The missing grandchildren

It has been known for some time that the population in most of the industrialized world is not reproducing sufficiently to replace itself. (The national populations may be growing, but that is due to immigration from the non-industrialized nations.) Almost all children survive to adulthood, but women and men have on average less than one child each (the demographers always measure this as children per woman, not children per person, but that makes a low birthrate sound like women's fault alone, or, if one favors a low birthrate, their accomplishment alone).

Progressive thinkers on the subject of population growth note that when people achieve some measure of security and prosperity, birth rates drop. They have now dropped below replacement rate. One major reason is that as reliable birth control becomes more widely available, people can plan their family size. Why do people want fewer children?

I suggest that one reason is that there are more interesting things to do. As all parents know, children are a source of great joy, but also of great exasperation and drudgery. For the poor where life itself is largely drudgery, the joy might stand out more than some extra drudgery. For those who are better off, life in general is more pleasant. Interesting careers are available to many people -- even ones we consider dull may be far more interesting than back-breaking agricultural labor. Labor-saving devices make housework far less demanding. There is leisure time and vacation time and many interesting ways to spend it. How does parenthood look against that background? At an emotional level, children are just as exasperating as ever, and the need for constant supervision remains the domain of people, not labor-saving devices. Without children, there is far more time for plain old fun, and more money to pay for the fun too. Occasional visits with a niece or nephew can allow a sampling of the fun part of parenthood.

Exacerbating this problem is America's highly child-centered culture. It is the norm for parents to spend as much time with their children each day as other commitments allow, or to drive them to out-of-home enriching experiences. When today's children reach the point of deciding whether or not to have children, what will they recall? They will recall that their parents' lives were consumed by taking care of children, and it may not be a commitment they want to take on.

People growing up in the 1950s or 1960s may remember a childhood where it was up to them to find their own toys and their own amusement. They were on their own after school until supper without parental intervention. The parents were doing their own activities in the evenings, albeit with occasional interruptions. That allowed far more time for the parents to pursue their own personal pleasures. That version of parenthood may be one that anyone, notably today's young adults, would be more likely to embark on. But it is not an option they can easily choose. If they did, they would be censured for neglecting their children.

It is true that if a person has poor memories of their own childhood, they may not want to have children either. But the main benefits of the child-centered culture to children are in their accomplishments and their safety, not their happiness. I speculate that in moving from 1950s childrearing to 2000s childrearing, parents have lost far more in autonomy than children have gained in happiness.

The counterintuitive result may be that the more effort we put into enriching our children's lives, the less likely we are to have grandchildren.

Contests of power and contests of discrimination

In World War II, we often knew where the German troops were located, but it was difficult and dangerous and a chancy matter to defeat them. Our power has grown to the point that in the initial stages of the Iraq war, we had no difficulty defeating Saddam Hussein’s armed forces. Any military target we could locate, we could destroy. We had a far more difficult time defeating them once they gave up their tanks and started using far less sophisticated weapons*. The problem has changed from one of a contest of power to a question of discrimination, in the original sense of “telling things apart”. We cannot easily defeat Iraqi fighters because we cannot easily distinguish them from the Iraqi population, which we do not want to destroy. The situation was almost the same in Vietnam.

The same progression has happened with our nonhuman foes. It has been some time since we had a raw contest of power with lions, tigers and bears. We have no trouble defeating them (so little, indeed, that such animals became endangered species). We can exterminate smaller foes such as rats and bugs in our houses, and the main difficulty is how to avoid poisoning the human residents at the same time. In the wild, the problem is how to avoid poisoning the rest of the ecosystem. Our most serious foes today are bacteria and viruses. It is easy enough to destroy them, as we do every time we sterilize medical instruments. The problem is destroying them while preserving the human bodies they live within. The most difficult discrimination problem is cancer, tissue that is so similar to us that it IS us, a small part run amok.

*This is a description of how things are, not how they should be. In writing dispassionately about how to destroy targets in Iraq, I am not addressing directly the question of whether that is a good idea. I do not intend this essay as a prescription for doing anything differently, just perhaps a slightly differently way of looking at things. But this perspective can be brought to bear on various other human conflicts too.