Dogs Instead of Children

As a kid, I remember driving to the beach on hot summer nights in July and August after my father came home from work. There wasn’t a lot of time before the sun went down and mosquitoes came out, but neighborhood kids would pile out of the family car (most had only one back then), drop their towels, and run to the water. I was reminded of this recently as I’ve been spending a few hot, summer evenings at a local beach in South Portland, Maine after working all day fixing up the house my wife and I recently purchased as an investment. A few young parents would bring their children down in the late afternoon and then take them home again for supper.

More numerous, however, were people who brought their dogs. They would have been young parents two generations ago but now they’re pet owners. Arriving at the edge of the sand, they’d let their dogs off leash and they’d run to the water’s edge, then back to their owners. Soon, it became evident how greatly dogs outnumbered children.

The children seemed to know each other as did the dogs; it was a neighborhood beach. They were all fairly well-behaved and had a good time, but I couldn’t help thinking about what a major cultural shift I was witnessing.

Have you noticed how many young couples are getting dogs instead of having children? They’re putting off babies, or they’ve decided they don’t want children at all. Children are a lot of work - a lot of commitment. They’re expensive. They live longer than dogs too, and they demand much more time and attention. They require self-sacrifice. But what’s to become of us all if this trend continues?I was one of eight children. That’s why they call mine the Baby Boom Generation. My wife and I had four children, but we have only four grandchildren so far. There might be one or two more to come along, but our grown children are like others of their generation: they have only one or two children - or none. They have dogs instead. Writing about the economic implications of this, columnist Mark Steyn uses Greece, Europe’s economic basket case, where their fertility rate is way below replacement level, as an example: “100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren,” he points out. “i.e., the family tree is upside down.”

Why is this happening? Talking to other aging baby boomers the conversation inevitably turns to family and I hear a similar lament. Fellow boomers are taking care of their grown children’s dogs instead of the grandchildren they’d rather care for but don’t have. When I’ve asked them why their children are not having children, I hear: They cannot afford them. They want to buy property instead. They want to travel. They don’t want to stretch out their bodies in pregnancy. They want to concentrate on their careers. They’re afraid of what is happening in the world and don’t want to bring children into it. They think the world is over-populated and don’t want to add to it. They think having children will stress the environment. They think there won’t be enough food for everyone,” et cetera, et cetera.

Fewer of the people who can afford to have children are having them, while more of the people who cannot afford them are. Government has subsidized generations of low-income, single women who bear children and yet we wonder why that demographic increases. In 1950, the rate was 2% of all births among white women and 17% among black women. During my lifetime, the rate has increased to 29% among white women and 73% among blacks! Since 1973, there have been more than 45 million abortions in the United States alone. If those babies were allowed to be born, would the above numbers be even worse? I suspect they would.So the trend is that married couples are having fewer children while low-income, single women are having more. As a teacher between 1975 and 2011, I witnessed first-hand the effects this demographic trend has had on public education and it hasn’t been good. What are the effects on American culture?

You already know, don’t you.

All Riled Up

It’s always easier to organize against something than for something. My experience in two big “against” campaigns were both kind of fun for me as a young leftist/liberal. We could easily portray ourselves as the good guys stopping bad guys from ruining our lives. The first was against a highway through our neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts in the early seventies and, the other was against a nuclear waste dump under our town in Maine during the late eighties. We won each after only a couple of months of hell-raising and I learned much. You can tell a lot about people by what riles them.

In rural western Maine where I live, many people have gotten worked up the past few years about Poland Spring selling water out of the aquifer under the towns of Fryeburg and Denmark. Most residents of those towns have their own wells and worry that Poland Spring may pump too much causing the water levels in their wells to go down. They imaging their situation as ordinary people each with a small straw drinking from a big bowl and then a giant sticks a huge straw into the same bowl and starts sucking enormous amounts of water. Their fears don’t seem completely unreasonable given that big aquifers out west have declined because of large agricultural and industrial users pumping out more and more water. The underground aquifer, or  “bowl” if you will, is constantly being replenished by rain, but will that keep up with increasing demand? Then I think of Sebago Lake. Unlike Fryeburg’s invisible aquifer, it is a huge bowl of water visible to everyone and supplies Greater Portland. I never see it go down unless it’s done intentionally by the Portland Water District or others adjusting its outlet dam in fall. It seems like there’s more than enough clean, fresh water in Maine for everyone.

