The Shrinking Family

The U.S. birth rate, falling steadily for the past decade, reached an alltime low last year, and is projected to drop even further in the years ahead. The 1967 rate, announced by Washington's National Center for Health Statistics, is 17.9 births for every 1,000 Americans, a figure below the previous record low of 18.4 set in the Depression years of 1933 and 1936.

The ups and downs of the U.S. birth rate (see chart) have experts pondering the mysteries of cause and effect. After both World Wars, there was a predictable surge after servicemen returned from overseas. But how to account for the drop during the prosperous 1920s and the affluent late '50s and '60s? The lowering birth rate has nothing to do with fertility, says Natality Statistics Chief Arthur A. Campbell; in fact, women are proving more fertile than the mothers of 30 years ago (88 babies for each 1,000 women of childbearing age v. 76 a generation ago). Nor did he hold the Pill solely responsible; the drop in births during the '20s, before today's sophisticated contraceptives were available, was equally steep.

What seems to be determinant is changing fashions in family planning. After World War I, the ideal family became set at two children ("a boy for you, a girl for me"). During the Depression, hard economic realities held down the birth rate. After World War II, the vogue for large families, with three, four or more children, peaked in 1947 and continued for a full decade.

Today's pattern, according to Campbell, is for women to have children earlier and settle for fewer of them (average U.S. family is now 2.7 children). Says Robert C. Cook, president of Washington's Population Reference Bureau: "There is a growing realization on the part of younger couples in America that rearing children in this complicated and expensive world presents big problems." Among those cited by Cook: "Rising costs of living, increasing competition for education, especially at the college level."

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