Posted on 02/27/2008 7:06:01 AM PST by Uncledave
Why are People Having Fewer Kids?
Perhaps it's because they don't like them very much.
Ronald Bailey | February 26, 2008
The "demographic winter" is coming. So warns a new documentary of the same name. What is the demographic winter? The phrase, according to the film's promotional materials, "denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, also referred to as the 'birth dearth,' and what that portends." The first half of Demographic Winter was previewed at the conservative Heritage Foundation a couple of weeks ago. According the film, the demographic winter augurs little good, e.g., economic collapse and social deterioration. If current trends continue world population should begin a steep decline sometime around the middle of the 21st century. Why?
Because total fertility rates (TFRs) are plummeting around the world. Population stability is achieved when each woman bears an average of 2.1 kids over the course of her lifetime—one for her, one for her male partner, and a little overage to make up to childhood deaths. Today, there are sixty countries in which TFRs are below 2.1. For example, the European Union's TFR is 1.5 and no EU member state has a TFR at replacement or above. Even high population developing countries have seen steep declines in fertility. Since 1970, China's TFR fell from 5.8 to 1.6; India's from 5.8 to 2.9; Indonesia from 5.6 to 2.4; Japan's from 2.0 to 1.3; Mexico's from 6.8 to 2.4; Brazil's from 5.4 to 2.3; and South Africa's from 5.9 to 2.7. The U.S. TFR dropped from 2.55 in 1970 to around 2.1 today, largely because of the influx of higher fertility immigrants. However, the fertility of second generation Americans drops to the level of longer established Americans.
I doubt that the "demographic winter" portends economic collapse or social deterioration, but let us set that aside for this column, and instead ask why people are choosing to have fewer children? After all, voluntary childlessness seems to violate the Darwinian premise that our genes dispose us, like all other creatures, to try to reproduce.
However, demographic data are undercutting the notion that there is some kind of sociobiological nurturing imperative, economist and demographer Nicholas Eberstadt noted during the question period following the documentary. As evidence, he pointed to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where 30 percent of women are childless and that Hong Kong's TFR has been below 1 birth per woman for at least a decade.
Demographic Winter asserts that "every aspect of modernity works against family life and in favor of singleness and small families or voluntary childlessness." And surely they are right. Modern societies offer people many other satisfactions and choices outside of the family. In particular women find that their time becomes more highly valued in occupations outside the home. There are no iron laws of demography, but one that comes pretty close is that the more educated women are, the fewer children they tend to have. Eberstadt also noted the best predictor of fertility levels is the desired family size as reported by women. And finally, the most profound event of the 20th century may have been the sexual revolution's drive toward gender equality, enabled by modern contraception. Unlike other creatures, people can have the fun of sex without the side effect of parenthood.
So, modernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre. But that's just the problem—according to happiness researchers, people don't really enjoy rearing children.
"Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact," reports Harvard psychologist and happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert. In addition, the more children a person has the less happy they are. According to Gilbert, researchers have found that people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television than taking care of their kids. "Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework," asserts Gilbert in his bestselling, Stumbling on Happiness (2006).
Of course, that's not what most parents say when asked. For instance, in a 2007 Pew Research Center survey people insisted that their relationships with their little darlings are of the greatest importance to their personal happiness and fulfillment. However, the same survey also found "by a margin of nearly three-to-one, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the 'mutual happiness and fulfillment' of adults rather than the 'bearing and raising of children.'"
Gilbert suggests that people claim their kids are their chief source of happiness largely because it's what they are expected to say. In addition, Gilbert observes that the more people pay for an item, the more highly they tend to value it and children are expensive, even if you don't throw in piano lessons, soccer camps, orthodonture, and college tuitions. Gilbert further notes that the more children people have, the less happy they tend to be. Since that is the case, it is not surprising that people are choosing to have fewer children. And if people with fewer children are happier, then people with no children must be happiest, right? Not exactly, but the data do suggest that voluntarily childless women and men are not less happy than parents. And they sure do have more money to squander as they try to pursue what happiness they can and strive to somehow fill up their allegedly empty lives.
Disclosure: My wife and I try not to flaunt our voluntarily childless lifestyle too much.
Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.
“If I saved my Mom instead of my children, she’d KILL me. :p”
lol! I was thinking the same thing!
