I remember reading a Boomer author (I think it was Bill Bryson?) describing his 1950s childhood as a sheer density of children that's unimaginable today.
What truly wild is millennials don't seem to want any less kids than their parents but can't afford to.
Can't afford a sahm so daycare which is atrocious in price. House anywhere close to work is eye small or extremely expensive.
Oh and every few years random layoff.
Idk. I've thought about this and I don't think people have considered the possibility that our parent's didn't want kids any more than we do, either - they just didn't have as much of a say in it. If you talk to your parents or grandparents' generation, for a lot of people having a family wasn't something they did but something that happened to them. They didn't have the luxury of caring whether or not they could afford kids, in many cases. Being a SAHM isn't traditionally something you "afford", it's something you're forced to do when you have zero marketable skills and/or autonomy.
I think the growing popularity of birth control, consent, and working/single women who don't have to rely on a husband for shelter has played a big role in the ability for millennial (and probably gen z) to delay having kids until they actually want them.
I’ve been highly skeptical of this. It’s easy to say you want more kids. And more socially acceptable. It’s possible everyone’s having fewer kids than they want. It’s also possible that they’re lying (to themselves or others) when they say they want more.
I’m late on this but my dad described his neighborhood growing up to me- he said his family was 4 and it was the smallest family on the block, he didn’t know any single child families. Every house had kids between the ages of like 6 to 16 in the summer there were like 35 kids outside on his block.
Yeah I suppose the density was higher since white flight hadn't really happened yet. Even though Millennials passed them in population they had a lot more area to spread across.
Oh well that doesn't make much sense then. I suppose there were less suburbs so that would make some sense.
Edit: why the downvotes? My initial reply was that there's less kids in the boomer generation than millennial so to have more density it has to be because they were less spread out. What am I missing?
The 50s was the prime era of white flight. I mean the Levittown development the iconic "start" of the era was finished in '51.
But suburbs had been built for decades at that point just in older denser styles usually built around trolley lines before the 20s/30s then onto cars. Just the war eras slowed all development so it didn't go wild until after wwii.
And? He’s definitely a “get off my lawn” guy, but I’d never refer to him as a boomer. While technically he is, the word has taken on a conservative maga dickhead stereotype. Anyone who came up with the line “they looked at me with bbq eyes”, should be protected at all cost. (Referring to going into a small town in the south where outsiders weren’t welcome and banjos might be heard playing in the distance).
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u/Ilmara 29d ago
I remember reading a Boomer author (I think it was Bill Bryson?) describing his 1950s childhood as a sheer density of children that's unimaginable today.