Where are the Children

A week or so ago, I met with a fellow to talk about installing a new door at the house where he grew up, which he now maintains as a rental.  When I  was young I had friends who lived in this neighborhood, and he and I began comparing notes about all the kids who lived near by.  He and I quickly rattled off the names of about a dozen children that lived within a block of his house.  I have often thought about the street on which I grew up, and all of the children I knew on this street.  In my one block of the street where I grew up, I remember and have counted 26 children.  Today, on that same street, there may be three or four children.   This is in a town which had a population of less than 10,000 in the late fifties, and has over 50,000 residents today.

This anecdotal demographic shift led me to think about my own family.  My mother had three siblings and between the four siblings, they raised a total of seventeen children.  All of these seventeen cousins are pretty well past their child rearing ages now, and these seventeen cousins produced, I believe, seventeen off spring. On my father's side, there were six siblings who produced nine children, and my nine cousins and myself  only raised, I think, three offspring.

Looking back, I can easily name ten families I knew who had more than four children.  Today, I don't personally knew any families with four or more children.

Now I am about to tread very lightly on some very thin ice.  Every one I have mentioned up to this point grew up in middle class white families.  I don't know how large other ethnic families were back in the fifties, but I suspect their  family size mirrored that of the people I knew.  The one thing I am certain of is that it has become increasingly difficult for a middle class couple to have a large family.  Typically, both spouses work, and neither spouse is willing or able to give up his or her job and stay home with children.  The cost of raising children from birth through college has grown astronomically.  It seems that the only people who can afford multiple children, are people who are assisted by the government in providing for these children.  I suspect that only a very small percentage of these poor children of poor families will have a chance of rising up to middle class prosperity.

Of course declining birth rate is not the only factor in diminishing the size of our middle class.  Thousands of people are falling out of the middle class every day due to reduced economic opportunity.  As the size of the  middle class shrinks, and the poor become poorer, the wealthy in this country continue to see huge increases in their net worth.  Perhaps this is the grand plan.  To quote Voltaire: "The comfort of the rich requires an abundant supply of the poor."