I have forbidden all of them to leave the state. I am QUITE sure they will comply with my dictates......BWAHAHAHA!!
i have a pile of fur in my lap everynight, her name is chanel and she is an 11 lb cavalier king charles spaniel. i can do without purring : ) if i am on the couch instead of the recliner, her 20 lb brother, Lucius, will have his butt pressed up against me on one side too.
Because it costs a lot of money to have kids. Two incomes are often not enough. Tax laws are slanted to favor the rich and the poor, and to penalize normal people who decide to become parents.
There should be a tax exemption of at least $12,000 per year per child (born to or adopted by male+female married parents).
Current tax and immigration laws penalize the normal family.
And even on a broader scale -
there isn’t a problem in our society that can’t be traced to some shortsighted liberal idea.
Can anyone offer a counter example?
Very well said.
I’m tryiny to talk my wife into another child, but the potential of another Iraq deployment is giving us pause. She doesn’t want to be alone with three children under 5 for another year+ It’s a tough situation.
In the meantime, I spend every waking moment when I’m not at work with my children. Yes, my hobbies like golf and SCUBA diving and long sessions at the gym have gone by the wayside. That’s the price you pay. My wife and I compromise as much as possible so she can attend Yoga classes a few hours a week and I can hit the gym for quick workouts. The problem is too many people can’t or won’t make these sacrifices. They just don’t get it. Your childhood is over, step up and be an adult and join the Human Race.
30% of your time with your toddlers is miserable. That’s life, but that’s how you “break your teeth” as a parent and turn your children into solid citizens. People that can’t, won’t or don’t want to do this baffle me. What if their parents had felt the same way?
Sometimes I weep for the future of this country.
It dependes on reproductionand the care and nourishing of the future generation (future leaders and such)
It is so difficult for me seeing my kids grow up (too fast!). There seems to be an inate unfairness that our job is to raise them so that they can leave us and live on their own. My kids (teens now) are very loving and kind, but they are also fiercely independent since they were very young. It about killed me when they started school for the first time with nothing more than a “bye mom!”
I of course want them to be as independent as they are (I raised them that way), but as a mom sometimes it hurts my heart knowing that in only a few short years they won’t be here in the house all the time.
I adore having teenagers... We have the best conversations and my son is so tall now he can reach the top of the shelves for me. He jokes that I only had him so he could reach stuff for his short mother. Lol
Ain’t it the truth? It is so funny when someone has a child who they think is God’s gift to the earth and the kid is annoying as hell. I knew the limitations of my children - knew when naptime was overdue, or when we were somewhere kids shouldn’t be. Conversely, when adults are in an area more conducive to children, they should be the ones to show some good sense and let the kids have some freedom.
There are so many other ways I can be ridiculed.
I didn’t say they were shallow—someone else did (note: I had responded to someone else’s post). But I said IF it’s true, that they’d make terrible parents anyway. And there’s nothing at all wrong with that—better not to have kids than to have them and neglect them or worse, abuse them because they’re frankly not suited for the job.
and you are! don’t allow yourself to be defined merely by your childlessness, when there is so much more that we can rag on you for.
Thank goodness you live in a smaller State!
I am hard-pressed to find so much as one liberal idea that's helped our nation in particular or society overall. If anything, they've done nothing but erode the fabric of everything that has historically made our nation great.
I think the difference with the clown car is that it’s a teasing jab whereas the attacks on the childless are very pointed, mean and insulting. just in this thread they are called selfish, deformed and horrible people. Regardless of the jokes thrown at those with too many children, I’ve never seen anyone call them deranged or accuse them of being the downfall of society. Frankly, many of those I know who choose to remain childless do so for very unselfish reasons. And many of those I know who have chosen to have children have done so for very selfish reasons. To try to lump all into one category or another is rather shallow.
FReepers are a very judgemental lot, that’s for sure.
You sound like a great mom!
I’m sure I’d like your kids.
Agree totally!
LOL! I agree - as long as they can give them a good home!
Carolyn
i don’t know, i just have three kids, i can’t speak for how those who have very large families are made to feel by posters here. knowing how judgmental and insulting freepers can be, i would not just assume that they are laughing the jibes off. my philosophy is to just respect other people’s decisions about their own lives. Defining oneself based on childlessness makes as much sense as defining oneself by the computer operating system they use. and God knows we have seen threads on that subject as well, LOL!!!
“There should be a tax exemption of at least $12,000 per year per child (born to or adopted by male+female married parents).”
there are freepers here who already think the present child tax credit is too much, and that the childless are “subsidizing” those who have children because they send more money to D.C.
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