by Craig Willms
I remember that day a few years ago, I remember it well... What a day it was! Spring was in the air and the desire to get out in the sun was strong. It felt like there was magic in air as we began our daily walk. It was nice to feel the cool breeze carrying a hint of solar radiation. The birds were singing in surround sound, and I swear I heard a motorcycle somewhere in the distance. It was glorious. Then my wife asked, "where are the kids?"
It's one of those things that didn't register until it was brought to light. The absence of children's happy voices outside was profound. It was the very first spring-like weather we'd seen after a long snowy winter that year, every kid should have been delirious with glee. We walked through a neighborhood of single-family homes for 35 minutes before we came across kids playing outside in the melting snow. Where are the kids indeed?
In the 1960's and 70's when I was a kid you could count the number of houses on your block that did not have children on one hand. We were everywhere. It was normal. It's all we knew. We were raised by a generation that didn't talk about their past in depth and kept personal things to themselves. So, if it was any different before the baby boom generation how would we know? We became conditioned to believe it would always be this way.
I don't have to go far to see a snapshot of what happened to the kids. If I look at my own family on the maternal side, there's a clear decline in the number of babies per generation. Grandma Rose had 10 kids, Mom had 7, her kids gave her 18 grandchildren collectively. Eighteen sounds like a large number of grandkids for Mom but consider that Grandma had 45. Between my siblings and I we've ranged from 1 child to 4 children. None of us will even come close to 18 grandkids. This scenario repeated itself in some form all across the country, the world. Personally my wife and I raised two kids, we currently have 3 grandchildren.
Most people don't realize how dire the situation is. The population collapse is happening in slow motion all around us. The numbers are the numbers, it's already happened, we have yet to feel the repercussions of it. It's the 'already, not yet' paradox. Most people are still steeped in over-population rhetoric, after all the human population is still going up. It's like a truck being pushed uphill and we are still rolling forward the last few inches on momentum alone. Soon the truck will start rolling backwards picking up speed as the years go by. Since we baby boomers have worked our 45 years, raised our children and now have retired the evidence of a dearth of babies isn't yet obvious. There are still a lot of people everywhere. Fact is, when the old outnumber the young it's not going to be a sustainable situation. We only have ourselves to blame, I guess. I'm not sure if it's possible to pin what has happened on just one culprit.
Yet, there is a profound difference in attitudes toward children among the current generation. In the distant past a woman would have six children to have 2 survive. Now in the modern world child mortality has decreased so as to be an insignificant statistic. With each woman having just 2 babies replacement rate would have been achieved. But it wasn't. Why not? When the statistics are crunched it turns out that the number of babies per mother has not changed much since the end of the baby boom in 1963, but the number of mothers has fallen through the floor. So, to restate, it's not that mothers are having fewer children, it's just that the number of women who become mothers is shrinking. And what that means is that there will be that many fewer potential mothers to propagate the future. I'm afraid to say it's a terminal decline.
Selfishly I could say "so what?" I'll be dead soon. But that is certainly not how I feel. The mathematical certainty of this knowledge just came to light for me in the last year or so. I've known intuitively that something was wrong for a long, long time. So many people I'd come across in professional life were choosing to be childless. There were just a few people you knew with large families of 5 or more children. They convey stories of how they had taken criticism from friends and family when they would announce their 4th or 5th pregnancy. It made me sad. Having grown up in a large family I knew the adventure they were on. It is an adventure fewer and fewer people will ever share.
The movement from a historically dispersed and largely rural population to an urban centric population is probably the largest contributor to this situation. The urban environment doesn't reward a large family. There are higher costs that repress child rearing in an urban setting. As housing costs swell in the city buying a larger home for a larger family becomes prohibitive. The larger house requires a larger income and that leads to both adults working outside the home - leading to fewer children in a viscous cycle. In the modern paradigm the cost of living rises exponentially with each child, this was not the case in the past.
That people face challenges raising children in this new urban centric standard is not minor, but it is largely a mechanical situation. The psychological barrier could prove to be greater. People don't want children, or they are being told they don't want children. From the shaming parents get when they have more than two or three kids to the armageddon that is predicted if "we" do not stop adding mouths to feed, the average couple is being brainwashed against becoming parents at all. Their selfishness is being encouraged and prodded by a coordinated cultural push to disfavor family. Live your best life now, take that (expensive) vacation, buy that boat or the sports car right now, why wait... The messages people receive from the culture and their childless friends goad them to forgo family in favor of fun. Then there is the insidious decades old anti-Christian rhetoric that further erodes the drive to have traditional families.
In the near future when the adult population reaches the age when they need special care in their final years there will be no one to provide it. The elderly and the dying will be warehoused and neglected, and most probably they will be unceremoniously euthanized. Roll that around in your head for a while... Is that what you want? There will be no one to care about you the way we cared for our parents in their final years. Maybe then you'll think, gee I wish I had had kids... Too late.
There is not much that can be done about it now. Any action to turn the tide would need to have happened 20 or 30 years ago. Even if every woman of childbearing age had three or four children this generation, it wouldn't reverse what's coming. There's a chance it could stabilize at some point, however there's no evidence that anti-human attitudes will ever change if the current anti-baby culture doesn't moderate. There are enough people who realize that something is dreadfully wrong with the culture, but they are clueless about what can be done. So, they do nothing or go along to get along. The culture we find ourselves in was methodically manipulated to socially chastise and enslave the very same people the corporate hierarchical system lashes to the debt treadmill. One system tries to create an illusion of freedom and a semblance of self-determination, and the other makes no pretenses, you will assimilate, hate on babies and religion or you will be destroyed. Neither system is an ideal to strive for or innately righteous, but don't kid yourself one is far better than the other.
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