Family size

“ Granting that excessively large families are not desirable, at least from an economic point of view, it cannot be questioned that the diminution in the average size of the family, and the increase in the proportion of childless families among the native-born stock is evidence of physical deterioration, and must have a lasting and injurious effect on national life and character. ”

“ For those who deplore large families in the case of poor people, it must be a comfort to remember a fact which experience shews us, that as poverty decreases, and as the standard of comfort rises, so does the size of the family diminish. Should we be able to conquer the problem of poverty, we should automatically solve the problem of the excessively large family. ”

“ The primitive weak sense of union between husband, wife, and children gradually grew into a strong bond of association, whose strength was added to by the possession of a separate family property, which increased in value with the development of society. Thus in the heart of the old vague social group there grew up intimately associated family groups of increasing size and importance. ”

“ They add one more argument to the many that already exist in favour of the practice of birth-control, which is now adopted by the more cultured classes of nearly all civilised communities—a practice the ethical justifications of which are becoming constantly more manifest.
On the other hand, the desirability of a limitation of the size of the family must not of course blind us to the fact that a very small family, especially one where there is an only child, will often have certain difficulties of its own, from which larger families may be relatively free. ”

“ September 29, 1904, p. 529) , that if 2d be the number of children in a family, half of them on the average being male, and if the population be stationary, the number of fertile males in each specific ancestral kinship would be one, in each collateral it would be d - 1/2, in each descending kinship d. If 2d = 5 (which is a common size of family) , one of these on the average would be a fertile son, one a fertile daughter, and the three that remained would leave no issue. They would either die as boys or girls or they would remain unmarried, or, if married, would have no children. ”

“ We are constantly reminded that the size of the average family is much smaller than it was a hundred years ago—but still the race is rapidly increasing, owing to the decreased death-rate resulting from a better knowledge of hygiene and medicine. Moreover, it is positively asserted that the "old time large family" frequently had one father but several mothers—the husband marrying several times in order to replace with a new life the old wife who had broken down and died from overwork and excessive childbearing. ”

“ The system of labor and the size of the houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups: the grown children go away as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes into service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies, and many newly married couples, but comparatively few families with half-grown and grown sons and daughters. ”

“ Let us turn back again to the question of whether family life is going to die out. In the old days of unrestricted families children just came because it couldn't be helped. Today, regardless of race or religion, intelligent people limit their families. Abundant statistics make it clear that the size of families has dropped greatly among all except two groups. One is a large group of less intelligent, isolated, shiftless, or incompetent people, among whom families of eight to fifteen children may still be [Pg 39] found. ”

“ Suffice it, that now all the tendency is back towards restraints upon increase, to an increasing celibacy, to a fall in the birth-rate and in the average size of families, to—to a release of women from an entire devotion to a numerous offspring, and so at last to the supersession of those little family units that for four centuries have made up the substance of social life and determined nearly all our moral and sentimental attitudes. ”

“ Engelmann claims that an older age at marriage does not mean a smaller family, that the marriage rate of the college graduate is higher and the size of the surviving family larger than in the population at large, and that the decreasing size of family is entirely voluntary. ”

“ Is Any House Large Enough for Two Families?—Although the proverb says, "No house was yet made large enough for two families," the residence of one grandparent (oftener the mother than the father) within the family circle has often proved highly successful if only a few rules have been observed. ”

“ In time, however, through the marriage of the daughters—for in savage life the young men usually roam off and take wives elsewhere, while the young women stay at home—instead of the original single family, we have the grown daughters, with their husbands, living still with their parents and rearing children, thus forming a group of families, closely united by kinship. ”

“ In our own country, families are usually small, parents and their immediate with the attendants and belongings which gather to a household, and, let it not be forgotten, form part of the family. The smallness of the family tends to obscure its character, and we see no force in the phrase at the head of this chapter; we do not perceive that, if the unit of the nation is the natural commune, the family ”

“ Fatherhood may pass through many stages, from a light flitting from one polyandric household to another, on to that form in which the several husbands of the female head of such households must be distinctly related to each other, but, through all the varieties of polyandry, the fixed stake of classification and localization of offspring defines the family outline. ”

“ Families follow the same law. If you take a family for three or four generations, including perhaps some hundreds of persons, some will be short, some tall; but the majority will be near the [39] mean, and the tallest of all will be less likely to have taller descendants than themselves than those nearer the average. But the children of the tallest, though generally shorter than their parents, will still tend to be above the average height. ”

“ What appeared to be nearly universal in this connection is the fact that infants and small children are always specially attached, and stand in a specific close relation to a man and a woman. [565] The woman is invariably their own mother, who gave them birth; the man is the woman's husband. The existence of this group, which may be called the individual family, is the basis upon which kinship may be determined; it is [199] the condition under which it is possible to speak of individual parental kinship in any given society. ”

