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I am beating my head off the desk here because FAMILIES, DO NONE OF YOU PEOPLE HAVE FAMILIES? AUNTS, COUSINS, RELATIVES LIVING IN THE SAME TOWN WHERE YOU PLAYED WITH A RAKE OF COUSINS AND KNOW ABOUT BABIES BECAUSE PEOPLE IN YOUR FAMILY ARE HAVING BABIES AND GETTING MARRIED AND SO FORTH?
If you lot have created the nightmare scenario of "nobody has siblings, nobody has cousins, nobody lives near their family" then why the hell are you surprised about dropping birth rates?
It's not quite so bad as you say but it is in that direction and that's kind of the thing I'm proposing to help with. My family is scattered across several cities separated by hundreds of miles, I live near some family but it really isn't a critical mass that if we had a little girl she'd be consistently exposed to women going through pregnancy and motherhood. Growing up neighbor kids were more likely to be more playmates than cousins who I would see on most holidays but lived a number of miles away.
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Remember genericland has had 1.5 tfr for generations in this scenario and most people’s extended families are either not very extensive or awfully distant.
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No. This is the exact issue under discussion.
However, places with less WASPy norms around extended family homes are also not having children at or above replacement. If you and your siblings are, go ahead and talk about that, it could be a useful perspective.
As someone with 4 siblings and who ideally wants 12 children of my own (my father had 11 siblings!) I think I can offer some perspective. Me and my siblings are basically going through the gamut of possibilities, which I find very interesting
My eldest brother moved away, currently works in some sort of research support role, and is part of a poly-amorous relationship. He drank the Blue-aid as deeply as possible, and he has no intentions of ever having children. If pushed he'll say something like "when I can afford it," but he doesn't seem to be too interested in saving up to do so. He takes international vacations, he lives in the core of a big city, and he spends what he makes. He is also perpetually miserable, God knows why.
My second eldest brother is severely physically disabled, and he has no real shot at procreation. He exists by still living in the childhood home, cared for by our mother. Sad, but he does okay. He actually tries his hand at creative projects quite frequently, but he's not particularly capable mentally either (though not retarded.)
My younger brother is the only one of the family who grappled with the challenges to religion and kept the faith, and he is in the process of steadily working himself into a well-paying trade job, buying some land in the middle of no-where, and intends to have a large family with the girlfriend he has had since he was a young teenager.
Then there is my younger sister. She wants to farm, and she does so. By the age of 10 she had convinced her parents to buy her a few dairy goats, which is now a sizable herd with impeccable lineage. She has maintained a rigorous schedule for as long as I remember, and refuses to break it for anything. I don't know what her plans are for children. I don't know if she's considered them. She just wants to farm.
Then there's me. I intended to become a journalist, run away to a foreign country, and experience interesting places and things. Once I learned that the whole field was rotten, discovered I hate working for other people and returned home, I have gradually grown in my desire to have children. I think part of it is being around a place where I have childhood memories. Part of it is knowing that I can bring them into a world where they have a future of something better than [school (which I hated and was worthless) --> college (same) --> Drone job (same).] Part of it may be reconnecting with family history, which I have records of going back a straight 130 years (not just names, but business records, letters, all sorts of things.)
More than anything though, I think my desire just grew as I began to hate life less. All these convoluted schemes seem to be missing the core idea that "people who are miserable and think life is meaningless don't really want to perpetuate that." But that's getting too into my own analysis, which I can share separately if anyone cares.
Thanks for sharing, that's interesting.
My father in law also had (19?) siblings, but had fewer children himself. Would you be giving birth to these children? I've given birth to two children, and it was fine, but I certainly wouldn't want to have 12, even if I were much younger! Maybe if we were a bit younger, four? Some friends are having a third in their mid thirties, and we're wondering if we should too, but not strongly enough to actually go in and remove the birth control. Low hanging fruit for slightly increasing birth rates might be for birth control implants to last two years instead of five. These friends are wondering if they should homeschool, or planning to do that. I was homeschooled, but do not want to, at least for elementary school. My older daughter is much more talkative than me, and I don't want to be either ignoring her or driving her to social events all the time.
It's interesting to hear you're still interested in a large family with a disabled sibling living at home. One motivator for my not wanting a third child is worry over having a baby with health problems as I get older, and not wanting to be in the position of either terminating a pregnancy, or raising a disabled child.
We aren't likely to move to be with extended family. Both sets of grandparents are quite old, and would be willing to help out a moderate amount, but are in places we don't want to live, or would have trouble living, and aren't willing to move. My brother isn't likely to have children, and one brother in law does, but in a place we don't want to move, and we don't get along all that well with his wife.
Neither of us has careers where we feel competent or any kind of career trajectory, and we're wondering what to do about that. I went back to work a month after both births, and it was very stressful for my husband to be at home with an infant for multiple years, so that's also something of a limiting factor. It was also quite stressful to be working full time and breastfeeding as well. We met living in a foreign country, and would like to take the children and live somewhere similar to where we met, but don't really know anything about how to do that as part of a family unit, most opportunities are for single people. The only people I've known who have managed, at least for a while, have been missionaries, or maybe in the State Department (but that didn't seem to be working out so well for their families). Part of our interest is missing life in actual, functional, historical villages, where women watch each other's kids, and they can play on the street with the neighbor kids.
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