The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted as an international treaty in 1989, enjoys ratification by most nations on earth; the United States is the one notable exception. As the UNICEF website explains, this Convention "spells out the basic human rights that children everywhere… have: the right to survival; to develop to the fullest; to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation; and to participate fully in family, cultural and social life....The Convention protects children’s rights by setting standards in health care, education and legal, civil and social services."

The architects of this Convention hoped to protect children from exploitation in armed conflicts, from the abuses of child labor, and from sexual exploitation. These are worthy goals. They also wanted to reduce disparities within societies, such as the gap often seen between urban and rural health systems. Again, this is a worthy goal.

All the same, prominent legal scholars have raised strong criticisms of the Convention. Some critics point to passages, such as Article 13, which appear to undermine the ability of parents to protect their children from harmful outside influences. Others see language that threatens cultural diversity and religious liberty. Still others worry about the very nature of "rights" when applied to children, seeing this as implicitly granting excessive power over the young to governments, relative to parents and other kin.

It is not my purpose here to weigh and evaluate these arguments. Instead, I want to take a few minutes and–as an American management consultant might say–"think outside the box" about what children really need.

From this comes my special problem. For when I read the Convention on the Rights of the Child, I find it inadequate: not so much wrong, as poorly focused. It contains many fine sentiments and worthy ideas, but it misses larger truths about children and their needs. Too often, I think, the convention inappropriately presses adult issues and adult language onto children’s unique circumstances.

Therefore, I want to engage in a small fantasy. I will assume that I have been asked by the nations of the world to draft a new and more appropriate Charter of Rights for children. It is to be called What Children Really Need, and it is to reflect the freshest and most compelling New Research on this question. After much consideration, I have settled on Ten Articles, and I am now here to announce them to you. They are:

Despite the best arguments for the view that differences between the genders are insignificant, the modern sciences continue to reinforce what custom and common sense also teach: on issues of human reproduction, men and women are very different. Only women have the gift to carry the conceptus to birth. Only women can develop the unique hormonal bonds between mother and child mediated by that amazing organ, the placenta. Moreover, only women can provide that fountain of nurture giving human babies exactly the nutrition they need when they need it: namely, breast milk. As the children grow, mothers play unique roles in guiding girls and boys into psychologically healthy development. As research reported in The Journal of Genetic Psychology explains, having "a recollection of the mother as available and devoted predicted less loneliness, less depression, less anxiety, higher self esteem, and more resiliency in dealing with life’s events."1 In these ways, mothers are vital to what economists call long-term human capital formation.

Yet, at times, modern society seems to conspire against motherhood. During the last one hundred years, mothers’ tasks have been devalued in the West, from the Highest of Vocations to a distraction or a kind of hobby. Some of the pressures come from the short-sighted views of modern business. Commenting on the recent flow of married women into the labor market, Britain’s The Economist–a business-friendly magazine also known for its frankness–wrote: "Women are proving a godsend to many employers. They usually cost less to employ than men, are more prepared to be flexible and less inclined to pick up a fuss if working conditions are poor...Employers like them because they...command lower pay, and because part-timers can be pushed harder while they are at work." This form of exploitation may not be good for women; it certainly is not good for children born, unborn, or potential.

To fulfill the Child’s Right to a Mother, governments should take all reasonable steps to treat motherhood as the most important of vocations and to insure that the mother-child bond is given priority over short term economic needs.

The evidence has now accumulated here as well: fathers are not optional adornments in the household; they are necessary to the healthy growth of children. Relatively new books by David Blankenhorn, David Popenoe, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead summarize the vast body of research on this point. So does a recent article in Demography by scholars at the Universities of North Carolina and Pennsylvania. "Fathers matter," they write. A father’s involvement in a child’s life "significantly influences [three] outcomes: economic and educational attainment and [avoidance of] delinquency." Fathers who are "both emotionally close and highly involved in joint activities" play a major role in a child’s maturation. Adolescents who experience "increasing closeness" with their fathers are protected from "delinquency and psychological distress."2

Here again, though, the biases of modern life discourage fatherhood. Many governmental welfare programs encourage fatherless households with children, by creating financial incentives for out-of-wedlock births. Even for married fathers, work expectations and routines undermine their physical and psychological availability to their children. The popular Western media commonly portray fathers as fools.

