As I understand it, the main problem in the US is not population growth, which would be steady-if-not-declining were it not for immigration and the larger families new immigrants tend to have, but number-of-households growth. Single, divorced, and small-family people who once would have lived with extended family (or whatever) now tend to live alone and so on–in general, there are fewer people per household and thus a much larger need for housing. It takes up much more physical space and more resources than the old model.
The vast majority of Americans now consider 2 children to be the norm, and many of them never have any at all. Three is a lot. (Everyone likes larger houses, too.) This is barely a replacement birth rate; additional population comes (as above) largely from immigration and the attending effects. In several countries in Europe, as well as Japan, the same trends have led to a pool of retirees nearly as large as the pool of workers, which spells trouble for government pension plans and so on. Germany, I hear, will soon have more pensioners than workers, which should get interesting.
Now, I do not care how many children any of you have, as long as you care for them (should they exist at all). But telling Cess and others with large families that they are single-handedly ruining the Earth is ridiculous. It’s just far more complex than that, and some economic factors actually render us dependent on people willing to raise large families.
The ‘replacement level’ of births per woman is 2.1. In the United States, only 11 states have replacement-level populations, according to the National Center on Health Statistics. The rest have below-replacement fertility rates.
But you are right that the US population is continuing to rise.
There are two reasons for this: One is that old people are living longer. Fewer deaths, not more births.
The second reason is immigration: America’s low birth rate is offset by the fact that a lot more people move to America than move away.
Educate yourself. Temporary classrooms have little or nothing to do with population growth as you describe it. They are MANDATED in California districts. Each school must have a certain percentage of them, because during student population swings a few decades ago, schools were closing and it was a huge waste of money. So now, modular classrooms are required, even if you are building a brand-new campus.
And as for culture, well I can’t think of a less appropriate username.
First my SUV used too much gas, and now my kids use too much air and water? What an idiot (or small group of them).
I don’t mind if people express interest in whether we’ll have another, but I do mind their passing judgment on our current preference keep our family at one. Which is I think what most people in this thread are having. There are pluses and minuses to every family size. We’ve figured out which tradeoffs work for us. End of story.
As for large families, they might inherently require more resources, but in my experience they use what they have much more efficiently than smaller families. Know many large families where every teenager gets his or her own car? How many of those little single-serving juice boxes do you think a large family wastes time with? I could go on. My friends with six kids know more about economy and conservation than I probably ever will. Good for them.
I feel bad about one time in the supermarket when a father was shopping with four girls of varying ages. I thought it was the neatest tableau and I cheerfully remarked “You’re outnumbered!” He sort of glared at me, and I realized after a few seconds (and after he went past) that it probably sounded like a critical comment to him–perhaps because he hears them too often.
I had to tell one of my co-workers that I traded in my biological clock for an overclocked CPU because she wouldn’t stop asking when I’m going to ‘settle down, get married, and have some kids’.
It’s nobody’s business but the people who want the kids how many they have, if any at all, and people just don’t seem to get the idea that it’s a personal issue. There are some real winners out there when it comes to the ‘butting into the private lives of others’ category at the ‘Academy of Assholes’ awards, for example the guy who said to my mother in front of my father in a grocery store while they were there with my sister (sis was a baby, very blonde, and parents both have dark hair) that they never heard of two people with brown hair having a ‘toe headed baby’. Hey, why not just ask my mother flat out of if she cheated?
I cannot figure out why so many people think that the size of someone else’s family should be exactly to their specifications, or what comments are OK to make about someone’s kids, and I’ve heard some gems. One in particular almost made Mom slug someone in K-Mart.
When I was born, I was blind. Not as in ‘all babies see poorly for x months’ but as in until I was two years old and got glasses, the best I could do was distinguish if it was daytime or nighttime. So I was a little kid, I wore some pretty thick glasses and I was teased quite a bit when I started kindergarten. Some clown at K-Mart decided to comment to my mom about how ‘awful’ it was that she put me in those ‘coke bottles’ because other kids would tease me. My mom amazingly did not remove his lungs but replied ‘Yes, well it’d be more awful for her to go through life blind now wouldn’t it?’.
The size of someone else’s family and the disabilities their kids have are not an open invite for interrogation or criticism. Yeesh.
I’m not sure how clear I was in my OP…but to clarify, I did not say that our family has made the decision to stop at one kid.
GreenBean helped me clarify the “expressing interest” question as well. If someone asks, “so do you know if you want to have more kids”, I’m not real bothered by that (although it seems odd, I guess for a passing aquaintance to ask). It’s the assumption, sometimes implicit–in the case of the OP, EXPLICIT…that having a single child is somehow an inferior or odd choice.
On the other side of the spectrum…passing judgement on larger families seems absurd for different reasons. My uncle and his wife have 9 kids. I could never envision that for myself…but what a glorious household to visit!
If we’re talking water, air etc. It’s not the family units (houses, apts, cars) that are doing the majority of the polluting and decreasing resources.
It’s the large industries. EPA is doing it’s best to keep up with enforcement of clean air and water acts. But in many areas there are as few as 2 inspectors for several million people.
Many industries still think it’s perfectly acceptable to just dump “stuff” they are done with in the woods, streams and even out in the open.
There is a cottage industry (albeit an illegal one) to assist those who don’t want to pay for proper disposal of their hazardous wastes in getting rid of it through illegal means (dumping it into our wooded areas, where it qucikly goes into the water table by natural attenuation).
