I find it incredibly odd that many western european (and many eastern as well) have this problem. What is it about this current generation of europeans that seem hostile towards the idea of having children?
I was in Germany this past x-mas break and people were astounded to hear of how my neighbors back in Florida has 5 kids and another has 4 children.
Another disturbing trend that I’ve noticed while I was in Rome was the **sheer ****number **of obviously illegal aliens roaming the streets as street vendors. It reminded me of some towns i visited that border Mexico, where a lot of the illegal flow comes into the US. What was really bizarre is how all those street vendors sold basically the same useless junk, is there a mafia connection here?
P.S.- to clarify, when I say “obviously illegal”, I mean because:
they barely, if at all, spoke Italian,
they scrambled every time a policeman would come by,
they simply don’t look italian, they were african or south asian or east asian, which could not mean anything but its worth mentioning
The character of the various nations is changing a lot with the influx of muslims. One thing I read is that arab oil countries insist that their students and “guest workers” going to Germany and Italy, etc. be assured they must not be required to be assimilated. I.e., not be required to give up wearing veils and carrying knives in their belts. Something odd there, but I guess oil rules the world, and if the arabs have an agenda then the old europe is going to be victimized by it.
gatroman, you might want to check your figures for the U.S. as well as Europe. While the U.S. is still home to a number of groups who tend to have families of 3 - 5 children, it is really not the norm and the U.S. birthrate is also falling.
High birthrates are a function of child mortality and poverty. People who expect to have to rely on their children for their support in their old age will produce children in order to have that support. People who are likely to lose several children to illness will have more children so that enough will survive to middle age in order to support the parents.
When children died with horrible frequency of pertussis, influenza, polio, measles, and dozens of other diseases that we now prevent or can medically mitigate, everyone had large families. In societies where the majority of people can rely on their own savings plus the support of the state to survive into their advanced years, they have less need to produce more children. With medical advances that have reduced or eliminated so many child-killing diseases, people have taken advantage of those two conditions to produce fewer children.
As to your “illegal immigrants,” you may have bit a bit hasty in your characteriztions.
You are probably correct that the people you saw were immigrants, based on clothing, langauge, and mannerisms. They may, in fact, be illegally in the countries you saw them. However, they might also:
be quite legally living there, but be operating illegal vending booths or carts, so that they are afraid of the police;
be legally operating their vendors booths, but come from a place where the police routinely shake down vendors so they flee out of habituated response;
or the local police might currently be shaking them down, making it a good idea for them to flee at the sight of police.
They also have to do with whether children are going to produce income for parents or cost parents money in a given culture. In the US, in middle-class and higher families, kids generally cost the parents money. In cultures where farming or family businesses are more common, kids might bring in money by working for those farms or businesses.
Or the police might not even be shaking them down, but just harassing them. Racial and ethnic profiling and discrimination are hardly unique to the US.
Women have rights these days in Europe; and while most want children, they generally don’t want to pop out baby after baby. It’s physically rather hard on them.
It’s no longer necessary for survival to have huge families, as most kids live.
Just wanted to mention that religion can also be an influence on family size. Mormons are known for having large families, as are those Catholics who follow the church’s ban on birth control. It also seems common among Protestant evangelicals.
The fact that religious life in Europe is generally more diminished than in the U.S. may account for much of what difference there is.
It’s cultural. Women have more freedom to pursue education/career. Nice houses etc. cost money and need two people working to pay for them. A growing middle class means that more educated independent women are hitting the scene.
A pull back from religion is also helping move the trend away from kids. People are generally having fewer kids later in life rather than popping them out while young and poor.
To add to tomndebb’s critique of gatorman’s “obvious” illegal immigrants: there are a fair few dodgy vendors in Italian cities, of various origins but often African, selling dubious shit on the streets - from knock-off Louis Vuitton bags to drugs. They might be therefore be legal migrants with an illegal profession.
As for not wishing to have a large family: I’m a Euro who is part of that phenomenon. I can’t explain it. I just don’t want kids. It might be something to do with affluence or education, or some reptilian-brian overpopulation prevention instinct.
My parents generation had lot and lots of families with 10+ kids. That was back when Catholic Ireland was good and strong. Now those types of families are rare.
