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A lot of the drop in birthrates over the generations has happened as people left farms and moved to cities. Big families are a great resource on the farm--lots of cheap labor--but not so much in the cities. Both sets of my grandparents were farm families who came north during the Great Migration. I have 23 aunts and uncles (many now deceased). But no one in my generation -- my first cousins --has more than three kids. And almost all of them have left rural life.
My maternal grandmother had 3 children. One cannot have children, my mom has 4 and her other sibling has 2. My uncle's two kids each have one child. My mom's 4 kids - two of them have 3 kids each, my youngest brother has 1 child, and I have 2 children. We also have some adopted kids in my family (some of my nieces/nephews).
Paternal grandmother had 5 children. My dad has 5 kid. His oldest sibling had 2 children, one died as an infant. Second oldest has 2 children. Both his younger siblings also have 2 children each. My dad has a boatload of grandkids lol.
Our birthrate has decreased but most people in my family have 2-3 kids.
I think it has more to do with delaying the birth of the first baby than it has to do with being raised in terrible homes. If you start having children at 19 or 20, then chances are good that you'll have more kids than someone who starts at age 35. With more women having careers and delaying marriage than they were 30 or 50 or 70 years ago, the number of children decreases as well. Of course, having many reliable birth control options makes a difference, too!
Wanted to note, I also agree with this.
My maternal grandmother didn't have her first child until she was 26, which was "old" back then.
My paternal grandmother had her first child at age 16.
My mom also had her first child at age 16. Most of the people I know who had children before the age of 20 have more than 2 children.
I especially agree on birth control. Having babies from my particular female perspective is very draining physically and mentally and now that we have the option to control how many children we have, women are doing that.
Someone else mentioned the Great Migration and moving from rural to urban settings and as a black woman, I agree that may have something to do with the lower birthrate for black women as well, but in my own family, my maternal side have lived in our hometown since the mid 1800s. My maternal grandmother was the first to have access to birth control. Her mother, my great grandmother had 5 children live to adulthood. My 2nd great grandmother had a total of 8 children and 6 lived to adulthood, my 3rd great grandmother had 8 children and 5 live to adulthood. My 4th great grandmother had 7 children and 4 live to adulthood.
All of those grandmothers lived in the same general area. My maternal grandmother came of age in the 1960s. Both she and my paternal grandmother were some of the first women to use birth control pills. My paternal grandmother had 5 kids by the time she was 26 years old. According to my oldest aunt on that side, she started taking BC after the birth of their youngest sibling and never got pregnant again after that.
I think education and career plans make a big difference. My grandparents all had at least 6 siblings growing up (mostly farm families) but they each had 1 or 2 children, most of whom went to college. Several had none. That generation in turn had 1 or 2 children each.
My mother remembers my grandmother telling her "you can love 2 as much as 12".
The biggest family later was my brother's with 4 (and the only divorce) but most in that generation have 2,1 or 0.
None of the younger generation got married before their 30s. They have had 3,0,2,0,0,0,0. Several have no plans of ever having kids. Too much money, too much stress and they enjoy their childfree lives too much to change.
There's a lot I could say about the birth/fertility rate in my family, so for now I'll just say this - Mom had three younger brothers. One of them died young, and hadn't had children with his wife. The other two married and had children later in life.......result being that there's a fairly large age gap between my two siblings and I, and our cousins.
That has continued on with the next generation......my siblings and I have been the only ones to have children, and so far none of our cousins seem interested in getting married or having families.
I am one of seven kids. My father was one of 13 and my mother one of seven.
My 11 year old daughter mentioned in her 5th grade class last year that she wanted to grow up and have 'at least six kids.' She told me that her teacher, who has no kids, laughed and said, 'Six kids? why that might just be a few too many'
I told her she is free to decide when she grows up if she wants to have six kids or not. I think there's a lot of societal pressure nowadays to limit the number of pregnancies etc. There's a lot of media and societal angst about the problems associated with more children but not much about the joys and benefits of having many children.
But happy to say my daughter still occasionally pipes up out of the blue that she wants to have a very big family. She talks about their potential names and age gaps. i love that she wasn't deterred.
Getting pregnant was rather easy for my wife and I. Once we stopped all means of BC, only took a few tries. After the last kid, I got a vasectomy. Fertility was never an issue.
Both of my parents came from smaller families. Mom had one sister, Dad had two brothers.
They had seven kids. Most were Baby Boomers (not me, I'm the youngest) and it was pretty common for people to have 5, 6, 7 kids in the 1950s and early 60s.
Six of us have biological children:
one has 4, one has 3, four had 2 each
(I have one sister who couldn't conceive and has two adopted children.)
So, there are 15 biological grandchildren.
Of those, three have two kids each and one has one, total of 7 great-grandchildren. There will most likely not be more until & unless the five youngest grandchildren, who are still in their teens/early 20s, eventually marry and have kids.
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