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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   22900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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American frontier families?

Americans started having smaller families in the antebellum period. From McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom:

The economic transformation coincided with—and in part caused—a change in the quality of family life as well as the quantity of children. As the family became less an economic unit it ripened into a covenant of love and nurturance of children. The ideal of romantic love increasingly governed the choice of a marriage partner, a choice made more and more by young people themselves rather than by their parents. And if wives now had a lesser economic role, they enjoyed a larger familial one. Patriarchal domination of wife and children eroded in urban areas as fathers went away from home for most waking hours and mothers assumed responsibility for socializing and educating the children. Affection and encouragement of self-discipline replaced repression and corporal punishment as the preferred means of socialization in middle-class families. These families became more child-centered—a phenomenon much noted by European visitors. Childhood emerged as a separate stage of life. And as parents lavished more love on their children, they had fewer of them and devoted more resources to their education by sending them to school in greater numbers for longer periods of time.

Now, I think that’s probably a romanticized view. More importantly, it’s focused on the urban population, where factories pull men out of the home and undercut women’s traditional industries. Families start buying a lot more textile and soap and whatnot rather than making it all day. I would expect the frontier to maintain higher family sizes, because they have much less access to those markets. But it’s not like they were low-status in this era of romanticizing the frontier. My point is that the urban middle class started to have fewer children during a time when large families were still pretty high-status. The trend reflected demand for young, unskilled labor.

My impression is that those same fundamentals held in America’s postwar transition. As our economy pushed towards service and knowledge-work instead of manual or factory labor, the value of an untrained child tanked. Hence the education treadmill, hence the general hollowing-out of factory towns and heavy industry. The marginal kid is going to cost more for longer.

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