Last summer a dog jumped on a bird at a beach in Scarborough, Maine and killed it. That’s what dogs will do, but animal lovers in that southern Maine shore town have been up in arms for a year over it. On one side are bird lovers who are appalled because the bird was a “piping plover” which is “endangered” according two the state and “threatened” according to the federal government. On the other side are dog lovers who like to let their animals run free on southern Maine beaches mornings and evenings. First it was the bird lovers and greenie federal officials who prevailed on the town council to pass a town-wide leash law. Dog lovers flipped out and overturned the council’s action by referendum. Bird lovers then got the council to pass more limited restrictions. At this writing, Scarborough animal lovers are still fighting each other.

Piping Plovers

My level of concern in this matter can be measured in units of micro give-a-sh**s. If I had to pick a side, it would be for the birds. Unleashed dogs on southern Maine beaches mornings and evenings outnumber children, and they’re annoying. But then millennials in the Greater Portland, Maine area would rather have dogs than kids. Children would cramp their lifestyle and increase their “carbon footprint.”

Next door in South Portland, Maine, green weenies are all worked up because they don’t want Canadian oil to coming into town through the Portland Pipeline. Even though tankers have been unloading oil there and safely piping it north to Canada since 1941 or so, greenies in South Portland insist the pipeline cannot safely reverse flow and bring Canadian oil south. They’re part of a wider, nationwide, green weenie movement that wants to leave petroleum in the ground. They want us all to put up wind mills and solar panels, and if we can’t ride bicycles, then drive Priuses as a last resort. They’ve successfully pressured President Obama to block the Keystone Pipeline for the same reasons. They’re knocking on doors to scare people about “Tar Sands Oil” ruining our environment and causing global warming.

Canada will sell its oil to China and India if they can’t sell it to the United States. Even if you believed that humans cause global warming (which I don’t), stopping any of these pipelines won’t reduce carbon in the atmosphere that purportedly causes warming. It will only hurt us because we’ll have to get our oil from much more volatile places like Venezuela and the Middle East. Greater Portland’s green weenies lost a referendum to stop importing Canadian oil last winter, but they’re still pushing. South Portland’s City Council enacted a ban on exporting crude oil from the city and that is likely to trigger still another referendum.

And on it goes.

Demographic Difficulties

Many elderly citizens in my small western Maine town of Lovell were summer people from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island who always planned to live here full time after retirement. I expect that’s true in other towns in a state where “Vacationland” is stamped on our license plates. I’m semi-retired myself and part of my income, aside from my teacher’s pension and Social Security, is from managing vacation properties here. It dovetailed nicely with teaching and I kept doing it after retiring in 2011. The small contractors I use for plumbing, excavation, carpentry, etc. tell me often how hard it is to find help — especially competent help.

Maine is the oldest state in the country, demographically speaking. According to a recent Boston Globe article: “Maine is one of only two states, along with West Virginia, where deaths now outnumber births,” and “many young people move away in search of opportunity,” further exacerbating the problem. Counties in northern Maine see declining populations while York and Cumberland counties in southern Maine are increasing by three and six percent respectively. Median age is 44 statewide. There are more people over 65 than under 18. The over 65 demographic is predicted to rise 37% by 2016 while all other age groups decline, according to the Globe.

Maine people are having fewer children and New England, according to a New York Times article, is “the least fertile region in the U.S." Without immigration, which is at record levels, regional population would very likely be declining. People I meet in the Portland area who are in their twenties and thirties are more likely to have dogs with them than children and I’ve written about that several times over the past fifteen years. Nationwide, according to lifescience.com, “there were about 60 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 [in 2017], which is 3 percent lower than the rate in 2016, and the lowest recorded rate since the government started tracking birth rates in 1909.”

Why don’t 21st-century Americans want to have children? When I looked into the problem for previous articles, opinions varied. Some young people said openly that it was selfishness — that children are expensive and require a lot of work for a long time. Some women said they wanted to avoid stretch marks and saggy breasts. Some had parents who divorced and didn’t want any of their children to go through that painful experience. Some said the earth’s environment couldn’t handle too many more people and they wanted to reduce their carbon footprint.

Catholic pundits suggest it’s a lack of hope. Young celebrities like the 29-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Occasio Cortez (D-NY) declared recently that the world will end in twelve years if we don’t take drastic steps like passing a “Green New Deal.” That certainly lends credence to the no-hope theory for her demographic. The Catholic Church taught (I don’t know if it still does) that despair is a sin, and that suicide — the ultimate despair — is too. AOC recommends that her cohort forego having children and eating meat as well because of the methane cows expel from their rear-ends. She wants us all to be childless vegetarians.

