I’m almost certain this is wrong. Economists (& demographers?) call this “The Demographic Transition”. Usually (i.e. historically in most countries that have developed or are developing) there is substantial population growth in the early stages of development due to much reduced infant/child mortality, in turn due to important improvements in sanitation, and maternal and early childhood nutrition. At this point, most of the society is still agricultural; what isn’t is, by our lights, early industry. In both sectors, child labor is usually an important component. Birth rates typically take a generation or 2 to adjust. An incomplete list of explanations for the lower birth rates: include more children surviving to adulthood: children becoming more and more an expense as child labor falls, and required training/education increases: and higher living standards reducing the need for children as social security.

I also agree with the point that some others have made that the Age of Independence has really changed for women more than for men. In most places and times a teenage girl marrying a guy 10 or 15 years older wouldn’t have gotten a second glance, but now it’s likely to get him arrested.

I’m a materialist. The simple fact is that people like sex; they like romantic love; they enjoy a sense of openness and adventure, especially before taking on family responsibilities.

The reason young adults get to enjoy this sort of thing for a longer period than they ever used to is simple: they can.

Politics and technology have moved women into the work force. They can earn money and control it. Men have often delayed having children until they had established careers. Now women delay having children for the same reason.

Technology also helps. It is easy to underestimate the impact of the pill, but the pill gives the woman control. Before the pill, every time a woman had sex, she was taking a risk of getting pregnant, and possibly dying during childbirth. If you could get polio from drinking beer, consider the impact of a polio vaccine on beer sales.

Of course conservatives like to whine about this stuff. Half the cave paintings on the walls of Lascaux were probably drawn by stuffy old people whining about young people being young and having lots of sex and few responsibilities, while the other half were probably drawn by young people getting it on.

I presume your larger point is that we’ve had legal, reliable contraception for forty-five years now, so there should be no change in unintended pregnancy/forced marriages since then, and all subsequent variation is purely choice. But life and society are messier than that.

This seems like a good idea to me. What I wonder is whether people like these “courtship-related activities” as such or merely as a means to getting sex without long-term commitment or as a means to getting a wide range of sex partners. Would Russell’s program fly? Freshman orientation: here is your roommate/sex partner for the year. We expect that you’ll get on but if you really can’t you may apply to the Dean of Students for a switch. Remember though—all cats are equally gray in the darkness, yuk, yuk.

Personally I’d have loved this kind of arrangement. Or failing that a web-based sex hook-up service: get your partner for the evening, no hassle. Get the sex taken care of so you can get on with business. What I wonder though if whether for some the courtship business, the competition, the seduction routines aren’t in some way gratifying in themselves, in the way that sports or video games are, if the tail isn’t wagging the dog so to speak. Still lots of cultures get on without this business and, until recently, it didn’t occupy 17 years of people’s lives.

Is engaging in ‘a lot of courtship-related program activities that don’t really entail a good-faith search for a spouse’ a consequence of ‘the age at which people get married and have children [having] gone up’? Or is ‘the age at which people get married and have children [having] gone up’ a consequence of people wanting to engage in ‘a lot of courtship-related program activities that don’t really entail a good-faith search for a spouse’?

I’d choose the second option.

I think it’s very hard to claim that technological and economic changes are forcing ages at childbirth and marriage to upwards. There haven’t been any real contraceptive improvements upon the Pill and Higher Ed is 3/4 years. I don’t think the dynamic is there – isn’t the age just too high to be forced by economics? People are in an economic position to marry earlier than they do, but don’t because they choose to maintain their independence.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you
with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

That gets me at least a metaphoric answer for why the kids of today are not like the kids of my youth. If I am not mistaken, I believe that my first son has just helped to deliver his first child today. He is thirty, that is the same age as me when he was born. I am not sure, he lives half way round the world in Shanghai. Ain’t life sumthin?

Right. And, er, in many ways it wasn’t. My point is not that we always have to remember London, but rather than narratives of changing conditions in marriage should be very careful to ground any grand pronouncements in the possibility that the conditions that believe are unique to (whatever gets to count as) today are not in fact unique. Thus when David Brooks writes, “Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30” (my emphasis), someone should point out that what he’s describing is more or less 15th-century London. For example. And it’s as a “for example,” finally, that I cautioned against Brooks or Ygeslias or anyone else forgetting the Middle Ages. Not because the Middle Ages always speaks to us, but because it—and the preindustrial more generally—all too often serves as a nice, imaginary monolithic point of contrast for the wild days we live in now. Elementary stuff, yeah?

No doubt that plays a major role—but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of family instability also contributing.

No it doesn’t preclude that, but I doubt it. Strikes me that there’s a direct relationship between societies with good social safety nets and low birth rates. In other words, it seems that increasing stability in fact decreases the birth rate.

I would add that this independent life stage seems to apply particularly to young women – who have always been more closely controlled by parents and community. Once young women had their own financial means, were able to live on their own without scandal, and had access to reliable birth control and no-fault divorce, they could afford to gamble on a “risky” marriage or partnership. I recall Stephanie Coontz, in her (excellent) Marriage, A History, pointing out that up until the 1970’s, women were far more likely than men to say they would marry someone they didn’t love if he was a “good provider and nice guy” etc. But a college-educated woman with good earning potential, who can live on her own, get birth control, and access to divorce, can much more afford what might be a risky relationship gamble.

1) Reliable birth control (I presume its effects on women’s independence, financial opportunities, and financial obligations are obvious enough);

2) Baby formula and breast pumps. It’s been really staggering for me to discover that, without these items (or, I suppose, the affluence and cultural context in which to afford wet nurses), it would be literally impossible for me to be apart from the baby for more than 2-3 hours. Obviously financial independence for mothers of young children is basically impossible without that quite recent technology. (And financial independence later on is harder to gain with a period of dependency in one’s history.)

Of course not all women are mothers (or want to be, or should), but it’s a sufficiently common state that the technologies that facilitate motherhood are indispensable in such a discussion.

Just guessing, of course. Hey—it’s a blog!

lower infant mortality among these groups of people

No doubt that plays a major role—but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of family instability also contributing. (I’m sure there are many other factors involved, as well. Social Security and other retirement benefits, for example, reduce the incentive for people to have children to care for them in their old age.)

changing labor practices

If I’m not mistaken, the main collapse of birthrates in industrialized countries took place long after child labor effectively disappeared.

the pill

People are actually able to control their fertility quite effectively by non-pharmacological means, if they want to. I think motivational explanations for declining birthrates are much more plausible.

Are you just guessing or can you refer us to a study?

Strikes me, and this is just conventional wisdom, that the diminishing birthrate among certain groups of people derives from: a) lower infant mortality among these groups of people (discuss: relatively high birth rate in America among industrialized nations and its relation to our high infant mortality for an industrialized nation); b) changing labor practices (child labor largely takes place in the industrial centers of industrialized nations, i.e., in the ‘Global South,’ and migrant labor has replaced child labor within the industrialized nations); c) the pill, which allows people to avoid having children and thereby increasing their happiness by not tying them down to caring for selfish creatures who diminish our productivity and ability to travel.

And it continues to strike me that the discussions of marriage and children and labor here need a better comparative angle to take in late medieval Europe and in fact the rest of the world.