When do people in the developing world stop having big families?
May 10, 2011 6:38 AM   Subscribe

What are mechanisms that influence having kids in the developing world?

When my wife and I decided to have kids, it was when we were pretty settled and had a fair degree of predictability of how it would impact us economically. It seems in the developing world larger families are more a kind of insurance or pension alternative (obviously everyone loves their kids, I'm setting that aside to try to consider economic factors). And there is the whole child mortality issue.
I hear lots about how more education, particularly of women, and rising incomes will change birth rates, but in simple terms what flicks the switch between "I need to have 7 kids" and "I need to have just one"?
posted by bystander to Society & Culture (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I’m not trying to snarky, but I won’t to point out something really obvious that you may be overlooking (this is from having friends with parents from developing countries and also living and traveling in Africa for several years).

It is not necessarily “I need to have X# kids” choice. Rather, there is no access to birth control, and if it is, it is very limited. Even the local infirmary did not medications to deal with malaria or diarrhea, let alone birth control. The largest hospital that was in an area that I lived in (~40 km and hard for most people to get to as there was no public transportation) was run by missionaries, and that was definitely something that they would not supply.
posted by Wolfster at 6:51 AM on May 10, 2011 [3 favorites]


The National Geographic from January had a good article on this. Population 7 Billion.

(And as far as my neighborhood goes, well, they don't go through the rhetoric you and your wife had. More babies=better. Jesus said so. It's how the God-fearing US is going to out-populate heathen socialist Europe. I only wish I was joking. This is actually the speech my husband got from his family when he said we weren't having children. )
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 6:58 AM on May 10, 2011


This is an extremely interesting question! It's also something a sociology grad student (or economics, or etc) might write a dissertation about!

In addition to not having access to birth control, other, more subtle social factors might affect the decision; for instance, having children can legitimate and cement womens' places in certain social circles. It's a complex phenomenon.
posted by clockzero at 7:11 AM on May 10, 2011


This is called the demographic transition (well, half of it anyway), and why it happens is one of the central questions of demography. There are reams of literature on the topic. The explanation for why birth rates go down fall into roughly two major categories -- the social explanation and the economic explanation. The social explanation is basically that birth rates fall due to, well, changes in society. This could be growing availability and acceptance of birth control. It could be that having a lot of children was previously an important marker of status, but modernization has eroded those cultural norms. It could be that marriage practices change, and women get married at a more advanced age, leaving them less time to have kids before menopause. It could be that fewer women are getting married at all.

The economic explanation is what you were getting at in your question -- the classical Rational Actor thing, where "more kids = more income" in a subsistence agriculture economy, where the kids can help out on the farm as soon as they're walking, but "more kids = more expensive" in a modernized economy where you have to pay for schools and outfits and food and stuff and they can't contribute much income until they're adults.

Check out the "further reading" section in the Wikipedia article for (a lot) more -- I wish I still had my Demography 101 syllabus, since we did a whole unit specifically on this question.
posted by theodolite at 7:34 AM on May 10, 2011 [2 favorites]


bystander: When my wife and I decided to have kids, it was when we were pretty settled and had a fair degree of predictability of how it would impact us economically.

In addition to other valid points people have made in providing answers to your question, I would urge you to evaluate any assumptions in the question itself.

People in 3rd world poverty are not inherently different to you. They apply much the same standard you do except the metric is different. If your idea of settled is home ownership, someone else's idea may be their own tent, shack, reindeer herd or whatever. As to the economic impact, the economics of poverty are overwhelmingly predictable: if you are sustenance poor, you are extremely likely to always be sustenance poor, and having children will make very little difference to that specific outcome.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:55 AM on May 10, 2011 [2 favorites]


People stop having big families when women are allowed the education and economic power to turn them from baby-making machines subject to the whims of husbands and male relatives into more self-sufficient beings. There is a strong, strong link between economic power, literacy rates, etc and birth rates in developing countries. If you're in a country where women are not educated, not given access to birth control, pretty much in the control of your husband, well, he has sex with you when he wants, how he wants, and if you get pregnant you get pregnant.

If you are in a country where women are more autonomous, not as dependent on men, able to choose whether or not to use birth control, you see a lot more exercise of the choice on whether or not to become pregnant.
posted by Anonymous at 9:58 AM on May 10, 2011


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