Does how many kids you have, if any, really matter?

Trends are always changing.  If you were to talk to any of your grandparents they all would most likely tell you that the world where we live in today is very different from when they grew up, especially in regards to the family.  These days there is more premarital sex, an increase of non-marital births, an increase of those living alone, a longer delay of those who are getting married thus delaying when people have children, and an increase of employed mothers.  Some would say, what's the big deal, all of those factors are very personal decisions, so why should I care?

Now a days its all about the individualism.  How does this benefit ME?  But would it be too crazy to think that your decisions may impact not only you, but those around you as well?  During the baby boom there was the idea that if we continued to have a lot of kids we would end up overpopulating the world, making it so that there weren't enough resources, thus having the human race starve to death.  Through this initial impact people started to have less children.  Along with that, after the industrial, women, sexual, and divorce revolutions, the family was becoming less and less relevant.  

However, children are a very important part of society.  With a lower fertility rate, we are not producing enough children to replace those who are dying and so there are less young people, and more older people.  But who are these older people?  Most of them are those baby boomers, but the time will eventually come when they all start to retire, and because the fertility rate is lower than that replacement rate, there won't be enough workers in the work field, or human capital, to support those who aren't working.  You can put two and two together.  Children are a necessary part of our growing economy and if we have a major population drop we are looking at a world wide economic crisis by 2060.  

So that decision of of having kids, that you thought was so personal, might not be after all.           

How Gullible Are You?

When I was younger my dad used to drop statistics like it was nobody's business.  The funny thing was that I never actually saw my dad read which always made me curious to where he was getting his information.  Many times when we hear statistics we take it as the the absolute truth.  But what makes something true and what makes something only as something we PERCEIVE to be true? 

In a study by the American Psychological Association they concluded that "not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect to children of heterosexual parents."  This study played a major role in courts redefining marriage since they believed that one of the major factors would be how this could effect children.  This one study has majorly influenced so many people and their thoughts on same sex marriage, and even what marriage is in general.  However in a brief written by Dr. Loren Marks entitled "Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination of the American Psychological Association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting" shows that there were some major errors in the interpretation of the data used, yet someone who would have only heard this study and taken it as the absolute truth would have never been able to know that.  In reality there wasn't any significant conclusion to come to a decision either way.  

So before you just go believing just anything somebody tells you, make sure you really study it out.  You are your own agent, not to be acted upon but to act.