I’m an only child. My husband is an only child. My dad is an only child. I grew up around small families: I can’t recall a single friend who had more than two siblings living at home, and none of my close friends ever had a baby in the house during the time I knew them. So the fact that I now have five children ages seven and under sometimes makes me feel like I’m living in a bizarre dream world. If you had told me ten years ago that this is where my life would be in 2012, after I regained consciousness I would have tried to imagine what the average day would look like. And I would have been mostly wrong. In some ways big family life is harder than I would have guessed; in other ways it’s easier. Overall, it’s simply…not what I would have imagined.

I was thinking about this the other day (as I loaded the dishwasher for the second time that morning), and narrowed it down to the top seven things that have been most surprising to me about what it’s actually like to have a big family....

5. It’s easier to let your kids find their own paths in life

I think most parents at least occasionally feel the temptation to steer their kids’ lives in a specific direction, regardless of whether it’s a fit for who they are or where God’s calling them (a prime example of this being the fact that so many parents discourage their children from pursuing religious vocations). I still fight the urge to get attached to visions of how each of my kids’ lives will unfold, but I will say that it’s gotten easier as our family grows. Part of it might be practical, in the sense that a larger number of kids means greater odds that at least one of them will be drawn in a direction that really resonated with me. But the biggest factor is simply that each child’s uniqueness in relation to his or her siblings is a new reminder that God has a special plan for each one of us.

Labels: Catholic Church, children, culture, family size, parenting, religion

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My wife and I have twins, a boy and a girl, born with much assistance from reproductive technology. As a byproduct we also have, at a clinic in New York City, two fertilized eggs ready for implantation should a willing womb—ours, or a stranger's—present itself. The zygotes cost $1,200 a year to store. That’s a lot for a few square millimeters of real estate, but then again we’re talking Manhattan. We've given ourselves a year to determine the right thing to do with those zygotes. They are our puzzle to solve.

Why Have Children?, by Christine Overall, a philosophy professor at Queen's University in Ontario, is about puzzles like these—not the specifics of reproductive technology, twins, or IVF, but about the moral questions that arise when one decides to have children, or more children.

Must you? No, Overall says.

Should you? "Don't miss it," she says.

How many? One per adult.

To arrive there Overall (herself the mother of two children, Devon and Narnia) piles her readers into the bioethical tour bus for a journey into the realm of thought experiments. ...

In short, my wife’s reality, her fundamental ontology, has shifted. I’m not fully sure how, but she is not quite the person she was before she became pregnant. I rearrange my life around the babies, but my wife has rearranged herself. She is a different person. An ethics of procreation should consider that difference, right?

Overall would say so and is a bit wearied—respectful but wearied—of systems that neglect these facts. She singles out the ideas of Parfit and Savulescu: These men, she writes, are often "oblivious to the fact that it is women ... who become pregnant and bear children and that it is their lives that are made better or in some cases unutterably worse by the conditions and circumstances in which they procreate." If your model of reality doesn’t take the female body into account then it’s a flawed model; forget the women and risk introducing "errors into moral reasoning."

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, children, culture, demographics, family size, Fathers, motherhood, women

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...Certain religious groups tend to have large families, whether for reasons of religious observance, as with some Jews, or because it is culturally approved, as in Mormonism. But 50 years ago, large families were unusual in evangelical Protestantism. A Santorum-size family would have been seen as a marker of exotic, sinister religiosity. Big families were stigmatized: they were for immigrants and Catholics, or for the rural poor.

Since then, however, there has been a shift in evangelical thinking about contraception, and therefore about big families. You can see it in the Duggar family, the enthusiastic Santorum supporters who star on the reality television show “19 Kids & Counting.” You can read about it in books like “Quiverfull,” Kathryn Joyce’s 2009 account of Christians who forgo contraception to add children to the Lord’s army. And you can hear it in the teachings of theologians like Russell D. Moore, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dean who warns evangelicals to be skeptical of the “contraceptive culture.”