The Catholic Church’s influence with young people has seriously declined in America and in the entire western world. The liberal Pope Francis has made several public statements against abortion, but I don’t believe he’s said anything about artificial contraception. That too was declared sinful by his predecessor, Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical: Humanae Vitae. Never have I heard a sermon on that teaching in any Catholic Church I’ve attended, it being politely ignored since its issue fifty years ago. Pope Francis has spoken out about climate change, about which he’s a fellow traveler with the Democrat Party, but nothing about the “carbon footprint” of more children — not yet at least.

The unemployment rate is so low now that we’re essentially at full employment all across America. There are more jobs than people who want them. Although you may not believe it if you look out the window here in western Maine, summer is right around the corner. Building contractors, landscapers, restaurants, resorts, and many other businesses will be desperate for workers and we’re simply not producing them. Savvy business people are recruiting in eastern Europe and elsewhere for seasonal employees. Fewer high school or college kids want to work the way they did decades ago.

What are we to do? Some European countries offer financial incentives for women to produce more children. Maybe we can do that here too but it won’t be enough. Our culture has changed from one that encouraged couples to have children to one that discourages them. For that trend to reverse will take a very long time.

Lacking Generosity

Grandpuppies and grandkitties. When aging baby boomers talk about the newest generation, that’s the lament I’m hearing from many. They wish they could take care of grandchildren for a weekend when their grown-up children go away, but there aren’t any grandchildren because their grown-up sons and daughters aren’t producing any. Instead, they raise dogs and cats, so they ask their boomer parents to watch their pets for them when they go to Bermuda or Cancun, or wherever. That’s what it has come to. It’s one unforeseen result of the fervent boomer belief that our planet is overpopulated.

Boomers grew up during the fifties when families produced a lot of children. When their turn came, however, they wanted fewer children than their “Greatest Generation” parents raised. Was it because birth control became more widely available? Must be a factor since they were certainly having sex often enough. This they proclaimed to the world as their “sexual revolution.” They separated sex from reproduction and family life, claiming marriage and family were too constricting. The institutions which had held society together for millennia were “oppressive.” “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one[s] you’re with.” Opposite sex? Same sex? Both? Didn’t matter. Boomers “liberated” themselves. They insisted it was all to the good. They still do in spite of mountains of contrary evidence. The Democrat Party platform reflects their “values.”

In spite of birth control, all that sex resulted in many pregnancies. “Liberated” feminists insisted they had a constitutional right to abortion and convinced a liberal majority on the US Supreme Court of this. Boomers would abort the children they didn’t want and many would insist that government (meaning people other than them) pay for the ones they did want. Democrats called it the “War on Poverty.” Forty years hence they say “It Takes A Village” to raise a child. It’s the same concept though. Fathers and Mothers aren’t important anymore. They would get rid of “Mothers’ Day” and “Fathers’ Day,” claiming such terms are “sexist.” They insist gender roles are artificial but homosexuality is natural. Government knows what is best for kids, not parents. How will government pay for all this? Raise taxes on the “rich” or course. The rich are defined as people other than them.

Not all boomer-raised children swallow that entire philosophy. They avoid children because raising kids is very expensive, requiring a lot of work and enormous sacrifice of time and emotional energy. They pursue a lifestyle in which kids would just be a drag. If they should get lonely, it’s much easier to get a dog or a cat. They can be left alone all day without a babysitter. On extended vacations, they can be boarded somewhere or left with friends or with their boomer parents. If pangs of guilt about their refusal to reproduce should intrude, they can justify their selfishness claiming they’re conserving resources and shrinking their “carbon footprint.” Their “green” lifestyle is saving the earth. They’re doing homage to Gaia. They’re preserving habitat for other organisms by not reproducing themselves.

Aging liberal boomers should be rejoicing that their children are living out their philosophies, but the ones I’ve talked to don’t seem to be. Rather, they seem sad. They feel they’re missing out on something and they are, of course. Western civilization’s advances have enabled them to live longer lives, but they can’t spend those extra years with the grandchildren if their children aren’t producing any. Similar things are happening in Japan where doll manufacturers are now making artificial, robotic dolls which function as surrogate grandchildren for the grandchildless. I’m not kidding.

Population in Europe is declining too. They’ve increased immigration from Muslim countries to the south to compensate, but that is presenting another set of problems and a backlash has begun against it in Holland, Switzerland, Italy, France and Germany. Europe’s population is aging and there are fewer young people to support the old folks because the generation in between hasn’t generated much. Liberal European retirement benefits cannot be sustained much longer.

Lamenting this situation with a Spanish priest I met in Jerusalem last May, I asked him why he thought young Europeans or Americans were not having children. His answer was simple and succinct: “They lack generosity,” he said. I had been inclined to discuss the subject further but I paused. He was right. It was that simple. When all is said and done, that’s what it comes down to. The “It Takes a Village” to raise a child view is misleading. What it really takes to raise a child is generosity and self-sacrifice, so let’s just say it out loud: Village or no village, today’s young people don’t have what it takes.

