How Would Franz Kafka See This?
I do not understand why people are not making the connection. We scoffed, criticized, and condemned China’s one child policy but what are we seeing in America today? Not a government limitation policy but an economic limiting one.
Being of the baby boom generation our parents and most others of the growing upwardly mobile middle class afforded a decent lifestyle that was within their means with 3+ children. As those baby boomers came of age, in a sense spoiled since no healthy parent wants their children to sacrifice as much as they did, they rebelled because they were raised to believe there was an easier softer way that did not require the levels of sacrifice and commitment their parents made.
Desiring the two cars and the house (plus appropriate toys and vacations their parents only afforded later in life) what did they do? The wife went to work justified by the brainwashing that staying at home to raise at least a replacement sized family of 2.3 children was not worthy of her time or her value. This led to a reduction in family size because of the cost of daycare, transportation costs, appropriate work attire, dry cleaning, and more meals out which made her income a minor player if there were 2-3 kids. Fortunately, as soon as the kids could be put in publicly funded daycare (school) the dual income $ became more available to expand lifestyle until corrective dental care, child extracurricular activities, mental health therapy for maxed out parents, the two car loans and yes, the costs of divorce for the economically destroyed relationships, took their toll (but now the wife had a credit card to help fund the upward spiral and in the divorce situation, for a while, her single lifestyle).
Back then a knew acronym arose, DINKS (Double Income No Kids). With the availability of non-secured credit and lacking the burdens of children these folks bid the price of everything up because they had far more lifestyle enhancing discretionary income to play with. As the cost of lifestyle increased the only choice besides reducing one’s quality of life was to reduce the families planned future size. This took place in various forms but the most insidious was the new larger families because of combining them due to divorce/remarriage and the addition of a third income earning nonfamily member contributing via “child support”. This is the triple income family. Today grandparents are a third and possibly fourth contributor just to provide what my parents’ generation (and initially myself) did with one income.
To cut this essay short I jump too today. As I look at the children of the baby boomers, I find smaller families, or having children later in life (usually just one) or no self-created actual family at all. The one child family has become more and more the norm purely because of economics (back to the China example). This is where a whole essay on abortion on demand would fit in. The one child family is no more than a hobby level commitment to the future as it creates a declining population that is unable to meet the economic demands of our society. It is purely self-serving. This brings us to the flood of illegals being allowed in.
Government officials know that a declining natural population cannot fund the needs of the future so they need more people that will hopefully fill the tax losses of fewer and fewer natives coming down the pike to pay in (i.e., Social Security, pension funds and biggest of all a growing national debt). The assumption being that these illegals will work and pay in.
America is all about investing into the future. The family is the core of that investment and unless we can reverse this declining trend, by default, we end up no different than China, killing unwanted or in this case unaffordable babies.
Rob Wood