To fulfill the Child’s Right to a Father, governments should take all reasonable steps to protect and celebrate the father-guided Family.

The research evidence on family and children, accumulating for two decades, points to one overwhelming conclusion: children are most likely to be healthy, happy, well-behaved, and responsible, most likely to succeed in school and in life, and least likely to be promiscuous, delinquent, or users of alcohol and illegal drugs if they live with their two natural parents who, in turn, are lawfully married. Any willed variation from this model–due to cohabitation, legal separation, divorce, sole-parenting, or even remarriage–will predictably lead to more negative results for the children. Even first marriages that are troubled are predictably better for children than the alternatives (except in cases involving physical violence between husband and wife).

The good home for children is also a place rich in functions, where the young become both the center of daily life and participants in meaningful household work. The good home takes seriously the task of education, and parents become the prime educators of their children, starting with moral training. The good home defends its autonomy and authority, for this again has positive effects on children.

It is the union of male and female through marriage that produces these results. Each partner brings gifts to the marital bond that are complementary. New research shows how this works. For example, one unusual study reported in the journal Criminology found that the active bonds between wives in a neighborhood–such as borrowing food or tools or having lunch at a neighbors home–had a strong effect in reducing neighborhood rates of violent crime. Yet this result was not produced through the bonds of husbands in a neighborhood. However, the presence of "family rooted men" in the same neighborhoods did reduce rates of out-of-wedlock births among neighborhood teenagers. According to the researchers, a single mother home with teenage daughters present was viewed by young neighborhood males as "an unprotected nest," because it lacks "a man, the figure the boys are prepared to respect,...to keep them in line."3 The lesson here is that a husband and a wife complement each other; each marital partner brings unique talents to the building of a home, so that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

To fulfill the Child’s Right to a Home, responsible governments will use all prudent means to encourage lawful marriage, discourage divorce, and recognize the prior existence and autonomy of families.

The current trend, particularly strong in developed lands, is toward a one-child-family system. For example, if current trends in Europe continue for another fifty years, by the year 2050 a majority of the European people will have no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles, no cousins. A range of anti-natalist impulses help explain this, including economic pressures to put work before family and children, and the heavy burden of taxation on household budgets.

This trend toward a one-child family system portends great trouble and great loneliness. The relationships between brothers and sisters have long been understood to be critically important in shaping–for the good–the moral and psychological character of children. In contrast, children without siblings disproportionately develop hostile, anti-social personalities. In China, for example, where the government has aggressively pursued a one-child-per-couple policy since 1977, researchers report in the journal School Psychology International that a child without siblings is more likely to disrupt the school classroom than a child reared with brothers and sisters. When compared to the latter, "only children display considerably more behavior problems, particularly in terms of learning, impulsivity, hyperactivity and anxiety."4

Later in life, sibling bonds also remain strong. Indeed, this is the longest blood relationship that people normally have in their lives, longer than relationships with parents, children, or spouse. Recent research shows that older adults commonly feel closer to their siblings than to anyone except their own children, attachments that grow with the passing of years.

Sometimes, of course, it is not possible for parents to have more than one child. The main cause in this time, however, is extreme voluntary child limitation. Such actions deliberately diminish the psychological prospects of sole children.

To secure for Children the Right to Siblings, governments should welcome the birth of multiple children in a family through all prudent and proper means.

