.
Pope Benedict needs to take on the eco-facists as well as the Islamofacists. The eco-nazis play a major role in society’s diminished value of babies and children.
Alas, they are all scattered to the four corners.
All my 9 are grown up and spread out across 3 continents. The closest ones live 4 hours away. But they are all doing the Lord's work. :)
As long as the parents have to pay for it the next 17 years. Otherwise, we’d see a new generation of welfare queens, instead of taxpayers raising more taxpayers.
Congratulations to the Rabbi and his Mrs. on their 9th. Many good points in the article.
I’ve been working on grandkids, since my
kids were born. Alas... I am a slacker.
Quiver not yet full... Jo
Well, home schooling Protestants, traditional Catholics, and Latter-Day Saints are still having large families. The future belongs to those who are willing to believe in it, and pay for — with their own money. People of conviction, and allegiance to transcendent value, have children. When German Christians gather for worship in another few decades, they may well be singing Turkish hymns.
My wife and I both have master's degrees. So, too, do two other home schooling families we know. Dave and Susan, both MSEEs, have six kids. The other couple, with MS degrees in biology, have nine kids. We only have four -- but since they call came by C-section, I think we did what we could for the cause.
If I had it to do over again, I would have at least five children. When we had ours there was a big push to limit the size of families to save the planet. Being young and stupid, I tried to do the right thing.
Then they flooded my nation with families with five to ten children, giving them higher payments for each new child. Go figure.
I think the industrialized nations have been brainwashed into having fewer children. Now the governments are acting as if they can’t get along without importing as many people as possible that don’t speak the native language, or hold anything near similar values.
You really have to wonder how planned this was.
If governments want more kids, provide a larger tax incentive to get them. It will work. And heaven forbid, you might even wind up with a stable society.
in desperation you might not have a choice, $20k for a kid who will work for 45 years isn’t a bad deal. We could turn an eye to the border of course...
“Too many children” is any number beyond what the parent(s) in question can support without taxpayer handouts. When an unemployed high school drop-out, either alone or with a similarly situated husband or boyfriend, has one child, that’s too many. The Duggar family in Arkansas is now expecting child number 18, but mom and dad support and educate them all (they don’t even use the infernal pulic schools that they’re forced to pay taxes for), and that’s not too many. “Primitives” is an excessively polite term for people who pop out babies like feral cats.
If you live near a university, "adopt" graduate students from Muslim countries. You'll form enduring friendships, and open eyes to the fact Hollywood hides so well -- there are Americans who love God and family. The sharpest young people from abroad are here, having the adventure of a life-time, bright-eyed tourists eager to learn all they can about our country and culture.
(dirty little secret -- we live in "low context" culture. Over the last few years, I've had more friendly dinners with Turkish Muslims than with people in my own church!)
Look me up in a thousand years, and tell me about your adventures in hospitality.
Congratulations to your family.
Let’s see — which churches opposed contraception in the early 20th century, and which still do?
And I have 0 kids, 0 grandkids. But I am a granduncle!
No, but it (nihilsm) seems a common thread in present-day European culture, with people living pretty much for themselves. It could also be argued, that if “concern for the world” includes the premise that man is just another animal, a mere accident, then that could be unpacked to nihilism as well since it undermines any ultimate purpose such as that provided by the Judeo-Christian and other monotheistic worldviews.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Whoa. Stop putting words in my mouth. I’m a Christian and also believe in evolution (think it is warranted by the facts). Putting atheism and belief in evolution together as an inseparable pair is the cause of a lot of needless contention on this site and elsewhere. Man is just another animal?!! Give me a break here, and show a bit of a capacity for analytic thought. (I also am a drooling sucker for any baby, by the way, I just love the ones that are already here so much that I want them to have enough to survive.)
I dont know about infirm because my grandfather my mom father still kicking with my brother and me when I was teenager and he was into 70s he died when he was 95 year old like 5 years ago
Come think of it I rather party with my grandfather than this loser columnist
I’ve made 2 thus far
Starship Troopers
at least a lifetime deduction on fed income tax for those who served in a combat zone (though obviously eliminated would be better)
Independence Day
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