In countries with poor healthcare the numbers are high, around 5-6. But in countries with good healthcare the numbers are low, around 1-3.
I have heard reasons for this including;
In poor countries w/o healthcare some of the kids will die so the parents have more to make sure they have enough that survive to adulthood
In poor countries parents want more kids so the kids can support the parents when they are older
My understanding is if those countries with the 5-6 ratings develop more economically and develop better ways to fight childhood mortaility their ratings will drop to the 1-3 level.
Nonetheless, is there any reason the number seems to consistently stop at replacement (or below) levels across geographies and cultures? Alot of developed countries have below replacement levels (replacement is considered 2.1, many european countries are 1-2 and the EU as a whole is 1.47), but so do alot of developing nations. Countries of all types that seem to have moderately competent healthcare stop in the 1-3 range.
Is there something specific about humans that causes them to start underpopulating once we obtain wealth and (more importantly) healthcare? Is there some biological basis for why we stop at near or below reproductive levels, is it economic, is it cultural or do we not know? Across geography and culture, in countries with easy access/subsidized education and countries without it levels seem to hover in the 1-3 range once child healthcare is taken care of.
Wesley this is a great debate but it is also pretty obvious to me because I live in a state that is declining in population in spite of immigration. I see it as a matter of social dynamics and timelines. Any female from a reasonably affluent family in the Boston area is expected to go to college. The social mores dictate that you don’t need a hasband let alone a child while you are a student. That pushes the minimum marrying age for most out to 22. Many 3rd world women have had multiple children during that time. However, social mores also dictate that females do something with that education like start a career. Let’s say they are focused on that for 5 years. Marrying before 25 is slightly frowned upon here unlike my relatively poor hometown in Louisiana where people get married at 18. We won’t talk about grad school because they are in the minority but that pushes the age of reasonable childbearing out pretty far.
What you end up with is a majority population of females that believe they can put off childbearing easily into their early thirties while they carefully select and mate and make a career in the meantime. Fertility starts to plummet in the late 20’s even though most people associate that with women in their late 30’s. It may take a while. Wealth tends to beget debt and obligation to build up to the social standard and that takes time these days. These conventions also filter down to even the lower socioeconomic groups. A woman at 22 who has two kids is considered trash and suspect in many parts of the country today even though that was perfectly acceptable 40 years ago and probably biologically prudent even today.
Another contributing factor is expectations for your children. A 3rd world parent will have no problem with their children living in their low standards. A Boston area family will see each new child as a very expensive drain on resources in the short-term such as $1000 dollar a month daycare bills for each child below kindergarten and a $100,000+ future college bill for each child in the future and that doesn’t take anything in the middle into account.
Yeah I know, but it is the same across cultures. In S. Korea where they force education heavily and in the US with our lax k-12 education system the numbers are still low (S. Korea is lower however) in both places. In places like France or New Zealand where higher education is mostly/totally subsidized by the state and highly affordable the total fertility rate is roughly the same as countries like the US & Canada which have relatively expensive college. Plus in some developed nations daycare is mostly subsidized. So those daycare and college bills may not apply in the EU the same way they do in the US, but they both have TFR rates in the 1-3 range.
In the US we are educated, but not excessively. The high school graduation rate and college graduation rate are about 70% and 25% respectively, so only 25% of the population graduates from college, leaving 75% to start families in the 18-22 age (half the population starts college, and about half of them graduate). I was looking up the rates of primary & secondary education in third world countries on that list and most seem to have high rates (60-90%) of enrollment in secondary education if the birth rates are in the 1-3 range. There seems to be a correlation just by looking at the graph between amount of education and TFR rates.
I don’t think that most couples give a second’s thought to repopulation rates and such when thinking of childbearing.
To a lot of people (likely the majority, but I’m not going to go chase cites) having a child is one of the most important milestones in their life. It shows they are fully adult, they are giving back the care/time/love they received from their parents, and all that good stuff.
The thing is, one child is enough to satisfy that drive for many people: Been there, did that, got the stretch marks and baby to prove it.
Other people will go on to have a second child. Stronger drive, social pressure, wanting the first to have a sibling, wanting a boy for dad/girl for mom, lots of reasons. These people get their second child and declare the family ‘finished’.
I suspect what happens is that given a society in which you can pretty much expect every child born to grow up AND that allows easy control of fertility, most people pretty much find two childrn is “enough” to satisfy their appetite for child rearing.
There are also some other things that come along with a society advancing in Medicine. Once you have lights, Late-night cable and the Internet you have more options to entertain yourself after the sun sets.
IMHO in the U.K. it’s only the very rich and the poor (who get considerable welfare) who can afford to have more than two children - and the second is often a push. It’s taxes, mortgages, and rent that have bled the average family so much that it’s difficult to afford children.
Yeah but some EU countries have good welfare for families, Sweden for example, and their rate is 1.66. Plus alot of poor countries with low childhood mortality ratings also fall into the 1-3 range. Economics alone really can’t explain it because welfare countries and impovrished countries stabalize at about the same rates (I’m sure Sweden’s rates were 5-8 200 years ago, same as modern day northern African countries), although I’m sure it plays a role.