Children know emotional wholeness and personal security if they see themselves as part of a great chain of family being, binding together ancestors, their living family, and their descendants. It is this that makes sense out of death, suffering, and sacrifice, which in turn supplies purpose or meaning to life. Indeed, children show a great hunger for stories about their families. Reporting in The Journal of Marriage and Family on a study of the telling of family stories, the researchers found it "a particular surprise" that "the younger generation told just as many, if not more family stories than the older generation."5

Yet, too often today, the young learn in schools or from the drumbeat of modernist propaganda in the media that their ancestors were ignorant, bigoted, and mean-spirited. As the great rhetorician Richard Weaver once remarked, "those who have no concern for their ancestors will, by simple application of the same rule, have none for their descendents." This diminishes not only the lives of children, but the global community as a whole.

To secure a Child’s Right to Ancestors, governments should insure that its schools and institutions appropriately honor the struggles and positive gifts of those generations which came before.

Current myths hold that the population control movement represents a rational adaptation of family size to modern conditions. While this change began in the West, it gains strength in the Developing Nations because of its popularity.

New research shows these myths to be false. A careful history of fertility decline, appearing in Population and Development Review, shows that neo-Malthusian "ideas, ideologies, and organized assistance"–or propaganda instead of steady conversion–was key. The task for these propagandists was to attack the status of large families. Their key triumph, according to the author, was the "rolling back of religion’s grip on...sexuality," urging persons to "ignor[e] the religious view." These ideologies then spread to the Third World through colonial administrators using "eugenic" arguments to control native populations and–later–through private organizations such as The Population Council and The Ford Foundation.6

It is time to end this war on human fertility, for the sake of children. At the dawn of the 21st Century, it is objectively clear that depopulation rather than overpopulation is the problem that looms before the world. The best evidence also shows that population growth actually stimulates economic growth, both absolutely and on a per-capita basis.

It is natural for each person to want to create progeny and to live into the future through them. This is each child’s destiny. Propaganda against the building of families is a direct assault on this destiny.

To secure a Child’s Right to a Posterity, governments should take all appropriate actions to affirm the value of fertility within marriage and to support and protect larger families.

Religious families better protect their children physically and psychologically when compared to families which reject religious faith. This finding flies in the face of the modernist bias that sees religion as resting on ignorance and repression. For example, a study on parenting styles reported in American Sociological Review found that "while it is true conservative Protestant parents are more likely to rely on [spanking than non-religious parents], it is also true that they are more likely than other parents to practice warm and expressive emotional work with their children."7

Strong religious faith also protects youth from destructive behaviors such as premature sexual activity. The Journal of Marriage and the Family reports that while the percentage of all white American female adolescents who were virgins fell from 51 percent in 1982 to 42 percent in 1988, the percent who were virgins among fundamentalist Protestants rose from 45 to 61 percent over the same six years. The authors credit this, in part, to the effect of "church sermons and Sunday school."8

In short, children thrive best within families that recognize Divine authority and seek to apply this faith in their daily lives.

To secure a Child’s Right to Religious Faith, governments shall respect families’ free exercise of religion.

No good home stands alone. Extended family members–grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins–properly take an interest in and help protect and rear children. In somewhat different ways, good neighbors also provide environments which give special protection to children. It is common, as well, for religious co-believers to seek to live near each other. The evidence shows that this is good for all children.

A recent article in The Journal of Socio-Economics examined the role of religiosity among neighbors in building a healthy community. Even in the highly secularized, modern nation of Sweden, the researcher found the importance of religion to be strong. Specifically: "the higher the rate of Christians in a Swedish city, the lower the rates of divorce, abortion,...and children born out of wedlock." Even non-Christians living among a relatively high number of believers found themselves behaving in ways more friendly to children: they too were much less likely to get divorced, have an abortion, or beget a child outside marriage.9

To secure a Child’s Right to Live in a Healthy Community, governments shall not unduly interfere with the spontaneous growth of neighborhoods and towns.

  The word, innocence, here means the opportunity to have a true childhood, the chance to mature normally in terms of physical, emotional, and moral development.

