All right everyone, here goes nothing, first blog entry. Also, full disclosure, what I’m going to be talking about is just my opinion about what I have been learning, I am not a renowned researcher or anything, just a college student sharing some thoughts.
The family, what many would call the main unit of society and I would have to agree with them. It’s in our families where life begins, where we learn to eat, walk, tie our shoes, tease our siblings, and ride a bike. There have been many changes to the family and what is considered normal just in the last 70 years.
Let’s start with the baby boom, a term that I’m sure most are familiar with, but just as a refresher, it was right after world war II when men came back from the and lots of babies were made. This term makes it sound like that people were having five or more children, but the statistic is actually 3.7 children per woman (I have no idea how you can have 7 tenths of a child, but there you go). The boom lasted from about 1946 till about 1964, with around 76 million births during this segment of time. That’s a lot of humans adding to the population and a lot of families!
I think adding to the number of families in the world is amazing, but not everyone thought so. A guy named Bob Ehrlich wrote a book in 1968 called the population bomb, where he wrote about his predictions if the population continued to grow. He claimed that there would be environment degradation, and millions would be starving to death, and we would run out of resources. These are things we have been lead to believe for a long time, but what I didn’t know was that these conclusions were pulled from one group of people that Ehrlich saw on his personal travels. All the panic that has been spread about over population was drawn from one mans findings from one area of the world, which if you ask me is pretty skewed. He seriously freaked people out at the time and his influence is still lingering today.
What experts have actually found is that fertility rates and population rates have actually slowed and we are no where near “overpopulation”. People having less children and it has more to do with the changes in the world and its culture more than people being more aware and not wanting to “overpopulate”. Here are some reasons for this decrease in the US:
- Individualism: people focused on themselves ans their own life goals.
- Fear of not having enough money to raise kids
- Increase of the age at which women are having children
- Birth Control
- Mom’s working outside the home
- Simply choosing not to have kids
Some More trends in the States that are changing the face of the family include:
- Increased premarital sex
- Increase in people living alone
- Increase in cohabitation before marriage
- It has also been found that those who cohabit before marriage are 3 times as likely to get divorced after marriage.
- The average age of marriage for women in the United States is about 27 and 29.8 for Men.
All these changes that are affecting the family are really taking a toll on society, more than I think we realize. This decrease in population growth also means a decrease in human capital, meaning there aren’t as many people to bring their own ideas, skills, and differences to humanity. There aren’t as many people out there helping to make the world a better place, to find cures for diseases, help solve environmental problems, or become those who will teach the next generation. With more people there would be more motivation to find new ways of doing things, to find new resources. I am by no means saying that everyone should go out and have 7 children, but just take some time to really think about how important families really are to society as a whole.
My own family means the world to me and I don’t know where I would be without them in my life today.
Relationship Backpack 