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Sometimes we must bluntly state the blindingly obvious: In order for
any society, civilization, or culture to survive, it's
essential that women bear children - they're the only ones who can - and that someone put in the
immense amount of effort needed for those children be
raised
to productive taxpaying adulthood. Since childbearing can only be
done by
women, if too many of them choose not to, society grinds to
a halt a
few decades
later. In the long run, nothing else matters: the future belongs
to those who show up for it.
Our Japanese friends have no grandchildren because a lot of young Japanese ladies aren't marrying or shacking up. Indeed, two-thirds of eligible single ladies aren't even interested in finding a relationship.
Because of these widespread individual choices, the World Bank states that the average Japanese woman has 1.44 kids, which is about half the number needed to keep the population stable. As an inevitable mathematical result, Japan is losing population - each year, about a million more Japanese die than are born.
Unless Japanese women start having a lot more babies soon, Japanese culture is doomed. There will be no need for a Chinese or Russian invasion, though that may come in time. It's simply not possible for foreigners to learn enough about Japanese culture to preserve it without enough young Japanese being raised in it. Japanese culture is so complex that raising children to be competent Japanese takes two decades of immense labor.
The situation in Korea is worse; the birth rate there is a minuscule 1.17 per woman. The BBC reports:
An increasing number of South Korean women are choosing not to marry, not to have children, and not even to have relationships with men. With the lowest fertility rate in the world, the country's population will start shrinking unless something changes.
We've shown how Korean farmers import wives from other parts of Asia because Korean women don't want to be farm wives. This may seem like half a solution, as the foreign women tend to be more amenable to having large families. According to various studies, however, children born to non-Korean women have lower test scores than children with both native Korean parents.
As the long sad history of racism suggests, some say that foreigners have inferior genes, but that isn't the reason. The cause is simply that non-Korean mothers don't know Korean culture well enough to provide the immense amounts of help Korean mothers give their children to make sure they do their homework (in Korean) and learn everything else in both the curriculum and the culture to succeed on life-defining standardized tests (in Korean).
This is an immense amount of work - indeed, not wanting to do all that work is part of the reason young Korean women are deciding not to have children. If maintaining a culture requires more work than women are willing to do, they stop doing it and society eventually collapses, or at least changes into something unrecognizable.
This phenomenon is not restricted to Asia - we've discussed Brazil, where the number of babies per
woman has dropped faster than anywhere else in the world.
Neither Japanese nor Korean society accepts children born outside marriage, but having fatherless babies is OK in America and in England.
Indeed, welfare mothers have lots of fatherless kids - the New York Times casually described a welfare mother who had 13 children and nearly 40 grandchildren at public expense and the Daily Mail described three men who had a total of at least 81 children by 46 different women. Alas, although Dr. Ben Carson's single mother was able to raise him to be a successful contributor to society, very few single mothers can raise taxpaying citizens without a father's help.
Fatherless mobs burned down Detroit and Baltimore and shoot each other in Chicago. This has NOTHING TO DO WITH RACE: the British welfare system, nearly all white when designed and largely white to this day, has brought about a situation where fatherless children effectively raise themselves.
Fatherlesness brings chaos. After a bloody Chicago weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that although Mayor Rahm Emanuel understood the problem and described it well, his statements were not acceptable to his fellow liberals.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel was accused Wednesday of victim shaming for citing an absence of values and character in the African-American community after the weekend bloodbath in which 71 people were shot, 12 of them fatally.
Shari Runner, until recently the president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League, said the mayor's blame game is offensive and insensitive.
What does Ms. Runner expect
the mayor to blame? The guns? The
people who use them? Public schools which taught them how to
tell right from wrong? Guns are already illegal in Chicago, so
harsher gun bans aren't likely to accomplish much; the problem lies
elsewhere. Ms. Runner may be offended when the mayor calls her
constituents criminals, but isn't she offended when her
constituents shoot each other? Isn't that a criminal act?
Mr. Emanuel was also quoted as saying:
I am asking...that we also don't shy away from a full discussion about the importance of family and faith helping to develop and nurture character, self-respect, a value system and a moral compass that allows kids to know good from bad and right from wrong.