Since 2000, the funding which once would have been used in enforcing EPA regulations has been slowly choked down and shunted to the DoD for war time efforts.
Not to mention someone might be having a problem conceiving, or whatever.
There’s almost seven years between Singing Princess and I because my mom suffered from endometriosis. Way to make her feel better!
Hell, my great-grandmother had a few miscarriages, some stillborns, and my grandmother had three brothers die before the age of 6! Won’t that make her happy!
Given that it’s a voluntary choice, why else would they make that choice? Five or seven kids…maybe they like prime numbers? Eight kids… maybe they like exponents of 2?
And frankly I do denigrate the choice for a large family. We’re quick to criticize those who drive around in gas guzzling behemoth SUV’s, and agree with that criticism. But it’s highly hypercritical that, on one hand, the right to unlimited procreation seems to be so sacrosanct as to be beyond debate or criticism, while on the other hand we proclaim the virtues of conservation in every other sphere.
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I agree with his/her premise. I can’t say if I agree with him/her completely, because I don’t know how he/she would want to implement that “say”. If you mean, do I think there should be laws against having large families, then the answer is no. But if you mean do I think that smaller families should be officially encouraged, and contraception made available without limitations due to religious objections, then I agree with that.
It’s ironic that pro-contraception, pro-small-family used to be more acceptable 30 years ago when our population (in the U.S.) was about two-thirds of what it is now. I remember ZPG TV spots; one of which wound up by saying, “There are lots of wrong reasons to have another kid”. Nowadays, it’s presumably too un-PC; as such a message would undoubtedly offend somebody’s religion or culture.
I’m one of nine. Second oldest, oldest girl. I have 6 brothers and 2 sisters. My parents would have had more, but my mom got too old. ^^
I love it.
My family is the greatest thing in my life. My house is always full of people, it is so open and fun. There’s always someone to talk to, always someone to hang out with. When my friends come to visit, they are a bit unnerved at first, because there are people EVERYWHERE, but they eventually come to love it.
We have a rather large house with 6 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms and my parents have sent us all to private schools from kingdergaten on (and are sending the older ones to college now), so it’s not like public dollars are being used to support us. Still, we get a lot of nasty comments. People’ve said things like “it should be illegal to have that many kids”. Which really pisses me off.
Why should it bother you? If my parents can afford to feed, cloth, house and send us to the best schools money can buy, why should you care?
I would love to have a large family of my own some day, but I have decided against having children for medicial reasons. I might adopt though.
auntie em are you me? That’s pretty much the situation I’m in. I have two older sisters, ten and seven years older than me. As a child, I was the youngest. As a teenager, I was an only child. As an adult, I am an aunt. Best of all worlds I say.
Can I add my own rant here? When I say I don’t want children, do not tell me I’ll change my mind. When I tell you I can’t change my mind because giving birth would be bad for my health, do not give me that “poor you” look or I’m liable to smack it right off your arrogant face. No, I do not want to adopt. I’ve spent enough time around kids to know that I would be a lousy mother. Great aunt, but lousy mom.
I just tell people I ripped my biological clock out, stomped on it, set it on fire, and shot it out of a cannon.
I see some typos in my last post, but I can’t seem to quote it for some reason.
I meant that I agree with the criticism of SUV’s (word I was omitted in original; and that pro-ZPG propaganda used to be more acceptable (word propaganda was omitted in original.
[jerking knee] I can’t believe then number of people in this thread who say that they were an only child and liked it.
The fact that I was an only child for eleven years is the exact precise reason why I will never have a one-child family. Zero kids - fine (actually, that’s probably not an option now ) Two, three, four … no problems. Anything but one.
[/jerking knee]
Whew. Thankyou for letting me get that off my chest.
Anyway, back to the OP … yes, it’s completely jerkish to comment on someone’s family size unasked. If anyone asks me, I’m more than happy to give my opinion on only-childness, and it’s a pretty negative one (wouldna guessed, would you?). Otherwise its zipped lip time.
Of course, people like that are usually incapable of keeping their trap shut on other issues too. “When are you going to get a steady boyfriend?”…“When are you getting married?”…“When are you going to have your first kid?”. In such cases even a big steaming cup of STFU isn’t enough … we need the stuff on tap in every major metropolis!
I dunno…because they enjoy having kids…they enjoy the dynamics of a larger family (which does notmean that they think having fewer kids is not a real family…your words, remember?)
Umm and contraception does “what” for folks who voluntarily choose to have larger families (that’s who you were flinging your denigration at…remember?)
And how exactly would smaller families be "encouraged?.. tax payers paying for PSAs that say javaman and zpg don’t want you to have more kids? (JohnT, autz and others in other threads have pointed out the dubious nature of your overpopulation from babies premise)
Huh …so far in this thread, you’re the only person to mention religion and culture as the rationale for family size. Most posters have just said it’s none of your damn business. :rolleyes:
that damn rolleyes again. Wouldn’t be allowed in GD.
I mention religion and culture because those are among the factors that strongly correlate with large family size. At any rate, I’m not going to argue with you anymore. If by some bizarre chance the survival of the human race depended on not putting more than a dozen eggs into a standard twelve-egg carton, you’d no doubt say it was anyone’s right to try to force in an extra egg.
) Two, three, four … no problems. Anything but one.