From the beginning of Christian history until the 19th century, the teaching held that contraception was sinful, says Allan Carlson, the author of “Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973.” “ ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ — until the 1920s, all Protestants formally read that as being a ban on contraception,” Dr. Carlson says, “and all Protestants held to the Christian convention that birth control was sinful, for the same reason and in the same way abortion was.”

But that consensus “started to break down in the 1920s,” Dr. Carlson says. The Church of England accepted birth control in 1930, and American Protestant bodies soon followed. As recently as “10 or 20 years ago,” Mr. Santorum’s rejection of birth control “would have been an immediate no” for nearly all Protestants.

Today, however, even those evangelical Protestants who use contraception — the vast majority, it would seem — have developed a cultural respect, in some cases a reverence, for those who do not.

“For evangelicals, an anticontraception position is not seen as exclusively Roman Catholic, as it would have been in the past,” said Jenell Paris, who teaches anthropology at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. She pointed to several developments in evangelical culture to explain this shift.

“Our understanding of hormonal birth control methods — the pill, the patch, the ring — have changed,” said Dr. Paris, alluding to those who believe, on scant evidence, that these methods of birth control can contribute to long-term infertility. “Abortion politics have changed. Views of women in the workplace have changed. Feminism has changed. All that has contributed to a number of evangelicals embracing a no-birth-control policy, or at least making it comprehensible.”

Labels: abortion, Christianity, contraception, culture, family size, feminism, religion

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Dear Mother of Only One Child,

Don’t say it. Before the words can even pass your lips, let me beg you: don’t say, “Wow, you have nine kids? I thought it was hard with just my one!”

My dear, it is hard. You’re not being a wuss or a whiner when you feel like your life is hard. I know, because I remember having “only one child.” You may not even believe how many times I stop and reflect on how much easier my life is, now that I have nine children.

All right, so there is a lot more laundry. Keeping up with each child’s needs, and making sure they all get enough attention, is a constant worry. And a stomach bug is pretty much the end of the world, when nine digestive tracts are afflicted.

But I remember having only one child, and it was hard—so very hard. Some of the difficulties were just practical: I didn’t know what I was doing, had to learn everything. People pushed me around because I was young and inexperienced. But even worse were the emotional struggles of learning to be a mother. ...

Dear mother of only one child, don’t blame yourself for thinking that your life is hard. You’re suffering now because you’re turning into a new woman, a woman who is never allowed to be alone. For what? Only so that you can become strong enough to be a woman who will be left.

When I had only one child, she was so heavy. Now I can see that children are as light as air. They float past you, nudging against you like balloons as they ascend.

Dear mother, don’t worry about enjoying your life. Your life is hard; your life will be hard. That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong—it means you’re doing it right.

Labels: children, culture, family size, motherhood, parenting

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In their 2011 State of Our Unions report (When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful, and How Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable [pdf]) W. Bradford Wilcox and Elizabeth Marquardt found, like other researchers, that parenthood is typically associated with lower levels of marital happiness among contemporary couples. But that is not the whole picture by any means, as they explain in the following excerpt from the report, subtitled, "Family Size, Faith, and the Meaning of Parenthood".

Given the negative association between marital happiness and parenthood, one might expect that the least happy husbands and wives would be parents of large families. Not so.

In a striking finding, it turns out that the relationship between family size and marital happiness is not linear, but curvilinear (see Figure A1). In other words, according to the Survey of Marital Generosity, the happiest husbands and wives among today’s young couples are those with no children and those with four or more children.

Figure A1 reveals that about 18 percent of wives with one to three children are “very happy” in their marriage, compared to 26 percent of wives with no children or four or more children, after controlling for differences in education, income, age, race, and ethnicity. Likewise about 14 percent of husbands with one to three children are “very happy” in their marriage, compared to 25 percent of husbands with no children or four or more children, after controlling for socioeconomic differences. This means that the parents of large families are at least 40 percent more likely to be happily married than the parents of smaller families.

