Here's a great, but tragic, article about what's happening in Japan as fewer and fewer people choose to have children:
For this is the land of disappearing children and a slow-motion demographic catastrophe that is without precedent in the developed world.
The number of children has declined for 27 consecutive years, a government report said over the weekend. Japan now has fewer children who are 14 or younger than at any time since 1908.
The proportion of children in the population fell to an all-time low of 13.5 percent. That number has been falling for 34 straight years and is the lowest among 31 major countries, according to the report. In the United States, children account for about 20 percent of the population.
Japan also has a surfeit of the elderly. About 22 percent of the population is 65 or older, the highest proportion in the world. And that number is on the rise. By 2020, the elderly will outnumber children by nearly 3 to 1, the government report predicted. By 2040, they will outnumber them by nearly 4 to 1.
The economic and social consequences of these trends are difficult to overstate.
While the same thing is not happening in North America, mroe and more people are choosing not to have kids. In Canada, the average number of children is about 1.6. But the real problem is not that people are having smaller families; it's that people aren't having children at all. In fact, of the people who do have children, the the average number of children is increasing, so that 3 is the new 2. But with more women not marrying and not having children, many are missing out on this amazing and enriching and life-giving experience of parenthood.
Here's something I wrote about this a while ago:
I would even go one step further and say that in those glorious “olden days” when people walked to school uphill both ways, children would have added economically to your household. They were expected to help on the farm or the business. Having children enabled you to have a larger house, a larger farm, and generally prosper more than you would have otherwise. Today it’s the opposite. Children don’t add; they subtract. We live in a child-centred world where it is us who are expected to work: we must drive our kids to lessons; sacrifice time to help them with homework; save a fortune for their education. When we have kids, we have more work, not less work. And so I think there’s something else going on. If you’re a young adult surveying the parental scene, you see harried parents chronically short on cash because hockey costs so much this year. You see them tying themselves in knots because their toddler won’t sleep through the night, their seven-year-old can’t read, or their teenager has gotten into the wrong crowd. It looks like a recipe for an ulcer. The one thing you can’t see is what’s going on inside those parents. You don’t see what happens in the heart the first time you hold your baby. You can’t see what being a parent does to you; how it makes you love life so much more, care about the world so much more, or brings a richness to your life you never believed possible. I am not saying that non-parents can’t experience love; only that being a parent is a
joy like no other, and cannot truly be comprehended until one experiences it. In the old days there were enough societal and economic pressures to have children that people tended to make that choice, and so they did experience that joy. Today, with those pressures gone, how many will decide not to procreate, and in so doing lose the joy that we only realize once we’ve already taken the plunge? At one point parenthood was one of the experiences that we all had in common. We had all gone through labour in some form or another, or stayed up all night with a child with croup, or kissed a boo-boo. Even if language or religion or culture or class separated us, we were all parents. When we lose these shared experiences we lose a shared culture. Parenting is hard work, and it requires more sacrifice today, perhaps, than it did a century ago. But it is still worth it. I know some will always choose to remain childless, and that’s okay. But I hope our country as a whole does not turn its back on parenthood. Babies are our future, and they really are irreplaceable.
You can read the rest here.Labels: nesting, parenting |
Stumble It!
Years ago when we had "only" three children, our church's youth pastor was in our home for dinner. When he realized that we were born the same year he looked around and said, with a somewhat snide tone, "So this is what I gave up to pursue academia."
I felt about 2 feet tall...but that was then, and this is now! Today, I'd look him right in the eye and say, "Sad isn't it?!"