Many outside forces threaten childhood: war; employers greedy for child labor; the modern media; ideologically-driven education. Against these, the research does show one consistent protector of childhood innocence: living in an intact, two-natural-parent family.

For instance, new articles in Child Development and The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology show the same amazing result: "girls who were in single-mother homes at age 5 tend to experience earlier puberty." This premature onset of sexual maturity occurs because "girls from paternally deprived homes are more likely to become exposed to the pheromones of stepfathers and other unrelated adult males" which accelerates their physical development. Early puberty is worrisome because it is associated with poorer health, emotional problems such as depression and anxiety, problem behaviors such as alcohol consumption, and sexual promiscuity.10

Intact homes are also much more able to control the intrusions of the outside media–from television to the internet–into the lives of children.

To secure a Child’s Right to Innocence, governments shall honor and protect the institution of marriage and they shall respect and support parental control of outside media directed at children.

Children are born into families, immediate and extended; they are also born into villages or neighborhoods which help and support families; and they are born into traditions or cultures, which give depth to their lives. G.K. Chesterton called Tradition "the democracy of the dead," where the living recognize the lessons of life learned, often with great difficulty and sacrifice, by those who came before. Respect for tradition does not require blind obedience to the past, but it does place the advocacy burden on those calling for change. Children find protection and meaning within the cloak of tradition, which gives them emotional stability and the means to survive even great tyranny.

The Polish Sociological Review carried a recent article on developments in Uzbekistan during the period of Soviet Communist rule. The author writes:

In many cases, the task of preservation fell to women. The author again: "I know of families where the father was a teacher of scientific atheism, while the wife said her prayers five times a day and observed ‘Ramadan,’ so as to (as she put it) atone for her husband’s sins." When the Communists fell, and Uzbekistan regained its freedom, these traditions were still there, so that the children and their parents could rebuild a nation.11

To secure a Child’s Right to Tradition, governments shall respect the inherited beliefs and customs of peoples as parts of their informal or social constitutions.

And so I call on the nations of the world to secure to each child Rights to a mother, a father, a home built on marriage, siblings, ancestors, posterity, religious faith, a healthy community, innocence, and tradition. The scientific evidence is overwhelming: these are the qualities that are best able to give children security, health, happiness, emotional stability, spiritual satisfaction, material abundance, and inner peace. These are what children really need.

Endnotes

1 Mohammedreza Hojat, "Satisfaction With Early Relationships with Parents and Psychological Attributes in Adulthood," The Journal of Genetic Psychology 159 (1998): 203-220.

2 Kathleen Mullan Harris, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., and Jeremy K. Marmer, "Paternal Involvement with Adolescents in Intact Families: The Influence of Fathers Over the Life Course," Demography 35 (May 1998): 201-216.

3 Pamela Wilcox Rountree and Barbara D. Warner, "Social Ties and Crime: Is the Relationship Gendered?" Criminology 37 (1999): 789-810.

4 Fang-Fang Wang, Thomas Oakland, and DeHua Liu, "Behavior Problems Exhibited by Chinese Children from Single- and Multiple-Child Families," School Psychology International 13 (1992): 313-321.

5 Peter Martin, Gunhild O. Hagestad, and Patricia Diedrick, "Family Stories: Events (temporarily) Remembered," Journal of Marriage and the Family 50 (1988): 533-541.

6 John C. Caldwell, "The Global Fertility Transition: The Need for a Unifying Theory," Population and Development Review 23 (Dec. 1997): 803-812.

7 W. Bradford Wilcox, "Conservative Protestant Childrearing: Authoritarian or Authoritative?" American Sociological Review 63 (1998): 796-809.

8 Karin L. Brewster, et.al., "The Changing Impact of Religion on the Sexual and Contraceptive Behavior of Adolescent Women in the United States," Journal of Marriage and the Family 60 (1998): 493-503.

9 Niclas Berggren, "Rhetoric or Reality? An Economic Analysis of the Effects of Religion in Sweden," Journal of Socio-Economics 26 (1997): 571-596.

