Why do families of older generations have more kids. Two of my grandparents had ten kids in there families and one had seven kids in her family. So what the hell was goin on back then.
Well, since I’m pretty sure people haven’t given up on sex, I’m guessing the answer is “birth control”. (The birth control pill was introduced at the beginning of the 1960’s.)
Lack of birth control was a big part of it. Beyond the lack of some modern forms of birth control, people were loathe to seek out the existing forms of birth control due to religious or socialital reasons. After all, seeking birth control was admitting to whoever that you were, in fact, having sex (which was considered a private matter).
Beyond that, we have the religious reason to procreate and have large families. This, combined with the reason above, made Catholic families notorious for being large.
Abortion wasn’t as common, so it was doubtful that many people had one unless the reward was greater than the risk. To prevent a scandal or as a result of a rape you might seek an illegal abortion, but the typical housewife wouldn’t do so simply to avoid another child. I would imagine it was likewise with adoption; unless you had a pressing reason to give your child away, you probably wouldn’t seek this avenue (I don’t mean to belittle adoption, which is a wonderful thing, rather that I doubt many married 30 year old housewives were using adoption).
Farming and other blue collar families often had large families as a means of support. More children meant more hands to work.
There’s always the possibility that they just didn’t know better. This has been covered before, but there are those people who don’t put two and two together and realize that thier little trysts are leading the the extra mouth nine months later. However, given religious prohibitions against sex except to procreate I doubt this was the case.
Well, my wife and I had two sons and I said that was all the children I wanted. So she suggested we become foster parents. The end result was that we adopted one girl and a set of twins (girl and boy). Our case is quite unique, but it does make the point that you can’t just ask that question and expect an answer that covers it all.
I think that maybe now a lot of people choose to have small families because they spend a lot more money rearing children, and think that if they have a lot of children, they won’t be able to provide the same things. In any large families I know, there are fewer consumer goods and holidays, and the family might have an old car, but the children all learn to muck in and look after each other.
Some of the things that went into handling a larger number of kids would now be considered child abuse or neglect. My father-in-law was left alone for weeks at a time as a shepherd for his family when he was nine.
Also, expectations are different now. You’re expected to give more time and attention to your children and not expected to have as many.
I wonder if the high cost of college might be part of it. College is so expensive now, and it’s also become necessary for most good jobs. I’d like to have 3 or 4 children, but the thought of $125,000 x 4 kids scares me. Especially because it would all be due within about a ten year period. Also, people are older when they have children, so they would be 10-15 years away from retirement when the kids started college. Not a very comfortable time to begin going into debt.
There were also some pretty strong social pressures to have kids. I mean what kind of man were you if you weren’t able to knock up your wife every 2 years? And the opposite was also true.