For what it is worth, Quebec is today usually rated as the least-religious part of North America. Quebec also has one of the lowest birth-rates in Canada and the world.
Don’t let the Canadian census figures on religious affiliation fool you. Most nominal Roman Catholics in Quebec can’t be bothered to figure out what they are if not RC on the census form, so official figures still give RC as the religion of a majority. But I stress the “nominal”.
Anyhow, this is the same Quebec that 100 years ago was VERY Catholic and had HUGE families, even for that era.
In certain senses, Quebec is closer to Europe than North America in how it thinks.
About five years ago, Italy was being highlighted as the only country in Europe with a declining population.
Wonder if there’s any data on non-religious population vs. population growth. As yojimbo says, the size of families has plummeted in Ireland just in a generation. So has religious affiliation.
It would be interesting to see some real numbers. My sense is that the U.S. numbers plummetted just over a generation ago with no significant similar drop in “religion.” (The Pill helped.) However, I suspect that the driving force remains economic. Southern India, where most of the very recent electronic economic boom has occurred, has seen the sharpest fall-off in birth rates. In less prosperous Northern India, rates are falling more slowly with no serious intervention by the Catholic or Mormon churches. I have no idea whether Southern India is following Europe into secularism, abandoning Hinduism (or, where appropriate, Islam).
Same in the US, among Catholics. When I was a kid (in the 60s), lots of families (especially Catholic ones) had large number of kids. Maybe not 10, but 5 or 6 was not at all unusual. These days, that’s almost unheard of. I don’t think there are many US Catholics who pay attention the Church’s teachings on birth control. In fact, in a recent thread on abortion I pointed out polling data that showed American Catholic’s views on abortion to be pretty much the same as Protestants (statistically speaking).
Poland has one of the lowest fertility rates despite being one of the more Catholic countries in Europe.
Ireland has had a huge economic boom in the last few decades and become far less rural. I imagine that has more to do with the drop in fertility then loss of religion.
Women only have a window of fertility and once it is gone, it is gone. I have read that is one area modern medicine has made very little progress in although the perception tends to be very different. Women that are giving birth late especially celebrities are most likely using cutting edge fertility treatments to eek out whatever they have left or using donated eggs once their time has passed for their own. There is nothing wrong with that put it is time consuming and expensive and it isn’t a good way to pop out more than a kid or two.
The window for giving birth for middle-class women has shrunk drastically especially if they pursue traditional undergraduate or graduate school. That can easily take into the mid twenties or more and middle class standards dictate that they search carefully for a decent husband, get married, buy a house and then carefully plan children. Here in Massachusetts, it seems that the late 20’s - early 30’s is the accepted standard for anyone to finish those things and begin having children.
If you follow those steps carefully, it will dawn on you how much cash it will take to raise kids to the standard you have been accustomed to. Each one could easily approach $1,000,000 when it is all said and done and I can say from personal experience that is a nail biter. Professional working conditions are not usually parent friendly even if companies like the one I work for really try. There are too many obligations as a parent and a professional to be a one place or another and they can conflict badly.
The education required to get a job that puts you in the middle class or higher has risen, too. You need a college degree for that now, which you didn’t in the 1960s, AIUI. College tuitions have been rising very fast, much faster than inflation, and parents in the middle class and higher are expected to contribute at least something toward their childrens’ education. Those factors combine to make kids much more expensive now than they were then.
For what it is worth (and this is only anecdotal) I happen to be very familiar with a village in Quebec inhabited mainly by French-Canadian Protestants (you heard me right).
What I could not help but notice is that the poorer families are more likely to have more kids than they should, economically speaking. But nobody can say it is the Pope or the RCC’s position on birth control that determines this.
I don’t have statistics, but it sure seemed like the big families* were usually Catholics (not many Mormons around where I lived), and more often than not with Irish last names.
*I’m talking 5 or more kids. Families with even 3 kids were a lot more commen then than today, and they might very well have been non-Catholics, too.
I just read recently that the birth rate in Spain is negative. Given that the cost of renting an apartment (let alone buying a home) is so high, it’s really no surprise to me that very few people in their 30s or 40s can afford to have kids.