10 Bruce J. Ellis and Judy Garber, "Psychosocial Antecedents of Variation in Girls’ Pubertal Timing: Maternal Depression, Stepfather Presence, and Family Stress," Child Development 71 (2000): 485-501; and Bruce J. Ellis, et.al., "Quality of Early Family Relationships and Individual Differences in the Timing of Pubertal Maturation in Girls: A Longitudinal Test of an Evolutionary Model," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (1999): 387-401.

11 Marfua Toktakhodjaeva, "Society and Family in Uzbekistan," Polish Sociological Review 2 (1997): 149-165.

by Allan Carlson

Christian Europe is dying.

Not only are the Continent’s churches increasingly cast as "museums of faith," haunted by the old people and the ghosts of past belief. The nations of Europe are literally dying as well. In Germany and Italy, for example, more persons are buried each year than are born: populations are shrinking; and those left are–on average–getting older. Even under fairly optimistic assumptions, Italy’s population, will fall from 57 million to 41 million by the year 2050, Germany’s by a similar proportion.

Or consider the problem from another angle. One can best understand the 1999 crisis in Kosovo through its demographic background: the Orthodox Christian Serbs in the province of Kosovo were bearing few children–an average of one per family–while the Albanian-speaking Muslims were averaging six children per family. Before any "ethnic cleansing" began, Serbian sociology journals carried frantic articles on the Muslim population threat. Barely a month before the Kosovo War opened, worried Serbian officials even called in the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, to impose a "family planning" program on the Muslim Kosovars.

Until very recently, Ireland was an exception to the demographic implosion effecting the Continent. Irish families were the largest in Europe. The impressive economic growth recorded by the Irish in recent years testified to the truth that under proper political conditions, young people are economic assets, not liabilities. But even in demographic terms, the 1990s brought the Irish into "the New Europe," and below-replacement fertility arrived in Eire.

Indeed, the United Nations itself–long a center of hysteria about overpopulation–issued a report last year entitled "Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Aging Populations?" The document showed that all of the European countries and Japan face "declining and aging populations" over the next fifty years. It also recommended increased levels of in-migration from other places–Africa, the Middle East, and Asia–to compensate for the shortfalls, to fill the jobs necessary to keep the European economy and welfare states afloat. This suggests that the future inhabitants of Europe will be very different peoples than those living there today.

Is the situation any different in the United States? Regarding overall numbers, the U.S. population continues to grow at the fairly solid rate of about 1 percent a year. Yet this growth occurs for two reasons: immigration remains at a high level in America, with approximately 800,000 legal entrants a year (and a net gain of another 300,000 illegals); and the out-of-wedlock birth rate has soared since 1950, to 1,260,000 out-of-wedlock births in 1996 (one-third of the U.S. total). If we look strictly to the marital fertility of U.S. residents, the birth rate has been cut almost in half since 1960; and the number of births within marriage has fallen by 35 percent.

What about Australia? While its situation is better than in some parts of Europe, Australia’s total fertility rate of 1.7 is only 80 percent of the level needed to meet even Zero Population Growth; and a large proportion of those births are outside of marriage.

Indeed, in all parts of the world, human fertility is declining sharply. Overall, human numbers continue to grow–we reached 6 billion in 1999–but not because of high birth rates. Rather, growth comes because of better diets and longer life spans: what demographer Nick Eberstadt calls a "health explosion." Such growth is a legacy from a more fertile past, however, and will not continue much longer. The world’s total population should start shrinking by mid-century, with the Western nations far in the lead. "Depopulation," not a mythical "overpopulation," is the problem that nations face in the 21st century.

What has caused this new situation? Since 1965, Europe, North America, Australia-New Zealand, and a few Asian nations have been on new, wholly unchartered demographic terrain, experiencing changes without historical precedent. There seem to be five inter-related explanations; or perhaps better said, five different ways to view the problem.

