The absence of reliable means of contraception meant that having children was a less discrete decision than it is today. And while many people felt an obligation to bear children or wanted the emotional satisfactions they can bring, they also had an overwhelming practical reason for wanting them: They needed the help. They needed their offspring’s labor. They needed children, especially, to avoid hunger and privation in old age. The bargain was simple: Parents take care of their children until they are able-bodied, and in return get taken care of by their children when they no longer are.
We still need to have children so that we can enjoy a secure old age. Modern societies have disguised the old bargain by socializing it. They maintain expensive government programs to assist the elderly, financed by successive generations. The children still take care of the elderly when they grow up, but now it’s all the children providing for all the elderly, collectively.
In some ways this arrangement may represent an advance for civilization. Most people seem to think so. But it has a little-appreciated drawback: It imposes a heavy, if hidden, burden on parents, especially those with several children, and societies that adopt it therefore tend to have fewer children. For both moral and practical reasons, it is time to revise the generational bargain again.
Read the whole thing, it's worth it
The Empty Playground and the Welfare State - National Review Online
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