(MENAFN- Asia Times)
This is the second installment of a two-part essay.
The first part of this essay argued that for any pro-natalist policy to be cost-effective in its use of public funds, it must recapture lost efficiencies of labor specialization, including economies of scale, that the large families of past centuries captured.
It also pointed out that no pro-natalist policy has tried to do this and suggested that this failure may largely account for the paucity of success achieved by prior pro-natalist policies.
Of the diverse institutional arrangements that might recapture the lost benefits of specialization in child-raising, some seem likely to encounter greater cultural resistance than others.
There is no size limit on orphanage-like institutions in which large numbers of children are raised by child-raising specialists to whom the children are not related biologically. Such institutions can achieve greater economies of scale in child-raising than can even the largest family.
However, orphanages have always and everywhere been considered inferior to families as child-raising institutions. They have been used only when both the nuclear and the extended family have failed.
In the West, adoption of children from orphanages into families has long been encouraged by society through diverse institutions, including orphanages themselves.
Consequently, to advocate the use of orphanage-like institutions to implement pro-natalist policy – which presumably would entail paying women to bear children to be raised by such institutions – might encounter substantial resistance and occasion disparagement as advocacy of“baby mills” or“kiddie farms.”
By contrast, to promote and fund a limited number of large families in which children are raised by their biological parents would encounter no such resistance rooted in traditional culture; the large biological family is a time-tested institutional arrangement for raising children.
However, there are limits to the economies of scale that a biological family can safely capture. The largest number of children that a woman can bear, consistent with the childbirth-risk-minimizing constraints of bearing a child every 27 to 33 months, starting no earlier than age 18 and continuing no later than age 45, is about 12, which was also the largest often-observed family size in the US as late as the 1960s.
If a woman gives birth once every 30 months from age 20 to age 44 – i.e., every 2.5. years for 25 years – then she will bear ten children. That seems the best target for a pro-natalist policy that seeks to recapture the benefits of specialization in child-raising by reviving the large biological family.
However, to raise ten children not inferior to those raised by a one-child family in which both parents work outside the home save for five years during which the wife stays home to raise an infant would require both father/husband and mother/wife to stay home and specialize in child-raising throughout most of their adult lives.
In the middle of that couple's child-raising career, when they are raising five, six or seven children at once, the assistance of a maid/nanny or two might also be required. One or both members of a professional child-raising couple aged 62 or older, no longer raising children of their own, might provide such assistance.
In order to recruit and employ young married couples to specialize in child-raising starting no later than when the woman is 20 years old, it would be necessary to recruit them soon after the woman completes her secondary schooling.
This would entail advertising the existence of this career path to secondary school students, and helping secondary school students interested in such a child-raising career to meet and date other such students of the opposite gender and to marry soon after graduating from secondary school and receiving a marriage-contingent offer of employment as specialized child-raisers from age 20 to age 65, presumably with an old-age pension thereafter.
However, starting to raise children at age 20 need not preclude post-secondary education for either member of a specialized child-raising couple. During the first three-and-a-half years before the birth of the second child, there would be ample time for substantial post-secondary schooling, which might continue, with less time devoted to it, until the birth of the third child about 2.5 years later.
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