The first explanation is that of successful conspiracy. Donald Critchlow’s fine 1999 book, Intended Consequences (published by Oxford University Press), shows how "a small group of men and women, numbering only a few hundred," caused a revolution in American policy toward fertility, with repercussions around the globe. This group of wealthy Americans believed that war and poverty were the result of unrestrained population growth. And they looked with horror on the "baby booms" of the 1950’s in the USA, Australia, and parts of Europe, where the new suburbs filled up with three- and four-child families.

This group of conspirators included: Clarence Gamble, hier to the Proctor & Gamble fortune, who fell under the spell of eugenicist throught in the 1930’s; Mrs. Phillip Pillsbury, hier to the flour fortune, whose money launched the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the late 1940’s; Hugh Moore, founder of the Dixie Cup Corporation, who created The Hugh Moore Fund and The Population Crisis Committee; and looming about them all, Standard Oil heir John D. Rockefeller III, whose "fortuitous meeting in the men’s room" at New York’s Rockefeller Center with investment banker Lewis Strauss led to creation of the powerful Population Council in 1952.

Critchlow shows how the money and influence of this group twisted popular views of population growth and large families from being "blessings" into being "dangers." They funded the research that developed the "birth control" pill. This wealthy cabal turned US AID into a global population control project. Their pressure and money spawned domestic U.S. birth control programs such as Title X, and the shift in public attitudes toward abortion. Hugh Moore, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundation grants also proved instrumental in launching the feminist movement in the 1960’s and the homosexual rights campaign of the 1970’s; all done in the name of reducing fertility.

There are also more conventional ways to explain cause here.

For example, widely and correctly cited reasons for sharp fertility decline since 1965 are the new technologies of contraception and the legalization of abortion. As population historians have long noted, the inhabitants of the Christian West began to control their fertility well before modern contraceptive techniques were available. The initial decline in French, German, Swedish, American, and Australian birthrates in the 19th and early 20th Century, caused by the rise of the industrial order, set in during an era when coitus interruptus remained the primary contraceptive method for the large majority of the population. Nonetheless, fertility control remained haphazard and the number of so-called "unwanted" births remained relatively high through the mid-1960s. However, the commercial introduction of the birth control pill in 1965 and the legalization of abortion in most Western countries in the 1968 to 1980 period resulted in a sharp decline in the percentage of unwanted births. Among married women in the United States, the percentage of unwanted births (defined as "not wanted by mother at conception or any future time") fell from 21 percent in 1965 to 7 percent in 1982. According to one analysis, about 40 percent of the fall in total U.S. fertility between 1963 and 1982 can be explained by this decline in unwanted children. I suspect that you would find similar effects in Australia.

A third way to understand modern fertility decline is as one consequence of the ongoing retreat from marriage. Sweden and the United States offer two examples of societies that are consciously dismantling the normative institution of marriage. In the land of my ancestors, marriage is rapidly disappearing as an institution. In 1966, Sweden counted 61,000 marriages; by 1972, the number had fallen to 38,000; in the 1990s, only 25,000 a year. Back in 1960, 44 percent of Swedish women aged 20-24 were married; by 1978, the number had fallen to 19 percent; today, it is under 10 percent. Taking the place of marriage is unmarried cohabitation. As late as 1960, only 1 percent of Swedish couples living together were unmarried. By 1970, the figure was 7 percent. Today, the figure is over 50 percent. Some cohabitating couples do continue to produce babies; yet their completed fertility appears to be less than half of that found among married couples.

In the United States, it is true, wedlock remains popular by comparison. Nonetheless, America has also experienced significant changes. The marriage rate for 1,000 unmarried women, ages 15 to 44, has declined from 148 in 1960 to 78 in 1998, a fall of 48 percent. Viewed from the other side, the number of never-married young adults has climbed dramatically. Among women in their early 20’s, for example, the never-married figure climbed from 28 percent in 1960 to 61 percent in 1999. Even the "remarriage rate," for women who were previously divorced or widowed has fallen off sharply since 1965. The number of reported cohabitating couples in the United States has climbed from 523,000 in 1970 to over 5 million in 2000, a tenfold increase. Moreover, American cohabitators are even less likely to have children than their Swedish counterparts.

