here is a little-known movement sweeping across the United States. The movement is "natalism."Posted on 12/07/2004 3:51:25 PM PST by RWR8189
here is a little-known movement sweeping across the United States. The movement is "natalism."
All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends.
They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling.
In a world that often makes it hard to raise large families, many are willing to move to find places that are congenial to natalist values. The fastest-growing regions of the country tend to have the highest concentrations of children. Young families move away from what they perceive as disorder, vulgarity and danger and move to places like Douglas County in Colorado (which is the fastest-growing county in the country and has one of the highest concentrations of kids). Some people see these exurbs as sprawling, materialistic wastelands, but many natalists see them as clean, orderly and affordable places where they can nurture children.
If you wanted a one-sentence explanation for the explosive growth of far-flung suburbs, it would be that when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences.
So there are significant fertility inequalities across regions. People on the Great Plains and in the Southwest are much more fertile than people in New England or on the Pacific coast.
You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.
In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe, "Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas."
Politicians will try to pander to this group. They should know this is a spiritual movement, not a political one. The people who are having big families are explicitly rejecting materialistic incentives and hyperindividualism. It costs a middle-class family upward of $200,000 to raise a child. These people are saying money and ambition will not be their gods.
Natalists resist the declining fertility trends not because of income, education or other socioeconomic characteristics. It's attitudes. People with larger families tend to attend religious services more often, and tend to have more traditional gender roles.
I draw attention to natalists because they're an important feature of our national life. Because of them, the U.S. stands out in all sorts of demographic and cultural categories. But I do it also because when we talk about the divide on values in this country, caricatured in the red and blue maps, it's important that we understand the true motive forces behind it.
Natalists are associated with red America, but they're not launching a jihad. The differences between them and people on the other side of the cultural or political divide are differences of degree, not kind. Like most Americans, but perhaps more anxiously, they try to shepherd their kids through supermarket checkouts lined with screaming Cosmo or Maxim cover lines. Like most Americans, but maybe more so, they suspect that we won't solve our social problems or see improvements in our schools as long as many kids are growing up in barely functioning families.
Like most Americans, and maybe more so because they tend to marry earlier, they find themselves confronting the consequences of divorce. Like most Americans, they wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions that are under threat.
What they cherish, like most Americans, is the self-sacrificial love shown by parents. People who have enough kids for a basketball team are too busy to fight a culture war.
E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com
No wonder there are so few children in blue counties. Blue county schools are among the worst in the non-Muslim world.
I wish we could go back to when the Left-wingers were the "Reds".
I'd go for 3 or 4 kids if it wasn't so much work. Hats off to those who can handle this many kids without breaking anything against a wall, you have the gift of patience.
The NYTimes hasn't a clue to what morality, family, GOD, and country are all about!
These people are dumbfounded by what was the norm only 40 years ago.
Our country crashed beginning with the johnson regime, trashed by the carter inept hell, and almost totally demoralized by the clinton.
demoralized? What is the word for the exact opposite of MORALS?
I liked the article, but you can tell that they are dumbfounded by real America.
A comforting report.
Reflecting upon societal trends for the past 40+ years, how gullible many of us have been to the destructive influences of: Hollywood mores, environmentalists' panic stricken warnings of "overpopulation", womens lib "life without men", psychobabble "blame someone else", Marxist educators and the "Hate American Life" press pimps, resulting in a noticeable lack of respect for our founders Judeo-Christian philosophy of decency.
I'll bet Kerry won the states with the highest abortion rates.
You natalist! ; )
Natalist ... O, ne Zot!
LOL Whotta pathetic term for parents, eh?
Hubby wants four, I tell him I want five but secretly hope for an even half-dozen.
What can I say? I'm addicted to babies LOL
To properly raise a child, one must be self-sacrificing of time, money, a clean home, and sleep.
One must worry more about another's future, rather than one's own.
One must put another first.
One must face the pain and danger of pregnancy and birth.
Such real sacrifice is repugnant to the self-serving ("It's all about me!) mantra that is the core of the Liberal value system.
Recall the NYC woman, pregnant with triplets who coldly watched saline be injected into the beating hearts of two of her children. And why? So she did not have to leave her precious rent-controlled space and go shop at CostCo, buying mayo in gallon jugs.
Our neighbors just had their 8th. They can't believe we "only" have three. LOL Needless to say we are in a red state. We have a small to average sized family in our church.
Many couples our age or older were convinced the world was going to end soon and only had one or two children. Couples younger than us tend to have three or more.
One of my cousins had five kids and was a little embarrassed by it, but someone kindly told her "You are the kind of folks who *should* have a big family because you will raise them right."
Ann
Want my brand new one for three months?
I want her back after she can sleep through the night, though. LOL.
ping
Good luck with four... no five... er... six? babies. I wanted to have four myself, but infertility changed my plans. It's so unfair that some women can get pregnant so easily (and then go kill the baby), and the women who want desperately to have a baby, can't. I have one little girl, it took us ten years to conceive her, and I am grateful for her every single day... even on the days where nothing will make her happy. :o)
I have an old friend who comes from a family of 14 children. When she married, she told me she wanted a small family, say 6 children.
Quite a few years later, there are 5 - all girls. I haven't asked her if they're trying for a boy.
Her kids are some of the nicest, well behaved, accomplished young ladies I've ever met. All pretty, too. One married, one engaged.
And all homeschooled.
I raised my children this way, starting in 1983. This is nothing new...it's just what conservatives have been doing forever.
I wonder if the writer can back up the claim that "natalists" (read: crazed baby maachines) tend to marry earlier. I know plenty, including me, from the boomer generation that waited a while, at least until we had our bachelor's degrees.
Too busy to fight a cultural war?? Think so? Come get some, leftist pukes!
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