According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2003, of 57,320,000 Married-Couple Families, 31,406,000 did not have any children of their own of less than eighteen years of age.  This represents fully 55 percent of all Married-Couple families.

(Source:  U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P20-547, and earlier reports; and unpublished data, in "No. 60. Families by Number of Own Children Under 18 Years Old: 1980 to 2003," U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2004-2005 [124th Edition], Washington, DC, 2004, p. 52; http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/pop.pdf .)

"From requests for childfree restaurants to a preference for childfree worship, it seems that American society has a strange relationship toward the young.  ...Those with sufficient means may dine, fly, work, worship, and play without the cries and demands of dependent life. Adults may remain productive, preoccupied, focused and, in a dubious way, irresponsible.

A generation of adults in North America faces now the strange combination of purposeful neglect and systematic use. Complaints about ill-behaved, interrupting, unproductive children are gaining force at the same time that we propose the use of embryos, fetuses and children for medical research. While a medical industry becomes increasingly interested in the usability of incipient life, a generation coming of age declares its perpetual youth and independence from dependent life. A new generation of grown-ups tends toward unapologetic neglect. I fear that we are also becoming predatory." 

(Source:  Amy Laura Hall, "Losing and Using our Children," The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, April 8, 2005; http://www.cbhd.org/resources/bioethics/hall_2005-04-08.htm .)

Why has fertility plummeted so dramatically in modern societies? Because he finds previous explanations of "very low fertility" so unsatisfying, demographer John C. Caldwell of the Australian National University in Canberra has recently set forth his own analysis-an analysis focused largely on economic "modes of production." In this analysis, Caldwell identifies the phenomenal wealth generated by the modern industrial economies as a prime reason so many young men and young women now delay or forgo child-bearing and child-rearing. 

In assessing previous attempts to account for the very low fertility now seen in modern societies around the world, Caldwell complains that colleagues who have allowed the Baby Boom aberration to blind them to longer-term patterns have also too often viewed "attitudinal and behavioral changes ... [as] the fundamental driving forces behind fertility decline" and have frequently falsely supposed that the changes in family life witnessed in the last quarter of the twentieth century are now largely over. Caldwell interprets currently depressed levels of fertility as the inevitable consequence of a societal shift premised upon traditional "home production whether on the farm or in the house" to modern "extra-domestic or industrial production."

Within this broad-gauge interpretation, Caldwell views low fertility as part of an overall social transformation. "At the beginning of the twentieth century," he writes, "probably half of all consumption was still of goods produced within the home: made-up clothes, prepared food, child care, and many other products. By the middle of the century industry had made only limited advances against this type of home production, and it was still largely the product of women in the home.  During the second half of the century, partly under pressure from women working outside the home, extra-domestic production began to compete successfully with home production in all of these areas." What is more, the move from home- and family-farm-based production changed people's fundamental social orientation, as it "allowed secularism to develop, and [fostered] new ways of interpreting behavior and new doubts about the divine endorsement of the old ways." And, of course, secularism offered no resistance at all to the use of the "better contraception" that became widely available beginning in the Sixties.

In Caldwell's interpretive scheme, the Baby Boom counts as no more than "a partial detour" in the larger economic and social transformation. Taking that larger pattern as the fundamental reality, Caldwell argues that the sheer wealth-producing capacity of modern industry made "the collapse of the baby boom" inevitable. "It is unlikely," Caldwell reasons, "that married women would have continued to stay out of the workforce, given that the economy was expanding and offering more jobs ... and ever-more tempting consumer products were appearing, even had there not been a steep rise in women's education or a move toward gender equity in wages." As the stunning economic developments of the second half of the twentieth century enticed (or pulled) more and more women into paid employment, the unprecedented "movement of most adult women to join most adult men in the workforce [became] the engine of the fertility decline" seen in recent decades.

But observers are very much mistaken, Caldwell asserts, if they suppose that the economic dynamism of the modern world has finished the changes it will make in family life. "That the Industrial Revolution is continuing," he remarks, "is shown by the average annual growth rate of per capita income during the last quarter of the twentieth century of 1.78 percent in Western Europe (a rate implying a doubling every 39 years) and 1.33 percent in the world as a whole (a doubling every 52 years)." It is, in Caldwell's opinion, "this huge increase in wealth that allowed young adults-even young married adults-to further their own training and to seek occupational advancement rather than, as in previous times, placing their hopes in their children's views." That is, "at the level of the individual in the industrial society there is no necessity for either families or fertility."

Given the strength of this overall pattern, Caldwell finds it strange that many of his colleagues have asserted that "the changes [in family and social life] were largely finished, rather than concluding that, as incomes continued to rise in increasingly secular societies, there were almost unlimited possibilities of continual social change and family disintegration." To colleagues who have proclaimed a "postmodern era" in social patterns, Caldwell responds skeptically: "The use of 'postmodern' implies that the great period of economic, social, and demographic change is over.  But this is far from true."  After all, for those who join Caldwell in taking the long view, "we are still in the midst, perhaps in the early stages, of the progression from a society structured for agricultural production to one structured for industrial production." 

Though Caldwell himself regards the disintegration of family life with utter insouciance, for those who earnestly seek a renewal of family life his provocative analysis underscores the deep need to recover traditional modes of home-based production-and to devise new ones.

(Source: John C. Caldwell, "Demographic Theory: The Long View," Population and Development Review 30 [2004]: 297-316.)