The fourth way to understand contemporary fertility decline is as a consequence of a new set of antinatalist or anti-birth economic incentives, caused by the transition from a one-income to a two-income family norm. All commentators on the subject of contemporary fertility decline note the important effect of the massive movement of women into the labor market over the last fifty years. Only a handful, though, fully explore its implications. Remarkably, some of the most honest thinking on this subject comes from feminist theorists.

In an article entitled "Will U.S. Fertility Decline Toward Zero?," for example, sociologist Joan Huber of the University of Illinois answers yes: "The most probable long-run fertility trend is continued decline, not just to ZPG but toward zero." Huber argues that it was, ironically, the new demand for female labor during the prosperous, Baby-Booming 1950s that undermined prevailing cultural assumptions about a woman’s responsibility to care for children at home. The rapid expansion of business and government bureaucracies increased demand for clerical workers, traditionally a female job. Similarly, the baby boom itself ironically stimulated demand for teachers and nurses, also "female" tasks. So began the massive flow of married women into the labor force, a development which was politicized after 1965 and continued through the 1990s.

This revolution soon overturned the family-friendly structures found in the economy. As more women spent more time in the labor force for more of their adult lives, powerful challenges were mounted against America’s informal "family wage" system: those "male" and "female" job categories and the sexual wage differential that set the earnings of women employed full-time at about three-fifths the wages of male counterparts. Such developments, Huber says, "not only triggered a new women’s movement but also set the stage for continued fertility decline."

She anticipates no improvement in the future. The direct costs of childbearing continue to rise. The economic rewards of childbearing decline as the welfare state dismantles the economic bonds of parents to children. As women’s education levels and job opportunities rise, the so-called "opportunity cost" for mothers staying home also increases. Many husbands have become primary advocates of working wives, having learned (as did husbands in the old Soviet Union) that the added income, in practice, costs them almost nothing in terms of extra housework. Finally, the ease of divorce in an era of "no fault" has suppressed the desire for children, by increasing women’s risks of being saddled with the children alone. Barring dramatic changes, Huber says, American children will disappear.

The fifth way to view depopulation is through the value-revolution which swept the Western world after 1965, marked by a retreat from religious faith. As Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaghe has shown, recent negative changes in family formation and fertility reflect a "long-term shift in the Western ideational system" away from the values affirmed by Christian teaching (specifically "responsibility, sacrifice, altruism, and sanctity of long-term commitments") and toward a militant "secular individualism" focused on the desires of the self.

Researchers point to signs that European youth "appear to be extending non-conformism with respect to abortion, divorce, etc., to parenthood as well," agreeing in large majorities with statements such as "children need only one parent" and "children are no longer needed for personal fulfillment." Even those who choose to parent now do so "to satisfy their private needs," rather than to meet religious, family, or communal obligations.

This new "tolerance" of alternate lifestyles at times comes near to excluding parenthood even as an option. Dutch Demographer Kirk Van de Kaa noted the paradox that it was the arrival of "perfect" contraception–or the birth control pill–in 1964-65 which, instead of bringing "wanted" children within marriage, produced couples who could live outside of marriage "without fear of unwanted pregnancy and forced marriage" and perhaps subsequently make a "self-fulfilling choice" to bear one child. The great French historian of childhood Philippe Aries, describes "a new epoch, one in which the child occupies a smaller place, to say the least."

Can "depopulation" be turned around? There are no sure answers, for a situation such as ours has never before existed. There are hints, however, particularly from the experience of the United States, of what might work.

