So, can we agree that the shift from high-labor farming, where children provide cheap labor and can be an economic asset, to urban dwelling where children are an economic liability, is a major reason behind lower birth rates?
I personally can’t agree with that. To me it does not seem that the major issue is an economic incentive one.
So for example the insular and religious groups of the Amish and NY Orthodox Jews both have high birthrates despite one being rural and one urban.
I didn’t say “the only reason”, i said, “a major reason”. And the religious laws those NY Orthodox Jews are following were written when the vast majority of people they applied to were traditional farmers and herders, for whom those rules made economic sense.
Habits and customs lag economics.
I’m not even convinced it is one of the major ones. I see little evidence that economic analysis of the costs and benefits plays into the decision as the general rule.
Yes there is a rural urban correlation. But doubting that economic value of the children is the causation.
The usefulness of lots of children was probably one of the major reasons that having lots of children was considered normal. Along with other admirable factors such as a big family was seen as a status symbol and sign of fertility. As those things have become less important and admired, they aren’t as big a factor in what people think is normal and expected. But in insular communities with a strongly confirming culture, they can create an artificial social pressure that makes people feel inferior if they don’t have a big family.
I would say it is ONE factor. The degree to which it is “major” might well vary from country to country and place to place, or even socio-economic level of the people in question.
Amish
The Amish are increasing less rural than they used to be due to rising land prices. A lot of Amish are working in factories now, and some groups have loosened restrictions on using technology like computers in a work environment because of the need for employment.
However, even in non-farming situations the low-tech lifestyle of the Amish means more manual labor about the household. Which means young children/teens are still an asset to the family to help get all the work done. Amish kids don’t sit around playing Fortnite all afternoon, and not just because they’re not allowed electronic games. They have lots of chores to do.
And yes, their religious belief systems are welcoming to large families.
There are a few indications that the Amish birth rate, while still high in comparison to the rest of North America, is starting to level off or even slightly decrease. Still well above replacement rate.
NY Ultra-Orthodox
The Ultra-Orthodox (UO) Jews have the religious “be fruitful and multiply” mandate, but I’ve always gotten a “we need to replace the 6 million lost in the Holocaust” vibe from them as well. They also make ample use of any and all government aid, which is often pegged to the number of dependents in a household. I don’t think those are the ONLY reasons they have kids, but it all factors into the equation.
Both communities
Birth control is discouraged, to the point of being forbidden outside of a very narrow set of conditions (typically, for treating some sort of serious health disorder)
Pretty much everyone gets married. The exceptions are few.
Pretty much everyone gets married young - the average Amish woman has her first child around 22 years old. The average UOJ woman has her first around 23. Contrast this with the average US woman’s first child, at 27. The Amish and UOJ women can easily fit in another 1-2 children into their reproductive years than the average US woman just by starting earlier (some will even manage more than 2, assuming 1 child every 2 years). They’re reproducing in the prime years, biologically speaking, for women to have children.
Community support - this can’t be overemphasized. BOTH communities support young people getting married, getting jobs, getting housing, and having kids. Young man needs a job? The community will try to connect them with one. Married couple just had a kid? Lots of folks to help out, help cook, help clean, provide diapers, clothes, cribs, etc. as well as someone being a sitter for the kid(s) so the parents can occasionally catch a break.
Oh, and motherhood is seen as a valuable “career” option for a woman. No one is derided as a “stay at home mother” or a “welfare queen”. It is also possible for women in either community to run businesses, which is also seen as praiseworthy, but if a woman puts raising a family first that’s seen as laudable, not lazy or irresponsible.
Producing the next generation is seen more as a group effort and less solely individual choice/responsibility/liability.
Here we’re getting back into “potentially unhealthy reasons to have kids” territory, ISTM.
Yes, society needs to provide more support and respect for having kids. And especially needs to integrate parenthood better with other lifework such as career and other interests.