Feminist rhetoric to the contrary, those single Chicago mothers
simply cannot keep their children from joining violent gangs as they
grow
up. Our law enforcement friends tell us that it is impossible for
police to maintain order once more than about 2/3 of the kids in a
neighborhood lack a father's presence. Welfare regulations
produce ghettos where there's no fatherly presence at all.
All these fatherless kids impose immense costs on society. It's not clear how much "social safety net" we can afford.
College educated women generally don't have kids out of wedlock, but in more and more cases, both college-educated parents work long hours. Our colleges are full of fragile snowflakes who retreat to safe spaces when they hear ideas they don't like.
We've written about the explosion in demand for mental health services at college. Many students suffer from depression, low self-esteem, and all kinds of other mental troubles. Nobody should spend a dime sending these kids to college, they haven't been raised in a way that makes the ready to leave home.
Two generations ago, that same age group was storming Normandy or Iwo Jima. That generation of kids experienced the economic crash of 1929 as they grew up. They learned to make do with whatever they had, they knew that there was no point in complaining, nobody would give them much of anything, and they'd have to work hard to get whatever they wanted.
This profound change, from the Greatest Generation to millennial "special snowflakes" in one lifetime, illustrates a much shorter 60 year cycle than the 350-year Confucian cycle we've discussed:
Why are so many American college kids, grotesquely pampered by historical standards, so ineffably fragile? The Wall Street Journal reported on the book Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters by Erica Komisar. Ms. Komisar has been rejected by her former liberal friends because she was honest enough to report her neurological research accurately.
The premise of Ms. Komisar's book - backed by research in psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics - is that "mothers are biologically necessary for babies," and not only for the obvious reasons of pregnancy and birth. "Babies are much more neurologically fragile than we've ever understood," Ms. Komisar says. She cites the view of one neuroscientist, Nim Tottenham of Columbia University, "that babies are born without a central nervous system" and "mothers are the central nervous system to babies," especially for the first nine months after birth. [emphasis added]
Stay-home mothers are important because women have more oxytocin than
men do.
This hormone buffers against stress, and women give it to their babies
through breast feeding or skin contact. These externally-supplied
hormones help the child's nervous system develop self-control.
"Every time a mother comforts a baby in distress, she's actually regulating that baby's emotions from the outside in. After three years, the baby internalizes that ability to regulate their emotions, but not until then." For that reason, mothers "need to be there as much as possible, both physically and emotionally, for children in the first 1,000 days."
This is why men aren't as effective as women in terms of socializing children:
Fathers produce a "different nurturing hormone" known as vasopressin, "what we call the protective, aggressive hormone."
If children are exposed to too much aggression before a woman's oxytocin matures the child's nervous system enough to control feelings of anger or upset, they find it hard to get along with others:
"What I was seeing was an increase in children being diagnosed with ADHD and an increase in aggression in children, particularly in little boys, and an increase in depression in little girls." More youngsters were also being diagnosed with "social disorders" whose symptoms resembled those of autism - "having difficulty relating to other children, having difficulty with empathy."
This well-researched fact that women make better mothers than men do isn't palatable to the left. Ms. Komisar said, "I was rejected wholesale - particularly in New York - by the liberal press" because "You are going to set women back 50 years."
As a practical matter, very few women can earn enough money to support themselves and their children while also having enough time to raise their children to be successful adults. Someone has to pay a mother's expenses. In western countries, the welfare system does this, but only for unmarried mothers. The absence of fathers from our welfare communities makes them ungovernable as Mayor Rahm Emanuel said.
The traditional custom was for a man to pay the costs involved in managing a house while his wife guided it. This clearly led to some women being mistreated, but has our society improved overall as women poured into the work force? Mayor Emanuel was sorely criticized for blaming Chicago violence on the absence of fathers, but this is nothing but simple truth.
We've tried many ways of raising children, and the only method that seems to lead to long-term social stability is for one man and one woman to enter into a long-term relationship centered around raising their children together. Nothing else seems to work. It's pretty hard for mothers to raise effective taxpayers without a lot of emotional, financial, and parenting help from their fathers. Forming a strong family not only requires that women want to have children, men also have to value and respect the woman enough to want to get involved.
