The Wall Street Journal reports today that Americans had the lowest birthrate in 2009 that we have had in a century.
The U.S. birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century.
Births fell 2.7% last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.
"It's a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before," said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report.
The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That is down from 14.3 in 2007 and 30 in 1909, when it was common to have big families.
It is an interesting phenomena that Americans and most other industrialized nations are seeing birthrates shrinking year after year, especially since the population is living longer and the ballooning amount of unfunded mandates is going to fall on the shoulders of an increasingly smaller pool of workers.
Some of this clearly has to do with extending “adolescence” (more on that in a later post). It also has to do with the equation many people have pounded into them that children are a liability and should be factored into your budget like a new car or funding your Roth IRA. When the economy goes bad, people cut back on all sorts of stuff including children. I don’t think that people have to have as many kids as they physcially can but I certainly disagree with the notion that kids have to be built into your budget like anything else. I wonder how many people that put off having kids or having more kids pay bills for cable, Netflix, internet, multiple cell phones, new cars and annually take expensive vacations. In many ways it seems that we make all sorts of luxuries “necessities” and see children as “discretionary”.
I fully expect this behavior from the world but from fellow believers I see a very similar attitude, an attitude of “children are a blessing but I don’t think I can handle more than a couple of blessings”. The voluntary restrictions on family size in the Body of Christ speaks to how deeply we have embraced what the world values and how thoroughly many of us see God’s blessings as incompatible with our lifestyles. Is it better to not have children because they are “so expensive” or is it better to have and love children who wear hand me downs, never go to Disney and perhaps can’t afford to go to the best colleges?
We go into debt to finance an unsustainable and empty lifestyle and go to extremes to prevent children from coming into this world. If that isn’t a sign of a society that is on the precipice of disaster, I don’t know what is.
1 comment:
The stats are there. And yet I look around me and see new babies everywhere, more than I've seen in many years.
Maybe this is because I've become a grandmother again 6 times in less than 2 years. And because on my face book page of over 500 friends (who I do know!), my many young friends seem to all be having babies - repeatedly. And they seem to be having them at younger ages again (late teens and early twenties). And many of the young parents are in what seem to be surprisingly stable relationships (though not necessarily legal marriage).
Unlike my generation who so often put career and nest egg and multiple relationships first, and then perhaps rushed to catch up with the running-down biological clock.
(Though at the same time I also do see young women having babies on their own because a lot of young men are still acting like young teens well into their post-teen years - and our society encourages them)
Maybe it's where I live. Maybe it's the people I know (having 5 kids of my own in their twenties, its inevitable, I suppose, that I meet and notice that age group).
But I'll be curious to see how the stats look in the next few years.
And, oh dear, I'm afraid my kids are among the ones who never got to Disney, didn't get to the best colleges, and definitely wore hand-me-downs. And I don't see their babies headed toward having a "better" life, if the world's toys are the barometer of success. But it does look to me like they're very loved - and their young parents are loosening their grip on their own toys in the process.
As far as "the church" goes, hardly any of these young people I know are part of the "traditional church" though many of them grew up in it ... but they seem to be far more interested in spiritual things in all aspects of their lives than their parents who kept the spiritual side nicely boxed up in its little box; and more and more of these young parents are learning to live loved in relationship with Jesus. And their children are growing up in that. So I'm hopeful.
Maybe there are changes developing that the stats haven't caught up with. Or maybe I live in an unusual niche of society. Well, of course, I am Canadian... lol..
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