But IMHO we should not be working to re-establish parenthood as a personal glorification for the bragging rights. Selfish ambition is not a healthy parental motive. As you rightly note, everybody’s motives for everything are at least somewhat selfish; but it’s not a good idea for society to focus on encouraging the selfish parts.
Nope, let’s keep social policy goals centered on making life easier and healthier for parents and kids, and integrating them better into our economic structures. We can leave it up to adults to decide whether and why they personally want to have kids, without handing out Olympic-type Motherhood Medals or intangible equivalents in personal social status.
I suspect that if we really get adequate social support for parenthood (and that will probably involve some amount of decoupling parenthood expectations from monogamous partnerships), we’ll get enough adults choosing parenthood voluntarily, even if they’re not being overtly pushed toward it as an image-boosting status symbol.
I think the elephant in the room here is that both Orthodox Jewish and Amish communities are strongly patriarchal, with a lot less agency for women than most women in developed societies expect.
The core conundrum for developed societies is going to be figuring out how to copy the aspects of such cultures that healthily support parenthood, without valorizing their traditional sexist structures that in practice are probably a major factor in their high fecundity.
Not so much the elephant in the room as something to contemplate. How can we create a society supportive of children without what regard as the toxic elements of religious patriarchy?
By collectively deciding to. Which makes it both hard and easy; easy because we can just decide to think that way any time we collectively want to, and hard because most people don’t want to.
And the simple fact that no matter how wealthy you were childhood mortality was scary high until fairly recently in history, more recently in some places than others. We really underappreciate the impact basic sanitation, antibiotics, and immunizations have had.
Maybe I travel in specific circles but the only people I see derided for that are those holding their trad lifestyle as the superior choice. Dads staying at home may have a tougher row to hoe.
True. My brother-in-law was a stay-at-home dad for awhile. It made sense though - he had just been laid off and his wife not only had a full time job and medical insurance I think her salary might have been higher than his, anyway. It was the right choice for more than one reason.
Even so, I’m certain there where nosy-nobodies commenting about how lazy he was, and taking advantage of her, and what kind of woman would choose a career over her kids, and all the other tired bullshit.
Let’s try a different angle.
Accept that every decision is ultimately a selfish one.
For my wife and I the selfish decision was to have four kids. Starting out when she was early in her career after graduate school and while I was an intern working longer hours than any Japanese salaryman. Not worried about needing adult children to later care for us or to help us economically. Knowing they would be a huge cost. And they have been. Continuing despite significant postpartum issues each time and adopting the forth time because of that.
We clearly had some selfish desire met. Hard to express what it was.
Yet for our children, to date, none are seeing having children as the selfish choice. One at 39 still thinks he might at some point. The youngest plans on it after she is done with grad school, and career established, assuming the right partner at that point. One middle in a long term partnership and the plan is no kids ever. The next sees romance as too much work.
So what has changed that the selfish decision for my wife and me was to have four kids, but our kids seem to not see it the same way?
I really don’t know.
For one thing, I think it’s a lot tougher for people to make any definite plans about when to have kids when there’s no partner in the picture, or in the pipeline.
For another, when it comes to analyzing “selfish” motives, I would distinguish between those along the lines of “I want to have kids because it will be deeply personally fulfilling for me and I will enjoy loving them” and those along the lines of “I want to have kids because they’ll care for me in my old age” or “because they’ll eventually help support me” or “because I’ll get more social status and admiration if I’m a parent”.
No, there’s nothing wrong with having any of those types of motives be part of the factors incentivizing parenthood, but ISTM that the first type ought to play by far the biggest role in the decision.
Thinking it over, ISTM that a big part of our problem with demographic trends is that societies have something of a tendency to facilitate their social engineering aims via social stigma, particularly towards women.
Is our top priority increasing productivity and economic growth to maximize returns for wealthy elites, hopefully with some positive side-effects for non-elites as well? Great, then we stress the importance of ambitious careers and two-earner families, with disdain for the so-called “takers” who “aren’t pulling their weight” because they want to work less.
