More fundie school board follies

[thatcrazycajun]

A school district in Washington state has had its board restrict classroom showings of the Al Gore-starring documentary An Inconvenient Truth to only when other material presenting "an opposing view" can also be presented to students. This despite the fact that not a one of the school board's members has even seen the damn movie. Read the story here and try not to headdesk.

One of the right-wing parents whose complaints brought about the policy has fathered seven (!!) children and believes that the Bible tells us the Earth is only 14,000 years old. Why on what is alleged to be God's green Earth people like this are even allowed to procreate at all, much less saddle themselves with seven kids and dictate school policy for everyone else's kids, is utterly beyond me.

Comments

[wouldyoueva.livejournal.com]

Because, having taken up homeschooling themselves, and secretly hating it, they want to force the rest of us to be just as miserable.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Matt,

You may not be aware that I'm the youngest of five. Do you think my parents should have stopped at two?

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

I was indeed unaware that you were the youngest of five children. While I certainly do not wish you had never been born (indeed, I am ecstatic that you were), it is my belief that, in general, parents should not attempt to have more children than needed to replace themselves, overpopulation already being a strain on the planet's resources. And while an argument can be made that three to five is not excessive, seven seems right out to me as both an unnecessary aggravation of the aforementioned problem and a strain on the parents themselves, physically, economically and otherwise, to care for so many. Also, given this man's attitudes and willful ignorance made clear by his public statements, one questions whether so many more carrying his genes would be an asset to the gene pool.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

As you might imagine, I strongly disagree, not only from a personal perspective but from a privacy perspective and also speaking as someone with a masters in demography. Not only is it a violation of women's rights to tell a woman what type of methods she can use to prevent pregnancy, but it's also an invasion of privacy to tell anyone that they cannot have the number of children that they want. That way lies China's coercive reproduction policies.

There is also a huge misperception that it's the large families that make a huge difference demographically. That just ain't so; it's what the vast majority of couples do that matters, not what 1-2% do. In every generation a certain proportion of people are childless, and another large chunk who have one or two children. What happens with the population's fertility is far more affected by the proportion of adults who remain childless and the timing and the number of children among adults who have lower numbers of children.

Finally, you're reading the news sloppily if you're going to buy into a reporter's prejudice. It was gratuitous detail, in my opinion, put in there precisely because the reporter thought it reflected on the person's character. But the fact is that there are plenty of men with two, one, and zero children with similar views. The number of children is entirely irrelevant.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

China, while I certainly don't condone their methods, has a valid reason for wanting people to limit their procreation: They're running out of room! Indeed, from their perspective, they need people not only to stop having so many kids, but to start killing each other off, so huge is the burden on their infrastructure and social fabric.

As for the report, I don't think it's irrelevant to report on how many kids a man has when that man is attempting to influence policies on a school board running the schools his kids may well be attending (assuming he homeschools or private-schools them, to my mind, is not necessarily a safe assumption). Plainly he is acting out of self-interest with children in the school system...and making everyone else's kids suffer for it.

Finally, while I would not presume to challenge your authority on the subject of demographics, even if a large majority have only one or two kids, and some remain childless, is it not true that the more kids *any* family has, the more those two other cohorts are offset? Maybe this is something I don't get because I haven't studied the subject as you have; I would benefit from your experience.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

China isn't the only country that has encouraged fertility reduction, and other countries have had reasonable success without coercion. My understanding of 20th century Chinese histoyr is that the greater threat to Chinese public health has been public-policy stupidity, whether the Great Leap Forward or the current pell-mell rush to industrialization without regulation of pollution or worker safety.

While I disagree with the parent on the issue in question, wouldn't I also bring my own selfishness to bear when I talk about public education? Or would it be better described as my perspective?

In terms of general fertility patterns, there's a famous Norman Ryder article from the 1960s where he analyzed the increase in total fertility rate in the U.S. from the early 1940s through the peak in 1957. He decomposed that increase into the proportion of women who ever got married (assuming that only married women had kids was always problematic, but less so then), married couples who stayed childless, couples with children who started having kids early/late, and when couples with children stopped having kids. My memory is that the last item (the one linked most closely to large families) was the least relevant item. What happened in the Baby Boom years was that a higher proportion of adults married, they married several years earlier than the prior cohort, fewer stayed childless, and they started having children earlier.

If you reverse that process—create social norms of marrying later, making childlessness acceptable, encouraging delaying one's first child by a few years—then those factors swamp when people stop having kids. Let's pretend for the moment that in Cohort A we have 100 women, of whom 80 get married, 70 have kids, they all start having kids at age 20, one every four years, and they all stop having kids at age 32. Of that cohort (with dramatic oversimplification), there will be 70 women with four kids each, or 280 children for the 100 couples.

In Cohort B, we also have 100 women, but let's let 75 get married (slight increase in non-married rate), 60 of them have kids (sizable jump in childlessness), and let's delay the first child until 25 (substantial leap) but raise the age at which they have their last child to 36 (a leap, but not as big as for the first child). You'll have 60 women with 3 kids each, 180 children for 100 couples, or below-replacement fertility.

This is dramatic oversimplification, of course, but

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

... but I hope it gets the gist across.