What accounts for the surprisingly higher levels of marital bliss among parents of large families, given the obvious financial, practical, and emotional challenges of raising a large family in contemporary America? This finding seems to be largely a “selection” story, in which particular types of couples end up having large numbers of children, remain married to one another, and also enjoy cultural, social, and relational strengths that more than offset the challenges of parenting a large family. In this case, the Survey of Marital Generosity suggests that fathers and mothers of large families are partly happier because they find more meaning in life, receive more support from friends who share their faith, and have a stronger religious faith than their peers with smaller families.[1] ...

Or take meaning. Figure A3 shows that the parents of large families—especially mothers—are more likely to strongly agree that “my life has an important purpose,” compared to their married peers with smaller families or no children. Meaning undoubtedly flows from the additional texture that each child adds to both parents’ lives, but it’s also likely that men and women who have a strong generative sense that their lives are endowed with meaning are also more willing and interested in having many children. ...

Couples with large families—specifically those who are more likely to have a strong faith, a sense of meaning in life, and the social support of religious friends—also seem able to handle the challenges of parenting a large family without witnessing a drop in marital quality. The cultural and social resources at their disposal seem to make them happier spouses than peers who do not have these resources.

Labels: children, culture, family size, Fathers, Marriage, motherhood, parenting, religion

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Rick Santorum describes himself as universally pro-life. That includes his tax plan, which policy analysts contend gives couples economic incentives to get married and have larger families.

Santorum’s tax proposals would triple the personal deduction for each child and “eliminate marriage tax penalties throughout the federal tax code.” He would retain deductions for charitable giving, home mortgage interest, health care, and retirement - all undertakings that support faith and family formation.

Significantly, he would eliminate all corporate taxes on U.S. manufacturers, from its present 35 percent to zero. The candidate’s native Pennsylvania has lost 127,000 manufacturing jobs 2005-10, and median income has fallen faster than the national average. High-wage manufacturing jobs made it possible to support a family without a college degree. A 2003 study funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation found higher education and the desire for more economic security delayed the age of marriage and family formation later than ever. ...

The marriage penalty embedded in the tax code may discourage marriage by taxing married couples at higher rates than single people. Santorum’s plan would equalize the tax burden by doubling the size of tax brackets for married families and eliminating other penalties for those who tie the knot.

But Santorum’s policies have deepened a longstanding rift between conflicting visions of conservatism.

Labels: conservatism, family policy, family size, Marriage, tax policy

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...Until quite recently, such population growth always came primarily from increases in the numbers of young people. Between 1950 and 1990, for example, increases in the number of people under 30 accounted for more than half of the growth of the world's population, while only 12 percent came from increases in the ranks of those over 60.

But in the future it will be the exact opposite. The U.N. now projects that over the next 40 years, more than half (58 percent) of the world's population growth will come from increases in the number of people over 60, while only 6 percent will come from people under 30. Indeed, the U.N. projects that by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will be falling globally -- and that's even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developing world. A gray tsunami will be sweeping the planet.

Which countries will be aging most rapidly in 2025? They won't be in Europe, where birth rates fell comparatively gradually and now show some signs of ticking up. Instead, they'll be places like Iran and Mexico, which experienced youth bulges that were followed quickly by a collapse in birth rates. In just 35 years, both Iran and Mexico will have a larger percentage of their populations over 60 than France does today. Other places with birth rates now below replacement levels include not just old Europe but also developing countries such as Brazil, Chile, China, Lebanon, Tunisia, South Korea, and Vietnam.

Because of the phenomenon of hyper-aging in the developing world, another great variable is already changing as well: migration. In Mexico, for example, the population of children age 4 and under was 434,000 less in 2010 than it was in 1996. The result? The demographic momentum that fueled huge flows of Mexican migration to the United States has waned, and will wane much more in the future. ...