First, turn children into cute little tax shelters. Long experience in Europe with universal state child allowances–where the government pays each family a monthly stipend for each child–has shown a uniform result: child allowances can change the timing of births; but they seem to have little if any effect in increasing overall family size. By way of contrast, the alternate American scheme, using generous child tax exemptions and credits, seems to make a positive difference. Between 1948 and 1963, the Federal tax code in the U.S. featured pure income splitting for adults (which was an incentive to marriage) and a large per-capita personal exemption (relative to median family income). Econometric analysis suggests that the famed Baby Boom of this period was, in part, a consequence of these policies. Congress dismantled this family-friendly tax code between 1963 and 1969, and the Baby Bust arrived. It appears that generous tax benefits work, where state allowances do not, because a tax break allows families to keep more of what they have earned while rearing children, a psychologically positive way of restoring some of the economic logic to child rearing.

Today, the U.S. tax code carries several "marriage penalties" as well as a personal exemption worth only one-quarter of its effective 1948 value; low marital fertility can be seen as the result. Fortunately, the tax cut measure signed into American law two months ago takes meaningful steps toward reducing the marriage penalty; and it raises, over time, the relatively new child-tax-credit to $1,000 per child. I hope, and believe, this will help.

The second, and more powerful way to restore above-replacement fertility is through religious renewal. Recent American history shows two examples of denomination-specific fertility increases:

Between 1945 and 1967, Roman Catholics in the U.S. produced an extraordinary flowering of large families. For example, in 1952, only 10 percent of Catholics under age 40 had four or more children, close to the 9 percent figure found among U.S. Protestants. By 1959, or seven years later, the Protestant figure was unchanged, but the Catholic proportion of large families had more than doubled: to 22 percent. As might be expected, these larger families were more frequent attendees at Mass. More surprisingly, in direct defiance of a so-called "law of sociology," it was Catholic women who had attended a Catholic college who showed the greatest increase in fertility. Between 1968 and 1971, however, this "Catholic difference" disappeared.

At that very moment, though, a different American religious group–the Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons–began to show a similar defiance of the dominant culture. During the 1970’s, as overall U.S. fertility tumbled to historic lows, the fertility of Mormon couples climbed to a level more than double the national average.

What caused these "heroic" episodes of counter-cultural fertility? For Roman Catholics, the whole teaching church in the 1940’s and 1950’s, led by Pope Pius XII, stood behind the large family. As that Pontiff explained in 1958: "Large families are most blessed by God and specifically loved and prized by the Church as its most precious treasures." Favorable economic circumstances in America of that time–an informal "family wage," economic growth, and a pro-family tax code–allowed Catholics to live their faith, with tangible result. For Mormons, the cause seems to have been a great burst of missionary zeal and temple-building in the 1970’s bonded to consistent faith doctrines that give spiritual merit to large families.

The third possible way to renew fertility is by restoring the functional nature of the family, through projects such as home schooling. Homes that are centers of productive activity are simply more open or amenable to children. In the USA, home school families have an average of 3.5 children, 67 percent above the national average. In Canada, home school families are twice as large as the national average.

Could similar developments restore natural growth in Europe? Theoretically, yes. In practice, however, Europe’s welfare states are nearly immune to tax reforms of the sort I have described; home schools are discouraged or persecuted; and a jaded secularism is widespread. Only a miracle will suffice; but perhaps the gathering of two million young Catholics in Rome last summer–the majority from Europe–was the first sign of that miracle.

Prospects are somewhat better in America: its system is amenable to pro-family tax relief; about 2 million American children are now in home schools with growth at about 15% a year; Americans remain–however morally disordered we sometimes seem–a relatively religious people; and Americans have shown the capacity for the renewal of religiously-grounded family systems in the past. So in my land, it could happen again.

It is not my place to offer predictions regarding Australia. I only note that you live in a rich, beautiful, and largely empty land. It is a place ideally suited for the building of families and the rearing of children; the place that God may have had in mind when he spoke in Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply; and fill the earth." May it be so.