In 1955, Pete Seeger wrote “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”. It’s been recorded by scores of individuals and groups, including Seeger’s own trio – Peter, Paul and Mary. The song is melancholy and reminisces on a time of peace and abundance which seems to be no more. I love Peter, Paul and Mary. I was listening to that song recently and wondered, “where have all the babies gone?”
When I began teaching at Mitchell High School in 1982, the high school was a sophomore through senior facility (grades 10-12) while the “middle school” was at that time a “junior high” serving grades 7-9 and the elementaries were first through sixth grade. I can’t remember exactly when kindergarten came into the picture, but when it did it was originally for only a half a day. Kindergarten teachers were full time staff, but they had two sessions, a morning group and then a different bunch of little ones in the afternoon.
This arrangement was largely due to numbers. Mitchell schools were bursting at the seams. We weren’t quite like Harrisburg or Sioux Falls are now, but close. L.B. Williams and Gertie Belle were built not only to replace the aging Whittier and Litchfield elementaries but also because these new schools were bigger and better able to accommodate all of the students flooding into the educational system. The high school, originally constructed in 1962, had two additions added to it. One was completed in the fall of 1982, adding an elevator for handicapped access and what is now the business wing and the east teacher’s lounge (then the counseling office). Later, the east hallway was added. English rooms on the first floor with math and science rooms on the second floor. The high school at one time, in round figures, had 1100 students in it 10-12.
The current configuration of a high school 9-12, middle school 6-8 and elementaries K-5 was done to ease congestion in the elementary schools. When I began teaching at the high school, there was no open lunch and no open campus. Open campus was instituted to alleviate crowding and open lunch was approved so that it was possible to feed everyone during their twenty-five minute lunch period.
My first year of teaching in 1982, when the population of Mitchell was around 14,000, we had 1100 kids in the high school in grades 10-12. The year I retired, 2018, we had around 750 students in grades 9-12. We added a grade, the freshmen, to the high school and had 2,000 more residents in town by the time I retired but still had significantly fewer students at the high school. In some sports, Mitchell has dropped a class from AA to A.
So, what happened?
When I first began teaching, an only child family was about as rare as sighting a unicorn along I-90. Families with just two kids weren’t rare, but they weren’t the norm either. Most families had three, four or five kids. Families of six and seven kids weren’t out of the ordinary. In the early days of my career, I might have a family in class – one sibling after another – for nearly a decade. My wife grew up in Mitchell in a family of six kids.
This isn’t just a local issue. The birth rate in the United States has fallen to 1.62, down from 2.12 in 2007. That birth rate in 2007 was barely the replacement rate needed to sustain population. In Europe, the birth rate is 1.5 and in Latin America it is still only 1.9. This has implications for employers in finding employees to fill jobs, something we’re experiencing in Mitchell right now, and having enough workers to contribute to Social Security in order to keep it solvent. Currently, the United States has three people working for every American who is over the age of 65 but that will fall to less than two younger workers for every senior over 65 by 2050. Less people also means less innovation and creative efforts.
What’s behind the birth dearth? Research published in 2021 found that men and women are postponing marriage, leading to less children as earlier child bearing years are taken up with the pursuit of careers, leisure and indulging individual passions (travel, for example) instead of getting on with the business of starting a family.
Even in China, the population is falling. The old joke used to go like this, “One of every four children born in the world today is Chinese. So, if you have three kids and you’re pregnant with the fourth, you know it will be Chinese.” Not very funny, or politically correct, but it does illustrate the fallacy of blindly following statistics. China lost 850,000 people by 2022 and dropped another two million in 2023. Part of that is due to the same factors that are limiting reproduction in the United States, part of that is due to deaths in the Covid pandemic and a portion of that population drop is because of China’s decades long “one child” policy that is now bearing fruit.
What can governments do? Some, like Japan, have tried to give parents stipends for child care or have pressured businesses to have on-site daycare for the convenience of working parents. South Korea has subsidized fertility treatments to try and get its birth rates up. Nothing has worked thus far.
Face it, being a parent is tough and taxing. It’s expensive. It’s time consuming. Even “little” things, like a trip to a fast food restaurant or a night out at the movies are costly. Daycare is so vital but also so pricey – especially when multiple children from the same family are cared for at the same time. That’s why lots of parents, mostly moms but some dads these days too, drop out of the work force to be full time stay at home parents.
I grew up with only one sister. My parents were devastated they couldn’t have any more children, due to medical complications, after my sister was born. I saw station wagons full of kids that looked like they were going to summer camp, but it was really only a single family headed off to someplace or other. Television’s the Waltons saying goodnight to each other at the end of the program was the norm for most of the families I grew up with in my neighborhood. Good natured bedlam was the rule until bed time, when I was a kid.
I don’t know what the answer is. Italy’s fascist leader Mussolini used to personally pin a medal on every Italian woman who bore a seventh child. Adolf Hitler, childless and unmarried until literally the day he died, (he married Eva Braun right before they both committed suicide), used to say it was every German woman’s duty to produce at least four sons. We don’t want to go down that road…
However, we do need to quit questioning women who chose to have children and prioritize their families. We need policies that recognize that being a homemaker, either as a stay-at-home mom or dad, is “work”. For example, we should allow additional voluntary contributions to be taken from the “breadwinner’s” paycheck for Social Security in the name of the stay-at-home spouse. Larger tax deductions for dependent children and allowing the deductibility of some child rearing expenses should be permitted by the IRS and the tax code, to make having and raising children more affordable. The threshold for deducting medical expenses should be lowered for those with kids to better reflect the run of the mill, everyday healthcare costs of raising kids – costs that aren’t usually catastrophic in and of themselves but can nickel and dime a family’s finances. Perhaps the government could provide a stipend for each child, deposited into an educational account and only accessible for that purpose to help allay the costs of a child’s future education. Employers could utilize more flexible scheduling to allow being a parent and doing things like taking kids to school or activities easier for employees.
If something is hard, people being people won’t do it. Parenting is hard on a number of levels and less folks are doing it and when they are, they’re having smaller families than in days gone by. There’s that old phrase, “the children are our future”. They literally are and without them, our future is grim at best.