Letters to the Editor
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A Definite Trend
I went to an expensive private college. The wealthy kids, the ones with trust funds, got married in their mid-twenties, bought nice homes, and started having babies. Several of those couples now have three kids each.
Many of them started having children before they were even out of grad school! It was quite obvious that the money for procreation was coming from inherited wealth. The wives all quit their jobs after a year or two in the workplace.
I, on the other hand, having had minimal financial assistance from my family, have spent all those years working my way up the professional food chain, and still, at 37, find the cost of raising a child staggering (in both time and money). And the men I date, mostly in the same boat, are in no place to procreate either. So, we are still single and childless.
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people are expensive
It was just a matter of time. Every broke bum seems to have a nice cell phone, and easy credit allows many of modest means to drive a late-model BMW if they choose; even live in a big McMansion. But children and other people (maids, tutors, nannies) are expensive no matter how you work it and that's why they are the new status symbols.
That said, societal norms have really been against families with more than a couple kids for the last few decades. If the pendulum shifts to allow people to have more kids if they want without being taged as trashy losers, so be it.
If I could afford to have four kids, I just might. It's nice for a kid to have siblings.
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And...
Those same couples with three kids each inevitably drive SUVs. Global warming has definitely not entered their consciousness. I honestly wonder sometimes if we live on the same planet!
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You ain't seen nothing yet
Just wait until they start keeping up with the megarich (like international banking family rich) genetic engineering, designer baby crowd.
Want a baby that will never get sick? They say that it is possible to engineer one. But don't expect your grandkids to have the same luxury unless your uber-child has children with another designer uber-child, because breeding with commoners will taint the new designer DNA and cause the grandchild to be prone to illness. And hence the new superclass is born consisting of super-rich genetically engineered super-freaks that will never get sick.
The future is now.
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and vice versa
Among the poor, having lots of children is all the rage.
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Outrageous
How dare these women stop working to take care of their children.
Rebecca, get the torches !!
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Or maybe it has and they don't care about what the Rothschilds have to say?
Global warming has definitely not entered their consciousness
Or maybe it has sunk in? Maybe they don't care about the propaganda the Rothschild family puts out and/or don't care about what the House of Rothschild has to say about the environment?
The banking cabal's public face for global warming, David Mayer de Rothschild, thought that Jupiter and Saturn are closer to the Sun then the Earth, which explained why Jupiter and Saturn are heating up faster than Earth is. It's true, it's true. Forgive me if ignorant comments by a Rothschild regarding global warming set off alarm bells, seeing as how it is their big pet project.
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Procreation as a Class Thing
If you're rich, you can have 'em. If you're poor, what the hell, you can have 'em. But if you are middle class and want to stay that way, forget about it...
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So the super rich breed like rabbits while the middle class disappears...
2050:
No middle class. The genetically, nutritionally, surgically enhanced white uber-rich control the country while the obsequious poor largely non-white diseased and desperate servant class struggles to eat and get 4 hours of sleep per night while living 10 to an apartment and dealing with water and power shortages.
Yay for Biffy and Brock!!
(taking knife to wrist)
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Oldest of 4--
Wow, who knew my mom was so cutting-edge?
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Wolf in feminist's clothing
How about we focus on the outside forces that prevent all women, rich, poor, and otherwise, from making the choices they want about career, procreation, etc. and STOP JUDGING OTHER WOMEN FOR THE CHOICES THEY MAKE!! You are feeding the beast. You are doing the bad guys' job for them, Rebecca. Oh, please, make it stop.
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De Rigueur
In the midwestern city where I live, it is exactly the same mindset. My only child attends parochial school in a wealthy parish. THE status symbol? Stay-at-home moms with 4+ children. All the moms tend to look a like, too: short blond hair, baseball caps w/ pony tails sticking out the hole in the back, very thin, Botox-ed, dressed in work-out clothes and they all drive Chevy Suburbans or Ford Explorers. It is really Stepfordesque.
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Three kids in a Prius
"Those same couples with three kids each inevitably drive SUVs. Global warming has definitely not entered their consciousness. I honestly wonder sometimes if we live on the same planet!"
There IS a difference between three kids and four; three fit into a normal car. We have three kids and drive a Prius - once or twice a week, and a couple times a year for vacations. When we lived in the city, we didn't even have a car. We also conserve water and electricity, heat our home with wood pellets and cool it with fans, grow some of our own food, walk to the farmers' market for local produce, buy few processed foods, recycle most of the packaging we do purchase, use canvas bags for our groceries, wash and re-use our plastic bags, get almost all our clothes second-hand, and teach our children that the world has limited resources that a person shouldn't go about hogging just because she can.
There is not an automatic link between the number of people in a family and the resources used.
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Glass Ceiling
This trend is real. It's because of the glass ceiling in the workplace. Educated women find their choices limited in the workplace. The solution is equality for all women, rich and poor.
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Do we actually care?
O.k. let's say for sake of argument that this is a wide spread trend, rich folks procreating full tilt and and having multiple kids.
What does it matter?
Even if you fear "overpopulation" the people in question are a small percentage of the overall population so their over expressed genes are unlikely to cause the tipping point between economic expansion and soylent green.
I feel I know way way too much about the reporductive lives of wealthy women as it is. Is this really something NPR, let alone Salon needs to devote bandwidth to?
If someone can expalain to me why this is a story of interest, please do so.
Thanks,