Note: I presented this life-model for the sake of creating a clear mental picture of how we have changed. It's only an example. The reason why it's of interest, is because the broadly modelled lifestyle, and life sequence, has now been made impossible and as I believe most likely deliberately, to control fertility. No more big families, thanks.
1. You are born well, in a primary birthing centre. There's no unnecessary trauma from drugs, forceps, or c-section required. You are handed to your mother immediately after birthing.
1. You are born well, in a primary birthing centre. There's no unnecessary trauma from drugs, forceps, or c-section required. You are handed to your mother immediately after birthing.
This gives you a major head-start for life. You are left non-traumatised (deeply relaxed) and well attached to your mother.
Developing mental health problems later in life, or cancer or heart disease, will be highly unlikely for you. You are privileged. Your parents love you genuinely and you will never be abused.
2. Your father works 40 hours a week, half the time at home. He's a computer programmer. Your mother chooses to stay home completely with you, until you are 6 years old.
Both you and your mother socialise each day with friends and family, who typically have children as well. Travel is effortless due to robo-taxi technology.
3. You do not attend a formal school. Instead your mother uses her $7,000 education voucher to send you to a homeschooling club, informally organised as a small group with 7 other families. School is mostly pleasant and endemic bullying and notable cruelty is unheard of.
About 2 hours of your 6-hour school day is dedicated to the more boring English and mathematics classes. It's tedious but painless enough. The rest of your time is interesting and exploratory.
4. By the time you are 12 you start to develop more specific interests. Your schooling is highly flexible, so you explore your interests. You travel to classes outside your home village, as required, independently. All transport is robo-taxi.
5. At the age of 14 your start to work part-time in a cafe'. You're paid less than the adults because you are new and less capable. You enjoy your job, and your adult workmates love having you around because you are young and cheerful.
6. At age 15, you become seriously interested in boys. Except for your main interests, academics shrink and socialisation grows as the focus of your time. You join a social club made up of your kind of people, and spend a lot of time there making friends.
7. By 18 you are married. Your man was a good choice because you got to know him well, amongst many other potentials. You had plenty of time to play the field. He's Spanish and very good looking.
8. You and your husband, who is a builder, buy an affordable but comfortable home in a private village. The atmosphere within the village is notably relaxed and trusting. Gating keeps dangerous people out.
Your mortgage consumes about 30% of your husband's income because house prices are not artificially inflated. Buying a home is no big deal. You expect to be mortgage-free within 15 years or so.
The village you bought into is quiet and beautiful, and has a depth of atmosphere. There's plenty to do, there's a beach and forest only 5 minutes away, and the central architecture feels almost majestic. Everything is built with intelligence and good taste.
9. You begin to have your babies from the age of 21. You have 3 children. Your last child was conceived when you were 26 years old. You would have liked to have had a fourth child, but like everyone else you had to accept the government's cap of 3 children, max.
Population stability had become international law. All nations had prior agreed to regulate fertility so as to limit the global population to ten billion people, for the next 20 years. After that time the limit will be revised.
10. You stay at home with your children until you are 32 years, which was when you decided that your youngest child was ready for schooling.
Your children are not too much work because they are largely independent, and free to play outside and beyond. They have many friends. There's no 'stranger danger' in the village and your children are always only a cellphone call away.
11. With your previously high parenting demand now relaxed, you become interested in a career and start to explore your options. You choose an apprenticeship in a metropolitan hospital, working 30 hours a week. You become a surgical technician. Your family doesn't need the money but you want to work anyway. The mortgage is nearly gone.
12. You work at a comfortable rate until you reach 62 years. This is when you and your husband choose to retire. You're not eligible for a pension because you are prosperous. You periodically help out with your grandchildren. Your grandchildren adore you because you always have time for them, and you are neither neurotic nor bitchy because you do not have a background of heavy abuse.
13. At the age of 92, you die. Your husband died earlier at the age of 87. You decided to give your seven grandchildren the inheritance, because your middle-aged offspring did not need the money.
Ends.
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The life in my model could be described as low stress, with a lot of spare time. Rarely bored, overloaded, or lonely. Is it possible? Yes, in fact it's easy. Technically you could have it right now on a working-class income. Especially with the technologies we have available to us, today.
However. I'm suspicious that this life-sequence--which could so easily be (re)introduced--has been deliberately undermined, because we're not ready to accept official limits on the number of children we can have.
Hence, as I have long speculated, government policy has probably been designed, deliberately, to make it painful if not impossible for couples to have more than 2 or 3 children.
From what I have seen we've done this with indirect controls, and manufactured social movements (that the majority never asked for). These changes, deliberate or not, have been slowly introduced since the 1960's. There's no argument that this has greatly suppressed Western fertility (a blunt expression here).
It's a speculation worth pondering. The culture you're living in is not of your design - nor your neighbours. In many variables, your culture functions in direct contradiction to long-known facts on child development and social need. We're still running on myths that leading social scientists know only too well to be just myths.
-Andrew Atkin