Another related megatrend is the rapid change in the size, structure, and nature of the family. In many countries, such as Germany, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, the one-child family is now becoming the norm. This trend creates a society in which not only do most people have no siblings, but also no aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, or nephews. Many will lack children of their own as well. Today about one in five people in advanced Western countries, including the United States, remains childless. Huge portions of the world's population will thus have no biological relatives except their parents.

Labels: aging, demographics, family size, family structure, Marriage, religion, siblings

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The New York Times Magazine explores the "stigma" (undeserved? archaic? regrettable?) surrounding the emerging trend of eliminating one fetus when IVF results in twins. This is a very sad paragraph, among many:

Jenny’s decision to reduce twins to a single fetus was never really in doubt. The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children. Even the twins would be robbed, because, at best, she could give each one only half of her attention and, she feared, only half of her love. Jenny desperately wanted another child, but not at the risk of becoming a second-rate parent. “This is bad, but it’s not anywhere as bad as neglecting your child or not giving everything you can to the children you have,” she told me, referring to the reduction.

I don't mean to minimize the hardship that can accompany multiple births, but this excerpt reflects an unfortunate (though increasingly common) view of parental love: a limited commodity that, when extended to one child, necessarily reduces its availability to another child. Not to mention the underlying premise that non-existence is preferable to existence in a household with "too many" kids.

Labels: abortion, Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, family size, IVF, motherhood, parenting

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Is there any nation as contrary in its demographics as Russia? While the world’s population police obsess about the ongoing “explosion” of the human species, Russia is on a depopulation slide and in danger of imploding. Again, while the world’s conscience is stirred by Asia’s 163 million missing females, Russia has a gender deficit of 10 million men. And, while “family planning” nearly everywhere else means preventing births at all costs, in Russia it now means reminding people to have a child or three.

The awful truth behind these Russian trends is confirmed by provisional figures from the country’s 2010 census. The population has declined from 145 million in 2002 to just under 143 million — less than half the population of its rival superpower, the United States (322 million), and far behind the rising powers of China and India to the east and south. If it were not for growth in immigration from former Soviet republics, the figure would be even worse.

Basically, there are more Russian deaths than births. For a developed country, life expectancy is shockingly low, with an average of 66 years — 73 for women and around 60 for men, compared with 77 in the US and 80 in Japan. There is a lot that could be said about Russia’s “man problem” but it seems to be both a cause and an effect of the decay of the family that started in the Soviet era. Russia’s 700,000 orphans bear witness to that, along with high rates of divorce that have given way during the last two decades to low marriage rates and increasing levels of cohabitation. The latter trends, together with political and economic uncertainty, have further discouraged childbearing.

The net result is that Russians are not reproducing themselves. The total fertility rate has been below 1.2 children per woman but has risen to 1.4 — not far behind Europe’s, but still far short of “replacement”. Of the children that are conceived, a shocking number are aborted: official figures for 2008 put the number of births at 1.7 million and abortions at 1.2 million, but some say the true figure for abortions may be as high as 4 million a year. Some 10 to 15 per cent of abortions have complications, leaving at least 7 to 8 per cent of women sterile, which, ironically, has opened the way for surrogacy entrepreneurs.

Labels: abortion, children, cohabitation, demographics, family size, Marriage, Orthodox Christianity, population control, religion, Russia

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College-educated women are waiting longer to have children than those without a college education, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

In 2000, the portion of women with college degrees between the ages of 25 and 34 who had children was 42 percent, according to the data. Ten years later, the same group of women, now ages 35 to 44 — representing about three million Americans — were far more likely to be mothers: About 76 percent had children, according to the data.

In contrast, women who did not finish high school were more likely to have children earlier. In 2000, about 83 percent of women ages 25 to 34 who did not have a high school diploma had children. The percentage rose to 88 percent by 2010.

