Good & plenty: what happened to large families?

Why did you want so many children, Mom?" asks my grown-up daughter, herself now a mother of a two-year-old. She knows that in letters written before my wedding in 1955, I expressed my desire for six children, perhaps all girls. Having five boys (surprise) and one girl within ten years (1955-65) was an arduous fulfillment of my dream, but today it's the aspiration itself that seems incredible to my children.

"Well, which of you do you wish weren't here?" I reply. This feeble thrust hits home, since on most days the children all get along with each other and us, and always adore being part of a large loving family. But if I point out to them that you cannot have large families or enjoy adult children unless you first produce babies, I get no response.

Intergenerational differences like these over reproduction force me to reflection. Why have childbearing patterns changed so much since the 1950s? I am also prodded to the inquiry by a paper assignment on the nature of responsible parenthood in a time of genetic progress. Is it the ominous growth of genetic knowledge and the newly salient risks of fetal impairment that increase anxiety about having children? Or is it a general instability in the economic and cultural forces in society?

For Catholics, another cause of the move to smaller families are changes in the church since Vatican II. The widespread acceptance of birth control makes a difference in the means of limiting family size, but why has the desire for large families diminished? Is it hard times in a new guise?

Small families were certainly the norm during the Depression era. My husband and I were 1930s' babies and each of us was the elder in a two-child, middle-class family. Growing up in my family's Southern WASP circle, I don't think I ever knew anyone who had more than three children. Two was the median, the mode, and the mean, even though back in Alabama my mother had been one of nine children and her mother one of eighteen born to a primitive Baptist minister. The national trend of fertility was generally downward until my cohort of women came along and gladly rushed into marriage and babybooming. Were we nostalgic for the past or hyper-hopeful about the future?

Economic boom times in the 1950s certainly had a lot to do with the high fertility rate. Since there had been few Depression babies there was less competition for desirable academic places or for good jobs. It never crossed my mind that getting good work would ever be a problem; jobs, even in academia, were plentiful and offered security. You might skimp and slave to get through school, often with the help of the GI Bill for husbands, but then the world was your oyster. Why not have many children?

Then, too, unlike today, most married women would not have to work in order to make ends meet, or to have basic security. Before divorce became rampant, women weren't afraid of being abandoned and dumped onto the job market with no skills. As a child, I never knew a married woman who worked professionally - or even wanted to.

Those odd young '50s' women like myself who aspired to intellectual careers as well as family life felt confident that we would be able to work out a transition down the road when the children were older and our husbands were established. I remember once when my husband avowed he would like to have twelve children; I assured him that I could only manage six because I intended to have a career.

Indeed a general domestic confidence prevailed - until the tumultuous and disillusioning 1960s and '70s hit American culture. Before these rude awakenings, middle-class families expected to be able to protect their children and raise them well. This assurance and the delight of loving one's children fed the desire to have more, and still more.

O.K. So maybe some of this childbearing was narcissistic pride in one's own progeny, but there was also a great deal of altruism involved. I try to explain to young people that before the world changed, the main channel for youthful desires to serve others was domestic. A big family was like the Peace Corps, only at home. It was like a commune, only you produced all the members. And in my case, I must admit that as a lazy feminine bookworm with little money, having many children was like an Outward Bound Survival challenge.

Don't most young people want to live fully, passionately, and throw themselves into daring projects? It must be human nature because I can remember as a child forcing my poor sister to go without covers in winter so we could shiver and pretend to be Eskimos struggling to survive in the freezing Arctic. (And I'd never heard of Saint Teresa setting out at age ten to convert the Moors.)

Now in a more pessimistic time I can cast a colder eye and see that enthusiastic parental risk-taking can be irresponsible. Psychological and economic standards of childrearing have risen in the last forty years. It's not just increased selfishness. But young Catholics aren't any longer imbued with the fervent belief that God will provide and come to one's succor. The operative spirituality of our day was much taken with Franciscan and Catholic Worker espousals of poverty and providence - which works out better for celibates.

Today the church teaches a more demanding version of Christian parenthood in which parents must take responsibility for providing high levels of education and formation. And increasingly, families are hardpressed for time, energy, money, and communal support. Working parents suffer incredible stresses and conflicts. Two children seem harder to raise than six used to be.

I can only conclude that family size among Americans, Catholics included, will remain small in the foreseeable future. Ironically, our generation was the exception, providing an unusual bulge in the demographic curve. Ah well, another blessing to be grateful for; we were free to be extravagantly fruitful in a time when life was grace and favor, and good and plenty.