Is our top priority shifting towards encouraging higher fecundity so that our wealthy elites won’t lose money (with corresponding greater suffering for non-elites) in an economy contracting due to demographic decline? Great, then we lament the decline of parenthood and demand more social pressures on young people to become parents.
Ultimately, I think societies are going to have to focus on supporting their people in whatever kind of fulfilling and socially constructive lives they want to have. If that leads to increasing or decreasing populations overall, then we have to find ways to cope with that. But deliberately pressuring individuals to make this decision or that decision about partnership, parenthood, choice of career, etc., should be a last resort.
In particular, we should stop trying to scare people into making major commitments for their entire adult lives in the hopes of some short-term benefits at the very end of their lives. I have heard people earnestly advise others to find someone to marry and have kids with “so you won’t die alone”, and I think, really? Is the prospect of spending the very last hours or even weeks of your life without the constant companionship of someone close to you really so daunting that that should be a major reason to devote several decades to developing such companionship? Shouldn’t people be making their life choices based on how they want their lives to be, rather than how they want their eventual deaths to be?
(Disclaimer: I don’t imagine that most people really do make major decisions about marriage and parenthood based on literal fear of dying alone. But the fact that that’s even seen as any kind of legitimate argument for marriage or parenthood seems to me a bit weird.)
See also: “No one ever said on their deathbed that they wished they’d spent more time at the office.”
Well, it helps being a society dominated by Jewish mothers.
I kid, but based on what I’ve seen, culturally, having children is a higher priority for Israelis than elsewhere, even among middle-class professionals, and employers are forced to accommodate them. We’re also better at maintaining a work/life balance. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s simply that Israeli workers are more culturally inclined to stand up for their rights, including the right not to work too hard. “Take this job and shove it” is practically our national motto.
I don’t know that the phrase “so you won’t die alone” is really about who you die with - after all, even if you get married and have a wonderful relationship with your partner for the rest of your lives, unless you die in an accident at the same time, one of you will still die “alone”.
I think it’s more of a shorthand way of saying, you don’t want to end up at the end of your life realizing that you never did find a partner.
The assumption there is that it’s something you want, which obviously not everyone does. I’m sure there are people who get to the end of their lives and they’re very happy that they never wasted time on a partner or kids.
Is that one about “how they want their eventual death to be”, or is it about how they want their life to have been?
This is anecdotal evidence, but when I compare my American friends (at least those I knew before having kids, obviously there’s a selection bias for people I met once I had children, who all also have children) to my Israeli cousins, in the same age group, basically all of my cousins are married, with kids; and basically none of my American friends are. It’s a very stark difference.
What’s funny is that maybe 10 years ago, my wife would say that she thought people in Israel are starting their lives so late, because from 18-20 or 21 they’re in the army, and they only start higher education once they’re done with the army. She would compare us, and where we were in our lives, to my Israeli cousins, who were basically doing the same thing we were but delayed by about 5 years.
Fast forward to now, and it turns out we were basically a statistical anomaly in the US; no one else in our pre kid friend group, or of her family, is even close to having kids (other than one friend who did the get knocked up, get married, have a second kid, get divorced speed run).
I had my first child at age 30. I joked about being the first kid on the block to have kids. My college friends mostly followed in a few years, or didn’t have kids.
I had kids because i didn’t want to die alone. And yes, i absolutely mean that as being about how i live my life, not literally how i die. But i grew up in a close family, and really enjoyed being part of a family. And it occurred to me that if i wanted to continue being able to do that, i ought to make some younger family to have around as i got old. Only one of my 3 sibs had kids, but I’m close with one of his offspring, too. Sadly (for me) i don’t think either of my kids will have children. But they will likely outlive me, so I guess that’s their problem, not mine. And one, at least, is investing heavily in the child of a close friend. (He eats dinner with them every week, and spends a lot of time with the kid.)
My husband’s uncle died alone, literally, and that was very much as he would have wanted it. He was a curmudgeon who mostly didn’t like other people. Although he did encourage my husband to invest in my family, because he could see that it was functional and supportive.