The trend of educated women having children later accelerated in the 1980s, along with the rise in women’s educational attainment, said Andrew J. Cherlin, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University. ...

In 1976, the earliest year in Monday’s data release, more women had three children than had two, but that has shifted over the years, with far more women having two children than three.

Labels: children, class, demographics, economics, family size, Marriage, motherhood, race, women

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The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young. ...

Still, poverty is largely invisible in the village. Parking lots are full, but strollers and tricycles seem to outnumber cars. A jeweler shares a storefront with a check-cashing office. To avoid stigmatizing poorer young couples or instilling guilt in parents, the chief rabbi recently decreed that diamond rings were not acceptable as engagement gifts and that one-man bands would suffice at weddings. Many residents who were approached by a reporter said they did not want to talk about their finances.

Labels: class, culture, economics, family size, Hasidic Judaism, Judaism, New York, Orthodox Judaism, poverty, religion, weddings

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Nine years ago my wife had her first sonogram. The technician seemed to be asking routine questions: “How long have you been pregnant?” “Twelve weeks.” “Any family history of genetic diseases?” “No.” “Any family history of twins?” “No.” Then she showed us the screen. “Well, you’re having twins.” My wife and I were scared. We were first-time parents. How were we supposed to raise two babies at the same time?

Strangely enough, I already knew a lot about twins. I’d been an avid consumer of twin research for years. Identical twins (like ours turned out to be) share all their genes; fraternal twins share only half. Researchers in medicine, psychology, economics, and sociology have spent decades comparing these two types of twins to disentangle the effects of nature and nurture. But as our due date approached, none of my book learning seemed remotely helpful.

Only after our twins were born did I gradually realize how much I was missing. Twin researchers rarely offer parenting advice. But much practical guidance is implicit in the science.

The most prominent conclusion of twin research is that practically everything—health, intelligence, happiness, success, personality, values, interests—is partly genetic. The evidence is straightforward: Identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins in almost every way—even when the twins are separated at birth. But twin research has another far more amazing lesson: With a few exceptions, the effect of parenting on adult outcomes ranges from small to zero. Parents change kids in many ways; the catch is that the changes fade out as kids grow up. By adulthood, identical twins aren’t slightly more similar than fraternal twins; they’re much more similar. And when identical twins are raised apart, they’re often just as similar as they are when they’re raised together.

Once I became a dad, I noticed that parents around me had a different take on the power of nurture. I saw them turning parenthood into a chore—shuttling their kids to activities even the kids didn’t enjoy, forbidding television, desperately trying to make their babies eat another spoonful of vegetables. Parents’ main rationale is that their effort is an investment in their children’s future; they’re sacrificing now to turn their kids into healthy, smart, successful, well-adjusted adults. But according to decades of twin research, their rationale is just, well, wrong. High-strung parenting isn’t dangerous, but it does make being a parent a lot more work and less fun than it has to be.

Labels: children, culture, family size, parenting

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...No one has done more to disprove Hall's stereotype than Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, both in the U.S. and in China, drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Twenty-five years ago, she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children from 1925 onward that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence.

Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren't measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. Of course, part of the reason we assume only children are spoiled is that whatever parents have to give, the only child gets it all. The argument Judith Blake makes in Family Size and Achievement as to why onlies are higher achievers across socioeconomic lines can be stated simply: there's no "dilution of resources," as she terms it, between siblings. No matter their income or occupation, parents of only children have more time, energy and money to invest in their kid. ...

"Most people are saying, I can't divide myself anymore," says social psychologist Susan Newman. Before technology made the office a 24-hour presence, we actually spent less time actively parenting, she explains. "We no longer send a child out to play for three hours and have those three hours to ourselves," she says. "Now you take them to the next practice, the next class. We've been consumed by our children. But we're moving back slowly to parents wanting to have a life too. And people are realizing that's simply easier with one."

