Honey, where are the kids?
Honey, where are the kids?
No no, it is not a sequel or spin-off to Honey: I Shrunk the Kids or Honey: We Shrunk Ourselves. Although it would be quite interesting to see where the cast is now. I'm sure if we were to Google them we'd find all those deets.
I digress. Where was I? Ah, yes. Kids. Kids are everywhere! Right? Well, I'm not sure how much longer that will be since we are seeing a trend of adults not wanting to have children at all or if they do they have maybe 1-2. You see, this then led me to look up some articles and the first thing I clicked on was this article by The New York Times, "Americans Are Having Fewer Babies. They Told Us Why" by Claire Cain Miller.
"Americans are having fewer babies. At first, researchers thought the declining fertility rate was because of the recession, but it kept falling even as the economy recovered" (Miller, 2018). Hmm, interesting. I kept reading and more reasons were presented. There was a research conducted by the Morning Consult and surveyed 1,858 men and women between the ages of 20-45. Check it out:
If I'm being honest, I have had some of those concerns too and a lot of people I know have shared similar worries. I think a lot of us may have that in common. For many young adults, they are on this wave of fulfilling their goals and being ambitious; career oriented. Nothing wrong with that.
Getting married, and starting a family used to be what would start the adulthood, "now many say they want to wait... the only age group in which fertility rate increased was women ages 40 to 44" (Miller, 2018). Starting marriage late and birth is a predominantly impactful reason people are having fewer children than they had originally planned. In the US, teen pregnancies, unintentional pregnancies were high among the Hispanic immigrant population. However, effective birth control has reversed those numbers.
And that’s when the wheel really started spinning for me. I noticed that this article was pulling data for the US. Which is not a negative thing but I was curious if other countries felt the same way. I mention this because Elon Musk shared that people think we are overpopulating but he feels “it's completely the opposite… if people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words” (Musk, 2021, as cited in Gleeson, 2021). Civilization, that means all of the human race.
Alas, this is where I decided to do a little research of my own. The data I collected was rather small (group of 66) but the responses were interesting. I really wanted to see if what I collected would be a tiny spec of what Miller had presented a couple years back. I did publish the questionnaire in English and Spanish. I was able to get responses from the Columbia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Philippines, and the US.
Majority of the responses came from married people and singles. I’ll share a few responses that stood out to me in regards to questions 8:
“Although in America (and many Westernized countries) rates are down, I believe it will continue to increase worldwide because the rate of pregnancy is higher than death rates.”
“I think the population will increase for the fact that during the pandemic a lot of lives were lost and a lot of us had to step it up and get a job and just have some sort of reliable income and just because of that I feel like a sense of responsibility comes with that. With that being said people might just go ahead and have a kid or were already planning that and are going through with it.”
“Decrease. Many are afraid of children and raising them as single parents since many refuse to marry for fear of divorce.”
“I think it will be decreasing. The reason is because I feel that we are exposing ourselves to many harmful chemicals and harmful products that affect our bodies which then shorten our life span.”
So, let me ask you. Honey, where are the children?
**I have attached spreadsheets of what the research consisted of:
References
Miller, C. C. (2018, July 5). Americans are having fewer babies. they told us why. The New York Times. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-having-fewer-babies-they-told-us-why.html
Gleeson, S. (2021, December 7). Elon Musk says there aren't 'enough people,' birthrate could threaten human civilization. USA Today. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2021/12/07/elon-musk-declining-birthrate-threatens-human-civilization/6414749001/
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