and this, too, shall pass

Reproduction was serious matter in pre-industrial days, as it still is in today’s poor South. By helping around the house or working outside for wage, children contributed since an early age to the family. Nobody in the West complained about child labor before the 19^th century. More importantly, as many modern-day Americans still know when they wire money to the old country, children were also—- the only pension scheme available to their parents. With babies being such a necessity, people sought to maximize their chance of having enough of them. When life expectancy at birth struggled to reach 30, the rational way to do it was to have as many as you could so that one or two would hopefully make it through. 

Modernization changed all that. First, a drop in child mortality gave parents the confidence to cut births. A few contraceptive techniques that had always existed, mainly the biblical coitus interruptus, sufficed to halt population explosions in 19^thcentury Europe, betraying therefore a lack of interest, not technical know-how, earlier. Next, the mass exodus from the countryside brought birth numbers further down. In a farmer’s world, parents could use the importance of inheriting farmland to secure their children’s support. With that leverage gone in the cities, the higher risk of child default shifted parental focus from babies to savings. Following the introduction of pension schemes that took direct responsibilities away from the family, the link between one’s children and one’s cushioned retirement became less obvious for new generations. Babies are now seen more as a choice than a necessity. 

Why have kids at all when you no longer bank on them for economic security? The answer today may have more to do with life enjoyment. Besides economic reasons, babies have always, since forever perhaps, been born for emotional rewards. According to evolutionary psychologists, humans may be biologically hard-wired to enjoy nurturing. Genetic fine-tuning may explain why we find babbling toddlers irresistibly cute and thus continue to have them when their economic value seems to have disappeared. This said, there is also more than one way to satisfy the genes. Many couples, through adoption, are happily caring for tiny strangers born continents away. Others still prefer to direct their nurturing urges toward a dog or cat. It seems therefore that while Mother Nature may have made us love children, and so likely to have them, she neither imposes the decision nor dictates a minimum to have. 

Besides nurturing, nature may have also predisposed the weak humans to countless other temptations. To make things worse, most of these are now within reach in our prosperity-brought leisure society. Not long ago, life was all about work. Our austere ancestors toiled for food from early childhood until near death. And to secure food when they could no longer work, they had to have, in what amounted to monumental work, as many kids as possible. Fun - anything people do to enjoy themselves, not for a living – was minimal. Thanks to our record free time and unprecedented wealth, that’s not the case anymore. From shopping (rocketing credit card debt), eating (rising obesity), video games (the average gamer is 33) to playing with the kids (who no longer leave at ten to become servants), community service, intellectual pursuits (the after-hour hobby of a patent clerk named Einstein changed the world)…, fun is now omnipresent and accessible. 

Babies, born for fun value these days, obviously don’t hold the monopoly of fun the way they once were the only pension scheme around. Competing against them are many positive things afforded by modernity: freedom, personal fulfillment, career, consumption, knowledge… Having kids is a great way to learn about life, young people may favor the school of traveling the world. Children being certainly great fun, potential parents may prefer the joy of casual sex… No matter how rich we become, life will always be full of trade-offs. It is one thing to tell a pollster from your couch that you want more kids (as well as your salary doubled, your vacations tripled…), it’s quite another to get up and face the sacrifices that will get you there. People may love the idea of a big family, they could still cut down on kids in favor of their other loves, be it African elephants, competing with the Joneses, politics (Lenin, Ralph Nader), gods (the Pope, Mother Teresa), contemplation (the Buddha, Thoreau)… With so many good options available and only one life to spend, a compromise - dirty word, no doubt, but inevitable - has to be found on how much of each to have. Away from Stalin and Kim Jong-Il, different people have different picks for best cocktail. 

Bombarded with options, fewer are choosing the classic roadmap for big family, which requires early settling down, efforts to avoid break-up and a serious time and money reallocation toward child-raising. First of all, given much of the same window of fecundity, now the young are settling down much later. Why commit yourself when you are having so much fun, pursuing exciting projects, and the next date, who knows, may be even better? After a partying 20s, the boomer George W.Bush got married at 31, at which age his father, married at 21, had found time to fight a war, go to college, get married and father four babies. 

When people finally settle down, they now do it for love and passion. Yet love-based unions are notoriously unstable. The whole thing ends the moment your soul mate walks out the door, having found excitement and intimacy - or just peace - elsewhere. Such was not the case of the old survival-based marriage. It’s human to stick together in tough times: in the face of uncertainty, the divorce rate of East Germans, traditionally higher than their western brothers’, plummeted during the first three years of unification. Over the last 100 years, as survival pressure goes down, dissolving unsatisfactory unions has become much more affordable in the rich world, so much so that nowadays almost half of all marriages there end in divorce. Late-formed and short-lived couples, for sure, are less conducive to babies, most of whom are still being born into coupled parents, married or not. 

Yet even stable couples are having fewer. Given their limited resources and the labor-intensive nature of child-raising, instead of more babies, many modern-day couples deliberately opt for more work and life enjoyment. Why on Earth are the world’s richest peoples also the least fertile? They can’t have more because life is too tough? Then what about the poor billions in the South who still reproduce strongly for a caring hand in their last days, exactly what the rich’s ancestors did a few generations back? How to explain the fact that, despite big increases in public subsidies, the Scandinavian nations still remain where they were three decades ago, fertility-wise? Why don’t the Nordic, for all those benefits, have more babies than do white Americans who live in the capitalist jungle? Why are third-world immigrants always more fertile than their native-born neighbors, Swedes, Danes or Americans? The answer may lie in a fun-loving culture that white America shares with the Nordics but not with the oh-so-1950s immigrants. We are having fewer kids but our houses, cars and TVs are getting bigger, we eat out and travel more often, find ample time for political activism or partying… Our love of children, though strong, may not be strong enough to save the world.