Labels: childhood, children, culture, family size, parenting

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Thursday, I felt lousy at work – I was extremely lightheaded, weak and nauseated. The thought has crossed my mind that my period is late. I dismissed it immediately, since my husband and I are always so extra careful and not taking any risks. Either I must have miscalculated, or crossing 40, my period begins to be irregular, which is expected.

But just in order to totally preclude the option, I did the test that evening. To my horror, the kit showed “Pregnant,” black print on white background. I screamed, and my 6-year-old daughter, who is already reading, rushed in. “What happened?” she asked. “Nothing, I saw a mouse” I said, while throwing the kit to some corner.

What shall we do? Husband and I were discussing. We are blessed with two adorable kids, daughter and son, age 2, and we had jointly and totally decided that this is absolutely enough for us – we are done. I rejoiced to get my body back after the second one, and to know I will never have to go through another pregnancy again.

On the other hand, this new decision is not one to take lightly. Who is this soul and what does she want coming to me like this so unexpectedly? I calculated I am six weeks into the pregnancy. My husband was adamant “to terminate,” but I needed to make sure I am weighing this seriously, and tried to imagine my life with or without a third child.

We live in a small Manhattan apartment. Both of us are working full time and struggling hard to find the right balance between our jobs, our children and a tiny diminishing amount of personal or together time. We both felt we are barely keeping our sanity, and the marriage, endlessly struggling to find new creative ways to “have it all” — career, time for our kids, time for ourselves and time as a couple — only to reach a dead end. You have to compromise something, there are so many hours a day.

There is simply no way that I can find the capacity and energy needed to give to a third child. This will hurt us, maybe critically, as individuals, as a couple and a family. I think about all the “third-child goes wrong stories” around me. Of course there are many happy three-child families. But there are so many others where the third one is by far the most difficult one, and the parents, much older and exhausted. There are other more extreme cases, where families break apart with a third child that was just too much. I am wondering in how many of these cases the pregnancy was not planned, but a decision to terminate was difficult or impossible.

The next morning I have reached my decision, to terminate. ...

The procedure is amazingly quick, 10 minutes under full and complete sedation and I am done, 10 more minutes to recover and I am out in the street. Some painful abdominal contractions (the uterus contracts back to its normal size, the doc explains), but overall feeling better since the nausea and tiredness instantaneously lifted like magic, I am back to myself. I have my body just to myself again. Relieved, happy. And surprised to be relieved and happy.

Labels: abortion, culture, family size, Marriage

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A middle-income, two-parent family will spend $222,360, on average, to raise a baby born in 2009, according to a government estimate (PDF) released today.

Yes, a number like that screams false precision. Still, some of the broad outlines that go into the estimate are pretty interesting:

* Housing is the most expensive part of raising a kid. It accounts for 31 percent of the cost, followed by childcare and education (17 percent) and food (16 percent).

* The annual cost rises a bit as the child gets older — from less than $12,000 per year for a baby to more than $13,000 for a teenager.
* Among urban areas, the Northeast is the most expensive region to raise a child, and the South is the cheapest. Rural areas, which are lumped into a single category, are even cheaper.
* The cost per child for a two-child family is 25 percent lower than the cost per child for a one-child family.

Labels: children, culture, economics, family size, parenting

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WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis. ...

Like many Hasidim, Mrs. Schwartz considered bearing children as her tribute to God. A son-in-law, Rabbi Menashe Mayer, a lushly bearded scholar, said she took literally the scriptural command that “You should not forget what you saw and heard at Mount Sinai and tell it to your grandchildren.”

“And she wanted to do that,” he said, without needing to add her belief that the more grandchildren, the more the commandment is fulfilled. Mrs. Schwartz gave birth 18 times, but lost two children in the Holocaust and one in a summer camp accident here.

