Mark Steyn has been writhing about demographics for years. Families used to have a tree...a couple - almost always married - would have a few kids. each would have a few kids, etc, etc. Now the family tree is an upside down pyramid. four grandparents, two kids, one grandchild.
The corollary to that is that you end up with a bunch of “only children”, no brothers/sisters, no cousins, no aunts/uncles...
I had to laugh at that one because at least in my case, it's how things turned out. My two adult children (now nearly their 30s) have yet to have babies of their own so our recent Christmas gatherings have been mostly a geriatric affair. Grandparents snoring on the couches after dinner, nothing under the tree but gift cards and alcoholic beverages - nobody in the family young enough to give toys to.
It wasn't always this way. When I grew up, three of my four grandparents were already dead. Most of my uncles and aunts had multiple children, as many as seven. So my childhood Christmases were bedlam - children running around everywhere. I had so many cousins I could never name all of them off the top of my head. I had to get a piece of paper and put some thought into it as I made out my list!
So I do kind of fear that this is happening all around. Not good for America if we are only averaging one or two kids and having to bring in immigrants to make up the difference.
So if there is a baby boom starting to happen as another poster here pointed out, I would encourage that and hope it is not too little, too late.
In closing, I should mention that the big childhood scare inflicted by liberals growing up was overpopulation. All during the 1970s, there was best seller after best seller warning us of upcoming famines brought about by overpopulating the earth. In the same hysterical tones we hear about "global warming" today, we were warned that we would soon run out of food to feed everybody, run out of gasoline and just about every other natural resource.
I think most people of my generation were literally scared into having just the proverbial 1.2 kids so that we would not contribute to overpopulating the planet. Look where that kind of hysterical thinking has gotten us? I hope today's generation does not fall for the "global warming" baloney as we did for the overpopulation scam.