By Patrick F. Cannon

I read an interview the other day of a reasonably famous couple – not Lucy/Desi, George/Amal, Mickey/Minnie, or Donald/Melania, but certainly familiar names in theatrical circles. He is an actor/playwright; she an actress of ability. During the interview, she said she wouldn’t bring a child into a world with the likes of Donald Trump in charge.

            She isn’t alone. One has heard many women (and men) say similar things over the years, not about Trump specifically but the state of the world generally. Our low birth rate seems to partly reflect this attitude. The rate in this country was 1.6 children per woman in 2024, the lowest in our history. Even in the depths of the Depression in the 1930s, it never went below 2.22. Can I point out that the 1.6 rate would result in reducing our population, unless we bring in sufficient immigrants to bolster the numbers?

            Our bad old world is only one of the reasons of course. Liberation from the expectation of early marriage and motherhood is surely another. Humans are unique, as far as I know, in being able to rationally decide whether to have children or not. Many young women put their career first, sometimes with the intention of having children later. Since the ages of greatest fertility are the early to mid-twenties, many are happy enough to have just one if they wait until their mid-30s or later. Of course, the reasons for the low birth rate are more complicated, so let’s just explore the reluctance to bring children into our messy world.

            I was born in March 1938, the last of three children. The unemployment rate then was about 20 percent, and Adolph Hitler was well on his way to plunging the world into the most destructive war in history. As it happens, my father had some kind of job during most of the Depression, but my parents could have been forgiven for wondering if the world  in 1938 was a fit place and time to have children. They went ahead anyway, and by the time I graduated from high school in 1956, the unemployment rate was 4.2 percent. Median family income was about $4,800 ($1.231 in 1940); life expectancy had risen to approximately 62 years; and infant mortality was 28.37 per thousand births. We had won World War II and were the world’s dominant economic and military power. People prone to nostalgia look back on the 1950s as a kind of Golden Age.

            The current unemployment rate is 4.6 percent, still historically low. Adjusted to inflation, that 1956  median family income would now be about $55,000: it’s actually $83,000. Life expectancy is now 78.4 and infant mortality is 5.2 per thousand births. The percentage of college graduates has increased from eight in 1956 to nearly 40 percent now (in 1940 it was under five percent). And to broaden the perspective, despite wars, famine, and recurring natural disasters, in 200 years the number of people living in extreme poverty had been reduced from 80 percent of the world’s population to just under 10 percent today.

            Children born today will be 18 in 2044. Who can predict what the world will be like then? Today’s convenient bogeyman, Donald Trump, won’t be around. I was born during the Depression and just before World War II. The world has had its ups and downs since then, but I’m glad I was here to see it. It makes no sense to me that people with the highest education and economic status have the fewest children. There will always be reasons not to have children, but I can tell couples from personal experience that having them can be a great consolation as they age. As is said, you always have family. Unless you don’t.

Copyright 2026, Patrick F. Cannon