The Demographic Winter

     Hi! My name is Caden Hill and I'm excited to start my first blog!  I'm doing this for my Family Relations class, since I have started taking this class, I have felt more passionately about the family than I ever have before. So far what I've learned about this class is the demographic winter that we're currently facing around the world, but even in the United States.  

    When we say that we're in a demographic winter, that means that as population might be able to increase exponentially population can also decrease exponentially. This is seen most clearly by the birth rate. Now, what we should see is a birth rate of about 2.1. What that means, is that for every two parents there should be just a little over two kids to replace them so that the population continues to grow. We reviewed this video as a class talking about the population of the world and the United States, and what we found is that our population is starting to go down but our birth rate Remains the Same, and that was interesting, at least it was at this is at the time. I want to say that was around 2014. Part of what started this demographic winter was a man by the name of Paul Ehrlich. He's a man that wrote this book called "The Population Bomb". 

    Basically what this book said was that the world wouldn't be able to maintain itself with this population growth from the baby boom. So, a lot of people got really scared about this and stopped having children. So, what we should typically see in a population is that if the birth rate stays the same the population should also stay the same. So, How Could the population be decreasing if the birth rate is staying the same? What we found, was that there were more people that were choosing to have zero children in their families. Now, what could be the cause for this? There's four major things that I remember from this video. The women's revolution, the sex revolution, contraception, and individualism all have something to do with this population decrease, this demographic winter. 

    Listen, I'm all for empowered women, and women doing things that help them to be successful, independent, and Powerful. But, this issue has me extremely scared. Nowadays what they're telling women is to go to school, to get a job, to be successful in your career, and a husband will come naturally. In consequence of this, what we're seeing is all the time that this takes for a woman to go to school, and to get into a successful career shrinks the dating pool, and they still haven't found a husband. 

    So, now that she's in a successful career and doesn't have a husband naturally, it takes time to date, it takes time to get married, it takes time to want to have children. By their time that they're ready to have children it might be too late for them, biologically. This is a surprising fact to me but, I didn't know that girls are born with all of the eggs they will ever produce in their lifetime. So, when someone says that they're racing against a biological clock, they mean it. And then, if there's fertility issues with that, that makes the ability to have children even less. Currently the birth rate in the United States today is 1.64. That is a scary number to me. Personally, what I feel like is the biggest problem today with the birth rate/fertility rate is the push for individualism. We are too concerned for what's going to be best for ourselves that we don't worry about having children or a family.  It then becomes illogical to have children.

    Now, I've always thought that the family was important, but looking at these numbers and what that means for us economically scares the living daylights out of me. Ironically, the concern about overpopulation in the world is solved best by populating the world instead of not populating. Like I said earlier, I've grown even more passionate about the family, and this just shows me how important it is to have families. I recognize that I can't do a sufficient job in explaining this all in this one blog, so if there's questions I would love to answer them, and I would also love to hear your thoughts, too! Thank you for reading into my first blog!