Labels: children, family size, Judaism, religion

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Diane Francis’s Tuesday Financial Post column calling for a global one-child policy as the real answer to man-made global warming has become an instant classic in the art of antagonizing readers. The piece could correctly be described as half-crazy, of course. Even granting that we are willing to endow the state with monstrous population-control powers, and Francis is obviously willing, her praise for China’s population-growth measures as “simple” suggests a willful blindness to its demographic effects and to the inegalitarian way the policy has actually been applied.

In China, the one-child policy has been a class war that skewed the natural sex ratio, introduced chaos into the family-formation process, and condemned millions of men to lifetime service in a reserve army of the unmarried. It’s the biggest, cruellest biological experiment in history. The results aren’t really in yet. And even if it “works” by environmental criteria, a project that the Chinese can pull off will not necessarily be scalable upward to the entire species. I feel silly even having to point all this out.

What I like about the column is that it puts population growth front and centre in the emissions debate; it gets in our faces.

Labels: children, demographics, family size, population control

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The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days. ...

The fix is simple. It's dramatic. And yet the world's leaders don't even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms, then cap-and-trade subsidies.

None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.

Labels: children, demographics, family size, population control

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There was spontaneous applause when Allan Carlson announced the winner of the 'family cup': a man who put nine children on the world, all within the same marriage.

That makes one a successful man in the eyes of the fifth World Congress of Families, which is being held in Amsterdam's RAI congress centre this week. The floor was then given to the winner's wife, who spoke of her husband's love and dedication to their family and God -- until he died of cancer last year.

Allan Carlson is the secretary of the World Congress of Families and the president of the US-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society. He is the author of The Natural Family: A Manifesto, in which he argues that "we welcome more babies and larger families while others wage war against human fertility".

In his opening statement in Amsterdam on Monday he said families that deviate from the 'natural family' (man, wife, children) are at considerable risk of developing 'problems'. "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state," Carlson said. ...

One of the speakers –- albeit via video link –- was the Dutch minister for youth and family André Rouvoet, a member of the orthodox Christian party ChristenUnie. Rouvoet wished the participants "every success".

Rouvoet's participation in the World Congress was controversial from the start. His critics said it legitimised what they said was a right-wing religious gathering. Intellectuals, members of parliament for the Green party and the liberal parties VVD and D66, as well as a handful of demonstrators demanded that Rouvoet either stay away from the gathering or come out in favour of gay marriage, abortion and divorce.

The minister didn't go quite that far, although he did call on the participants to "build bridges" and to "think about how we can live together in a multicultural society with differing attitudes to the family".

Labels: abortion, divorce, Europe, family size, gay marriage, Marriage, Netherlands

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...The utterly ridiculous thing is that my husband is ovulating too. It happens. He sniffs me out, and the drive to procreate becomes just as fierce in him as it does in me.

The bedroom dialogue when I’m ovulating:

Husband: “Come here. Let me just rub your back. We won’t do anything. I promise.”

I hide in the bathroom, picking my zits or something. “Just a minute.” I peak through the crack in the bathroom door to see if he’s fallen asleep yet. Much as I want that backrub, I know where they lead. They’re dangerous. Dangerous.

Contrast with bedroom dialogue when I’m not ovulating:

Husband: “Wanna do it?”

Me: “Is that foreplay?”

Husband: “Yeah, but if it helps, I’ll let you see me naked too.”

Ooooh….That’ll do it.

Well, I’m not falling for it this time. I’m not going in for that backrub. I am going to invest my creative energies in something other than procreation. The [Natural Family Planning] experts say that spouses should not avoid one another during fertile periods--that they should not abstain from signs of affection while they are abstaining from sex. I find that advice a little naïve.

If I have to go seven days without showering or brushing my teeth, I’ll do it. I’ll wear the hijab. I’ll hide in the closet when my husband comes fee, fie, foe, fumm-ing home from work. I’m serious this time.

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, family size, Marriage, sex

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