Sex Education Paradox

Published 1-05-06

Anyone who read my “Sex Education Controversy” column here last week didn’t see the whole thing. Editors of two newspapers removed sections about controversial “workshops” presented to fourteen-year-olds in Massachusetts by state agencies. The workshops exposed students to sexual practices so bizarre that they couldn’t be printed here. The Boston Globe ignored those workshops, but it reported in a front-page, above-the-fold headline last month that teaching abstinence in school was “controversial.”

One editor emailed me, explaining: “I wanted to let you know I removed the portion of your column regarding “-------” While I see why you included it, it crossed the line regarding good taste and appropriateness for a community newspaper.” I understand the editor’s action, but it presents a paradox. I can’t name the practice here, even though it can be favorably described to fourteen-year-old public school students by state education officials paid with public funds. A search of the Globe’s archives showed no coverage of sex lessons anyone but the Marquis de Sade would consider outrageous. If you want to read an account, Google: “City Journal”; “Tufts” and “teach out” and you’ll hit on a comprehensive article describing what the Massachusetts Department of Education, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are pushing in schools across the country. Be prepared for a shock.

As usual, I gathered more material for the column than I could use in an 800-word piece. For example, sex education the way we know it originated with Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. PP is the biggest abortion provider in the United States - performing nearly a quarter million in 2004, sixteen percent of the total and not including chemical abortions resulting from PP’s distribution of the “morning after pill” to teenagers at their clinics.
Although Margaret Sanger is a feminist hero, few realize that she was also a major promoter of eugenics - the selective breeding of human beings as if they were dogs, horses or cattle. Planned Parenthood is just a new name for the first organization Sanger founded in the 1930s - the “American Birth Control League.” To the governing board of her ABCL she appointed fellow eugenicists and admirers of Adolf Hitler like Lothrop Stoddard. In his book “The Nazi Connection,” Stephan Kuhl writes of him:

“[Stoddard] even met personally with Adolf Hitler. William L. Shirer, an American colleague who had been in Germany since 1934, complained that the Reich minister for propaganda [Joseph Goebbels] gave special preference to Stoddard because his writings on racial subjects were ‘featured in Nazi school textbooks.’ . . . Stoddard claimed in 1940 that the ‘Jew problem’ is ‘already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich.’”

Stoddard was referring to the Holocaust - the ultimate eugenics program. In 1942, The ABCL changed its name to the “Planned Parenthood Federation of America” over Sanger’s objections. As Kuhl put it, the ABCL had a strong Nazi smell.
In the late 1960s, our two biggest teachers’ unions joined Planned Parenthood to push sex education in public schools. In last week’s column, I wrote that teen pregnancy rates have been skyrocketing ever since. Actually, it’s unwed teen pregnancies that have skyrocketed while total teen pregnancies have been declining. Up to about 1970, many teenagers tended to get married and raise their children in nuclear families. In 1970, only about 30% of all teenage births were to unwed mothers, but in 1990 about 70% were.

Thirteen-year-old girls show up at Planned Parenthood clinics for abortions after being impregnated by men several years older. State laws obligate Planned Parenthood to report such cases to human services agencies as sexual abuse or statutory rapes, but it seldom does. It also lobbies against laws in every state requiring them to notify parents when teenage girls seek abortions. This is the agency public schools across the country trust to design their sex education programs.

In spite of, or perhaps partly because of these programs, American teenagers are having sex more often, with more different partners, and at much younger ages than ever before. Consequently, sexually-transmitted diseases among teens are epidemic. Should we be surprised? Teens are bombarded with sex on television, in movies, in music and in advertising everywhere. When dancing, they simulate sex. The instruction they get at school is scrupulously values-neutral. They hear, “You really shouldn’t be having sex at your age, but we know you’re doing to anyway. So, here are several different ways it’s done, and here are some ways you can avoid getting pregnant while you’re doing it. Oh, and here’s how you put a condom on. Now I want you all to practice on these bananas until the bell rings.”

Teaching sex in a moral vacuum strongly implies to kids that morality has no place in sexual behavior. If that’s the only way it’s delivered, perhaps the schools would be better off not teaching it at all. Or, maybe it should be an extra-curricular, after-school activity that parents could choose for their children if they didn’t want to teach it at home. If schools continue to teach it during the regular school day, how about using at least half the time to teach them some effective abstinence strategies along with all the “how tos”?

Nah, too controversial.