babies
When you're a kid you grow up around other kids. For the most part they usually had two parents, and other than teachers - whose private lives must naturally resemble that of all others, you rarely saw any other adults. So the assumption that I had growing up was that all adults had children, or if they were older adults, grandchildren.
Then as I got older I realized that it's not that standard and people have a large variety of lives. And yet I still assumed that everyone getting married and having kids was what must have been the overwhelming majority before our modern times. Back before women had careers, before large machines harvested crops, before birth control existed and antibiotics lowered the mortality rate of children and pregnant women ... I just assumed that everybody ended up with kids.
But the more I read 18th and 19th century literature, the less that seems to be the case.
So now I wonder, throughout time, what proportion of the population on average has remained childless? Has it gone up recently, or has it always been this way? In many parts of the world today, like Italy and Iran, young people aren't getting married because they can't afford it. That's not a modern delema at all. Many of the nuns, priests and monks of the past were younger siblings for whom there was no inheritance.
Then as I got older I realized that it's not that standard and people have a large variety of lives. And yet I still assumed that everyone getting married and having kids was what must have been the overwhelming majority before our modern times. Back before women had careers, before large machines harvested crops, before birth control existed and antibiotics lowered the mortality rate of children and pregnant women ... I just assumed that everybody ended up with kids.
But the more I read 18th and 19th century literature, the less that seems to be the case.
So now I wonder, throughout time, what proportion of the population on average has remained childless? Has it gone up recently, or has it always been this way? In many parts of the world today, like Italy and Iran, young people aren't getting married because they can't afford it. That's not a modern delema at all. Many of the nuns, priests and monks of the past were younger siblings for whom there was no inheritance.