“ But a few words must be first said about the constant factors of kinship just mentioned.
[173] They consist in the existence of the individual family group as determined by individual marriage and by individual motherhood. Individual motherhood means that the same woman who gave birth to a child stands to it in a special close relation in its later life also: she suckles it and rears it, and she is bound to him or her by the manifold ties resulting from the community of life and community of interests. ”

“ In some there were four families—the grand-parents, the parents, the eldest son with his wife and family, and a daughter or two with their husbands and children. The eldest son, who inherits the house and land, almost invariably brings his wife to his father's house, where she often becomes little better than a slave to her mother-in-law. ”

“ THE PRIMARY FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY is continuing the life of the species; that is, the primary function of the family is reproduction in the sense of the birth and rearing of children. While other functions of the family have been delegated in a large measure to other social institutions, it is manifest that this function cannot be so delegated. At least we know of no human society in which the birth and rearing of children has not been the essential function of the family. From a sociological point of view the childless family is a failure. ”

“ Instead of the happy-go-lucky methods of the middle and lower class Anglo-Saxon, who will turn a family of sons and daughters loose upon the world with very little thought as to their future beyond the bare necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, the French parent regards it as his duty to see that [Pg 14] each daughter is provided with a dot suitable to her position, and the Civil Code requires a parent to leave a proportion of his property to each member of his family. ”

“ Its bonds of union were of the loosest,—merely common paternity, with a miscellaneous maternity of inimical interests. Such a basis forever forbade any high individualization, and high individualization with its demands for a higher marriage forbids any numerical importance to the family. Marriage has risen and developed in social importance as the family has sunk and decreased. ”

“ Children when they come swell the number, and thus we see the beginnings of complex social relations of subordination in the family itself. It involves three such distinct relations, that of husband and wife, that of parent and child, that of master and man. The family passes into the village community, partly by the tendency of several families of common descent to remain together under the direction of the oldest male member of the group, partly by the association of a number of distinct families for purposes of mutual help and protection against common dangers. ”

“ We should expect, in a family of which both parents are near the typical average, to find the children also to be near this average. On the other hand, if the mother is excessively short and the father excessively tall, we should expect some of the children to follow the mother in regard to shortness of stature, others to follow the father in regard to tallness. It will therefore be seen that in the case of alternating inheritance, we must expect an increased variability among the children. ”

“ Now the household remains so long childless that it is very common to find the wife's mother a permanent member of the household, being retained for companionship! Even the mature family contains but few children, and this in the best agricultural parts of the country. ”

“ But as in ordinary families there are diversities of character, of strength, and of weakness, so in a large community family, if I may so define the relationship of the settlement membership, these diversities are more strongly marked; and it is a gratification that we are often able to give to young girls—frail, ignorant, unequipped for the struggle into which they are so early plunged—some of the protection that under other circumstances would be provided by their families and social environment. ”

“ Books on filial piety and the domestic relations recommend sons not to leave their parents when married, but to live together lovingly and harmoniously as one family. This theory is carried out in practice to some extent, in most instances. In the division of property some regard is had to primogeniture, but different sons share nearly equally. The eldest simply has a somewhat larger portion and certain household relics and valuables. ”

“ The consideration of the house and its parts and furniture, and of the outward forms of domestic life, leads us naturally to that of the constitution of the family. It was the chief pride of the aristocratic class to live very extravagantly, and to support a great household, with an immense number of personal attendants of different classes. In the first place the old system of fostering, which was kept up to a comparatively late period, added to the number of the lord’s or knight’s family. ”

“ The evidence goes to show that throughout the most valuable part of the nation, not only in the upper classes but also in the middle classes and in the best parts of the working classes, the birth-rate per marriage has in a generation sunk from four and a half to two, and is now only half the size required to keep up the numbers in those classes. ”

“ There must be, therefore, more than three children born to the average family for a population to grow. From the sociological point of view the ideal family would seem to be one in which from three to six children are born. ”

“ The family moves downward, until in the fourth or fifth generation a new rise begins. Actual study of families seems to indicate that this is not true. The main branch of the family retains its position over centuries. But some of the branch families, created often by the less able family members, show a tendency towards downward social mobility. ”

“ If a mother, in average financial condition, has the "three and one-half children" eugenists demand of each family, and does her duty by them in private family life, how much of her time and strength must go into the housemother's service and for what period of years? ”

“ Each family has a sort of a chief or official head, and the eldest son always looks for a wife among the families of his own class. Seldom, if ever, does the married son quit the paternal roof, so large households are the rule. ”

“ Possibly in the long ages in which man or his pre-human ancestors lived in relatively isolated families, this tendency was of advantage in the struggle for existence, in so much as it may have contributed both to more rapid multiplication and to the greater consolidation, and therefore greater safety and stability, of the family, as the most important social unit. The tendency to incest may thus be due ultimately to the action of natural selection ”

“ Indeed for many, women as well as men, it is a sort of necessity. Our nation is so vast, and it expands so quickly, that there is nearly everywhere a family separation. In the main, all the children of one generation become the heads of families of the next. ”