Mechanization of agriculture means less people farming, so you don’t need a bunch of kids to help out on the farm. Great grandma had 13 kids. Granny had 8. Dad just had one. Guess who moved off the farm?
There is also the fact that in cultures that have good health care systems and good education systems, it just plain costs more to have kids. There’s the cost of pregnancy and delivery, the cost of vaccinations and checkups, the cost of educating the kids (even public school isn’t free, since we do have to pay taxes to cover it, as well as all the field trip costs, supplies, etc.), the cost of housing them, etc. Having a child in the US is an investment in and of itself.
We have two kids, and when the second was about two years old, we decided that we simply couldn’t afford to support a third one, especially since the second one has ongoing health issues. (If we lived in a third world country with limited health care, the second one probably would have died at least three times by now, meaning that we probably would have been more willing to invest in a third or fourth child as support in our old age.)
If you don’t have effective birth control all bets are off, but if you are able to control the number of kids you have, you are likely to want more if they help you out economically, and fewer if they are more of an economic burden. It’s really that simple. We’re talking about averages, though, so don’t be surprised if there are exceptions. Mormons in the US have larger families than average not because of economic reasons but because of cultural (religious) reasons. Same with Catholic familes a generation or so ago.
I agree that agriculture is a big factor. Running a farm is a lot of work, and the only easy way to get that was to make lots of little farmworkers.
Another factor is traditional housing arrangments. It used to be very common for young married couples to live with the male’s parents, taking care of them in their old age. With changes in this, young people have to work harder to find suitable housing for raising kids and can be more mobile. It’s also less important to make sure you have kids- and more importantly sons- to take care of you in your old age since they won’t anyway. And without the emphasis on sons and back-up sons, there isn’t as much motivation to keep trying and seeing what you get.
[ul]
[li]Availability of birth control. Sex is fun. Absent birth control, people often have more children than they would really like, simply because they like having sex even more. The widespread availability of birth control means that people choose how many children they want to have, rather than having the number be an accident of timing and fertility.[/li]
[li]Women’s Emancipation. The entry of women into the workforce has changed the equation for child rearing. When it was expected that a woman would stay home and raise children, and there were few opportunities for women to work, then you got large families. Because it was cheaper to raise children, and because women had the time and energy to raise them. In addition, since they didn’t go to college, they started bearing children much earlier in life, and therefore had more time to bear lots of them. If you look at a lot of larger familiies, you’ll often see that the oldest kids are significantly older than the youngest. Ten years or more. Sometimes even twenty years separates the oldest from the youngest. That’s impossible if you start having kids at 35.[/li]
[li]Economics. Children have become net drains on a family, instead of a net benefit. In my grandparents’ day, having kids meant having extra workers on the farm. Kids started pulling their own weight *very early in life. Even the five year olds were expected to carry out their share of farm chores (collecting eggs in the morning, feeding chickens, etc). Kids were driving tractors and combines by age 12. [/li]
Today, kids are a huge economic drain. They bring no income into the house. They just add expenses. So there’s an economic motivation to have as few as possible.
[li]Social programs. Before we had a social safety net, your ‘safety net’ was a large extended family. Before we had Social Security, your retirement plan was to lean on your children. It was common for grandparents to move in with their adult children when they got to a certain age. If you got sick, the family pitched in to help you. Large families are a hedge against sickness, injury, and loss of income as you age. But today, we have social programs that do all this, which reduces the need for large, closely integrated families.[/li][li]Lower Infant Mortality. Another reason for having lots of children was to ensure that enough would reach adulthood to provide the social benefits above. Also, it may be somewhat psychological - the pain of losing a child is probably not as great if you have eight other ones than if it’s your only child. So people tended to pop them in large numbers.[/li][/ul]
In general, I’d say the real story is that the availability of birth control has allowed us to have the number of children we want, rather than the number of children fate bestows on us. And the other factors listed above tend to push developed nations towards a level somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5, depending on local mores and economic conditions. As a general rule, I’d say that modern, non-agrarian societies tend to produce children in numbers that allow for a fulfilling of the basic human desire to reproduce, and no more. Poor, agrarian societies tend to produce children at a higher level because there are significant economic advantages to doing so.
I don’t know tons about all the countries on earth, but even though I see the point of these arguments I do not know if they apply across the board to the world. I don’t know if Mongolia and Canada can be viewed the same way.
Mongolis has 42% of it’s people working in agriculture.
Unmechanized agriculture vs mechanized. Totally different thing. But what kind of agriculture, really? Traditionally, Mongolians are nomadic herders, not settled farmers.
Actually the (relative to other EU nations) higher birthrate in France is very often attributed to the wide availability of public daycare (still by comparison with these other EU nations). So, daycare might be a significant factor.
Might be a tangent here, but I take a bit of issue with this statement. This comment would suggest that parents of large familes don’t distinguish each child as a uniquely valued individual. I would be very surprised to find that there is any research to support that. If you are aware of a study that finds having many children means less attachment to each individual child I’d be curious to see it.
Yes, but Sam was talking about a time when infant and child mortality rates were much higher-most people expected to lose at least one child. It was still painful, but it wasn’t unexpected.
