Current Family Trends:Less Does Not Equal More

There are a lot of changes occurring in our society today regarding the family, and many of these changing are the result of other trends shifting. For example, a lot more women are working full time jobs. This causes them to wait longer to get married, which means that they typically wait longer to have kids.  Due to the fact that they start having kids later, they have less kids. Then in some cases, even if they do have time to have a lot of kids, they will not have a lot because they are afraid of the risk of divorce. Since divorce rates are so high, people do not want the risk of being a single parent and having to support their kids on their own, so they just do not have as many. Both of these factors result in household size and fertility rates going down. This poses a very big problem for our society today. 

If people are having less kids, then that means that our population is shrinking. Some people may think that this is a good thing, but it really is not. Lower population means less people that can work. We need people working because without them there is no one that can help support those who are not working, otherwise known as retirees living off of social security. Also, more people working results in more food being grown and produced.

A really good example of why lower population is not such a great thing can be found in China. For the longest time they had a law that made it so that families were only allowed to have one child. However, in their culture boys are seen as "more desirable" than girls, so many families would keep trying to have their only child be a boy. This has created a huge problem because now there are not enough girls for them to be able to maintain a sustaining population. Not only that, but people have become accustom to having only one child and do not want the extra expenses that come with more children. 

The irony in this logic is that the people that do not want to have more kids due to the "financial burden" that come with them, actually have the means to support more than one child. They would just rather invest a lot of money in one child rather than investing a reasonable amount in multiple children. Now there of course is always an exception to the rule. Some people cannot have more than one child, find it hard to adopt one, have specific reasons (usually health related) as to why they do not wish to have another child, etc. These are all totally acceptable. It is those that "just don't want to", but are fully able to, that are ironic in this case.

The fact of the matter is the Earth is fully capable of sustaining all of us, we just have to be smart about our resources. An example of this comes from the book "Cheaper by the Dozen", which is about a family with twelve kids that was able to be efficient with their resources and managed to fully support themselves. They did things like bathe quickly and efficiently so that way they did not waste water. 

People think that we need to have less people otherwise we will run out of resources, but then they go and use exorbitant amounts for just themselves. If we spread our resources around and were not so frivolous with them, we would be able to have a lot more people living healthier and happier lives.