..to consider social impact of family size?

[nornironrock]

I'm wondering if anyone else ever gives consideration to the social impact of their family size? I'm thinking about allocation of public resources, consumption of limited resources (such as water), and in the longer term issues such as housing and healthcare provision.

I certainly believe everyone should be free to have the family size they want insofar as they are able to support that number of people, but I sometimes wonder what the future holds if we don't get a handle on population.

In the past, before we had medical science to keep people like my son alive, and to allow us all to live past 50, a bigger family was often required to enable the family to generate income, and look after older members. This requirement doesn't exist now.

I'm genuinely interested to hear peoples thoughts on this.

WankYou

Yes, he sadly died a few months ago, of pancreatic cancer I think. What a great lecturer he was. I really loved watching him.

I really doubt most people get to the environmental questions, as they will already have limited family numbers because of cost, size of house, mother's willingness to go through it all again, effects on existing children.

Whether an extra child in a UK family would have much of an impact would then have to be looked at in a more in depth way, rather than just the simplistic more people = bad.

We haven't established the impact of 1 person, and when it comes to environmentally conciliatory behaviour the importance of the tipping point can't be ignored. Once enough people care about these things, they become normal societal behaviour, so in that sense more people with those values is better than there just being fewer people around.

I'd rather people had more children and we had a proper unsentimental debate about how long we should keep people alive for.

No. Can honestly say it didn't occur to me, and wouldn't have worried about it if it had.

We have always worked, and there were no tax credits when ours were born, just CHB. Me and DH have flown 8 times in our lifetime. We don't eat meat. We do have 2 cars but deliberately moved next door to my work so I had no commuting.

My DF was one of 3. One sister had no DC, the other had just one and he had 2. My DB only has one. I work with a large number of people who do not have children. I believe it all balances itself out.

My eldest 4 are adults who are all working, as is my DN. None of them have children and only 1 plans to, and I suspect the next generation of our own family will be smaller than the current one.

I've just been having a look at my family tree and of 3 branches of the family there wasn't much increase in people over 5 generations. Bearing in mind that the final generation in each of these includes my 5 DC
8 children/8 Gchildren/14 GGchildren/15 GGGchildren
9 Children/ 13 GChildren/12 GGChildren/14 GGGChildren/ 19 GGGGChildren
6 children/ 6 GChildren/ 7 GGChildren/ 10 GGGChildren/ 14 GGGGChildren