{"id":2373,"date":"2010-07-13T07:50:05","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T11:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=2373"},"modified":"2010-07-13T09:17:48","modified_gmt":"2010-07-13T13:17:48","slug":"the-baby-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/07\/13\/the-baby-bust\/","title":{"rendered":"The baby bust"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, Pew issued the results from a new survey<\/a> showing that the number of American women who never have children has doubled in my lifetime — from 1-in-10 to nearly 2-in-10.<\/p>\n

As an aside, one of my fascinations as a journalist and an observer of American life is the incredibly rapid pace of change that our society manages to navigate with relative aplomb.<\/p>\n

We like to think of ourselves as a culturally conservative nation — more religious, more traditionalist, and more small-town based than much of Western society.<\/p>\n

But in demographic terms, this kind of thing is transformative:\u00a0 it points to a wholesale shift in the structure and meaning of family, the role of women in society, and the make-up of our national population in the near future.<\/p>\n

One interesting note from the Pew study is that the change in attitudes is affecting women of all races.<\/p>\n

By race and ethnic group, white women are most likely not to have borne a child. But over the past decade, childless rates have risen more rapidly for black, Hispanic and Asian women, so the racial gap has narrowed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some critics have raised alarms about this “childless” trend (I found an interesting article at Slate’s website<\/a>) and here in the North Country we are seeing some of the most serious side-effects.<\/p>\n

As the number of children drops, schools close, communities age, and the viability of some villages is called into question.<\/p>\n

This trend also suggests that the furor over illegal immigration may be a tempest in a teapot, a kind of distraction to the main event.<\/p>\n

If these birth-rate trends continue, it is inevitable that immigrants and the children of first-generation immigrants will continue to make up a larger and more vital slice of the American population.<\/p>\n

If immigrants are indeed the future, then it might be time to ask how we can begin attracting the next generation of newcomers to our rural area — people willing to follow in the footsteps of the Europeans and Quebecois who came here a century ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, Pew issued the results from a new survey showing that the number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2374,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373\/revisions\/2374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}