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Can you please name sources for your statement that after WW2 it was extremely common in Europe to limit the size of the family to one child and that a lot of these children migrated from the countryside to large cities? Thank you.
I name myself as the source :-). I was born 15 years after the WW2, and about half of everyone I know that is my age or within 10 years older is an only child, the other half have one sibling. I have also directly observed mass migration into the cities in my childhood. I am aware that much of Western Europe had a baby boom immediately after the war (not as large as the US, and it petered out even by the time I was born), but I personally would have a hard time coming up with anyone born in those years that I know who wasn't either an only child or had one sibling. I don't know where that baby boom was, I personally did not notice it.
I name myself as the source :-). I was born 15 years after the WW2, and about half of everyone I know that is my age or within 10 years older is an only child, the other half have one sibling. I have also directly observed mass migration into the cities in my childhood. I am aware that much of Western Europe had a baby boom immediately after the war (not as large as the US, and it petered out even by the time I was born), but I personally would have a hard time coming up with anyone born in those years that I know who wasn't either an only child or had one sibling. I don't know where that baby boom was, I personally did not notice it.
I would love to know where you lived.
I was born in 1953, and I had four siblings, the two youngest born in 1960 and 1964. My ex-husband was born in 1950, and he had ten siblings, the youngest born in 1968. Many of my friends and most of my friends and cousins had more than one sibling born after 1960. (Btw, my ex was Catholic, but I and most of my friends and all of my cousins were Protestant.) However, we were all mainly "working class", and I think it is true that generally speaking, working class people had (have?) more children than affluent people do.
I guess it all boils down to personal experience, but here in the U.S., I think only one or two children in a family was not the norm until after the mid-60's when The Pill was in widespread use. As late as 1965, only one in four of every married woman under age 45 used it, according to Planned Parenthood. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/1514/3518/7100/Pill_History_FactSheet.pdf
Quote:
By 1965, one out of every four married women in America under 45 had used the pill. By 1967, nearly 13 million women in the world were using it. And by 1984 that number would reach 50–80 million (Asbell, 1995). Today more than 100 million women use the pill (Christin-Maitre, 2013).
The last thing I want at this age is to own more STUFF. Whether it happens to be located in one house or not. If I want a place to sleep while away from home I'll pay to use someone else's. They get to take care of it. I want more variety in where I travel. If I owned two abodes chances are I'd end up spending travel time working on it. If that's what I want, I can do that at home. Why do it on a trip?
For me and many other Alaskans it's well worth the effort to escape the winter season to a warmer location in the SW US or Hawaii. I was raised in Alaska too, not a recent transplant.
Short vacations are fine, though not nearly so pleasant and relaxing as longer stays. For me I get to enjoy growing tropical fruits at my second home, so it's like an entirely different life.
The land was cheap, I built my own house and the only utility cost is internet.
I really love both places. It would be a tough call deciding which one to eliminate, but I recognize that this day will come one way or another.
In my experience, large families weren't the norm during and after the war. My grandparents born in the 1870s had
11 children, one died. Their siblings had one or two children.
I know this is veering off-topic, but anyone who spends time researching family history/ genealogy/ on the genealogy websites will recognize something...
Families until the 1930s often had many children -- 10 was not uncommon. The shock of the Great Depression here and abroad caused a reduction in family size to more like three, four, or five children. Then the "sexual revolution" starting in the mid-1960s caused another reduction. One or two children are the norm since then.
I know this is veering off-topic, but anyone who spends time researching family history/ genealogy/ on the genealogy websites will recognize something...
Families until the 1930s often had many children -- 10 was not uncommon. The shock of the Great Depression here and abroad caused a reduction in family size to more like three, four, or five children. Then the "sexual revolution" starting in the mid-1960s caused another reduction. One or two children are the norm since then.
My father (born 1921) was an only (he is the only pregnancy that survived) and my mother was was the oldest of four, born in 1928.
I am the fourth of seven kids, born from 1950 to 1969. Ya never know.
We'd been at our Scottsdale place (second home) for a few days when late at night I felt "weird". I checked my pulse repeatedly and sure enough, I'd contracted atrial fibrillation. It's not hard to detect if you listen for it.
I mention this because of the possibility of any of us having problems with Afib. I have to go back to Stanford in a few days to get my monthly Nucala injection. There are long stretches in that 600 mile jaunt where there are no top-notch EDs. I'm wearing a Holter monitor now.
My husband wants to sell the Scottsdale place. I get it: There would be substantial gains. And he would see his friends more often.
I name myself as the source :-). I was born 15 years after the WW2, and about half of everyone I know that is my age or within 10 years older is an only child, the other half have one sibling. I have also directly observed mass migration into the cities in my childhood. I am aware that much of Western Europe had a baby boom immediately after the war (not as large as the US, and it petered out even by the time I was born), but I personally would have a hard time coming up with anyone born in those years that I know who wasn't either an only child or had one sibling. I don't know where that baby boom was, I personally did not notice it.
Thank you for clarifying that this is something based on your personal circle not Europe.
I know this is veering off-topic, but anyone who spends time researching family history/ genealogy/ on the genealogy websites will recognize something...
Families until the 1930s often had many children -- 10 was not uncommon. The shock of the Great Depression here and abroad caused a reduction in family size to more like three, four, or five children. Then the "sexual revolution" starting in the mid-1960s caused another reduction. One or two children are the norm since then.
That would have been my grandparents. Both sides multiplied like gangbusters and not much has changed. The same with SO's family. Looking around our neighborhood - Oklahomans are not a dying species:>)
Nice photos and interesting stories. The fact remains that in the world of Europe in which I lived, there was a disproportionately large number of only children who bought their home (usually a condo) in or near a large city while their parents still lived in some house in the countryside, and inherited an ancestral house (eg, on the coast) which they subsequently used as the vacation home. If there were two siblings, they tended to split the ancestral house as the vacation home. I know of a lot of that, enough that I consider it very common, among people in all types of economic status. And the parents (or grandparents) that left the house as an inheritance were typically closer to poor than to rich. Having a vacation home is common in Europe, and the vacation home is usually acquired by the mechanism I just described.
My acquaintances in Europe (from the 1960s-70s when I grew up on that continent, and those from other Euro countries that I met in various contexts) tended to be all urban dwellers. I don't really know how people lived who still lived in remote villages around 1945-1970 - maybe they still had ten kids, in which case the average between them and urban dwellers with 1 or 2 kids would have been 6 kids, which is indeed a baby boom :-). But growing up, and later meeting various Europeans, I did not know anyone with a large family.
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