One difficulty is that men don't generally get as emotionally involved in children as women do. If a woman says she wants marriage but lets a man have her without marriage, he feels she's a liar - marriage means little to her or she wouldn't do this. If he can have her without marrying her, what would marriage give him that he doesn't already have?
If a women expects her husband to become emotionally and financially involved in raising her children, she has to make sure that he's emotionally and financially involved in her before they're conceived.
We're going to have to restore motherhood to its place of honor. There was a time when the effort of motherhood was respected and praised. Now, it's criticized. The New York Times wrote about a human resources consultant who interviewed many hard-charging coeds at Penn State University:
At one point, she asked the young women if any of them wanted to marry and have children. They at first appeared shocked by the question, then looked at one another for reassurance before, she said, "sheepishly" raising their hands.
"I thought, 'My gosh, what have we come to that these brilliant young women are afraid to say that marriage and children are significant parts of what they view as their lifelong happiness?'" Ms. Patton said.
"They have gotten such strong, vitriolic messages from the extreme feminists saying, 'Go it alone - you don't need a man,' " she added.
But, in fact, many of the Penn women said that warnings not to become overly involved in a relationship came not from feminists, but from their parents, who urged them to be independent.
"That's one thing that my mom has always instilled in me: 'Make decisions for yourself, not for a guy,'" one senior at Penn said.
It's sad that women who know that they want to have children acted as if they were ashamed of this. On top of that, fostering this attitude of individualism and independence overlooks the fact that effective parenting is a joint, interdependent endeavor. Each party to the marriage must give up their individual wants and desires in favor of helping their children fulfill their potential. This degree of self-denial is difficult for members of our "selfie generation."
Popular messages make it hard for men to even think about making commitments. When the pill arrived, feminists rejoiced that women could enjoy emotion-free, recreational sex as men do. The New York Times article "Sex on Campus - She Can Play That Game, Too," cited above described a "slender, attractive" coed who said, "I will not remember who I have slept with." If sex is just a game, "no" means "try harder."
Feminists proclaim that men are interested in one and only one thing and that women and men have exactly the same wants and needs. This teaches horny men that women seek casual hookups. My classmates a half-century ago declared allegiance to the "4-F club" - Find 'em, Feed 'em, Fondle 'em, Forget 'em."
How is a woman who knows that she wants to raise her own children going to find a man who's attracted to her strongly enough to be willing to take on the traditional responsibilities of a husband and father if young men have been told so often that women only want sex?
Japanese and Korean cultures are doomed unless their women start having 3 or 4 babies each pretty soon. That isn't likely to happen.
American population would be dropping except for immigrants who have higher fertility rates than the native-born. These newcomers aren't integrating themselves into the American culture as well as they used to, which has become an explosive and intractable issue in our current politics. They maintain enclaves of their originating cultures instead, making the potentials for future conflict even worse than they'd otherwise be.
Feminists proclaimed for decades that it's unjust for women
to be paid less than men for the same job. We now have enough data to
show that women who don't have children are
paid just as much as men are, and in some cases more.
If a woman decides to
bear children, however, the
effort and emotional impact of raising them, even with excellent day
care, tends to damage her career by 20 to 35% in terms of lower
income. In a sense, having children is the ultimate limit to
gender equality.
Having children is clearly hazardous to maternal careers. Unless
American fathers become significantly more willing to help their wives
do the huge
amount of work needed to turn infant barbarians into
productive adult taxpayers and wives decide to be
more willing to do the work, our society is doomed because we won't be
able to maintain our high-tech food distribution system.
Disruptions of our food supply will bring serious problems. Continued innovation is vital to our getting enough to eat. Our broken education system is making it harder and harder to maintain our high-tech farms which feed us and much of the rest of the world. Neither solar, wind, nuclear, nor hydroelectric power give us anything to eat - all our fertilizer comes from oil. Fossil-fueled high-tech agriculture feeds us. If our education system declines to the point that we can't maintain it, half our population will starve.
The Chinese have recovered from societal collapse many times; we have not. They are graduating 4 or 5 times as many engineers as we are. They will be better poised to recover from not breeding enough tech workers than we will.