Family Science according to Sophie: This week's lesson: The Replacement Generation

The classroom on Thursday was buzzing. We were a group, trying to understand a concept our teacher had placed in front of us. The subject, “The Replacement Population” Hands were being raised, questions were asked, all the while it felt like a living, breathing subject we were prodding and observing. Each of us trying to understand how it worked and why it mattered. I was trying to take it all in, because later I knew I would have to sit down and write about my understanding of population growth and why having children matters.

Personally, I’m glad that my parents decided to have children. I am number seven of eight children, all eight of us come from the same mother and father. I’ve often thought where I would be if my parents had stopped at three or even six. What would have become of my siblings if my parents had only one? Would we have been assigned to different families or would someone in heaven say, “I guess you’re stuck here.”

While studying about population this week, I realized that our personal decisions really do affect everyone around us. One main part of my study came from a documentary called “The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter” here’s the link if you’d like to take a look for yourself, https://www.byutv.org/show/5e819b00-5e99-4bf4-931e-c154d3c2dc8d/new-economic-reality-demographic-winter In this documentary they take a look at several things, including; the baby boom, a book called “Population Bomb” by Bob Urlick and the average number of children born to American women each year. There are more things they talk about in this documentary but their main goal is to inform the public that in order us to succeed as a society in the future, and by that, I mean economically, politically, socially, we need to have enough people in our replacement generation. For that to happen there needs to be at least 2.13 children born to every parent.

A big hindrance to people having more children came from the book I mentioned earlier called “Population Bomb” by Bob Urlick. He predicted that by the year 1968, the world would have exceeded its resources and within the 1970s there would have been massive starvation because of over-population. Bob is interviewed in the documentary and he compared having five children to robbing a bank because, as he said, “you’re denying others, resources that I think, they have a right to have.” (Bob Urlick, The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter, 6:30) I can see his point that it’s unethical for parents to have more than maybe one child because you’re taking resources that could be used for someone else, yet there’s a problem with his study. Not only have none of his predictions come true, he underestimated the amount of resources that the planet has to offer. This doesn’t mean that I think we should do whatever we want because our planet has an unlimited amount of resources and it doesn’t matter what choices we make. No, our choices matter, and there are consequences to each decision we make, but if we were to think of the population as a conveyer belt and as generations pass away do we have enough people on earth to replace the previous generation?

There’s a lot of responsibility on parents not just to have children, but to raise those children to become individuals who are hardworking, diligent, honest, good people, who will be able to carry out the responsibilities that will be placed before them. We don’t just need parents who will have more children, we need parents who are willing to teach them how to think for themselves how to make correct decisions. In an odd way, I’ve come back to the classroom, where the teacher and the student can come together and learn important principles.

It matters to me that my parents decided to have more than one child. Not only because I don’t know where I would be if they just had one, but because I would have missed out on the experiences that I had within my family. I wouldn’t have learned what it meant to be number seven of such a group. My family has its problems and I didn’t always like being part of such a large group, but it was my classroom, and I wouldn’t trade the lessons I learned from that particular classroom for anything.