Falling Birthrates Won’t Make Humans Extinct

January 21, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Sometimes I see articles discussing how far the birthrate has fallen in many countries and pointing out that this is a worldwide trend. Families are much smaller than they were in the past, and many young adults are opting not to have children at all. The authors often make dire predictions as to what will happen if this trend continues for another millennium or so, leaving a tiny human population on the brink of extinction.

There aren’t enough reasons to want children in today’s society, they say. In past generations, large families had economic value because children worked on the family farm. As they grew older, they took care of their aging parents, who might otherwise be left destitute upon becoming unable to work. But nowadays, a child is just an expensive, time-consuming luxury item. Even in countries where the government provides good child care and pays generous stipends to parents, birthrates remain low. Simply put, modern-day humans have many other things they’d rather be doing than raising families.

While I agree with the short-term prediction that the world’s population will soon reach its peak and then begin falling, I don’t see this as a cause for alarm. As I see it, the resulting labor shortage and high salaries will be very good for wage-earners. Raising a family on one parent’s salary, while the other parent stays home with the children, will be an affordable choice. Lost career opportunities won’t be as much of a concern because the average lifespan will continue to increase. A parent who stays home raising a large family until age 50 might reasonably expect to have a productive career until age 100, or perhaps even longer. Employment discrimination will be much less of a problem because of the labor shortage. Because the young adults of the future will not have to face today’s social and economic constraints with regard to families, their choices may turn out to be very different from what we’re seeing now.

When I wrote this post, my main purpose wasn’t to reassure worried readers that humans are not heading toward extinction. Nor am I suggesting that all children would be better off with a parent who does not work outside the home. Rather, this post is meant to illustrate how current trends often become absurd when they’re extrapolated out too far. We lack a sufficient frame of reference to predict what will happen in the long term because our baseline assumptions soon become outdated. Thus, although a calm, well-reasoned focus on solving present-day problems may not get as much attention as shrieking about a coming apocalypse, the former approach generally results in wiser policy decisions.

Putting Words to Expectations

March 28, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

It’s often said that marriage takes a lot of work. My husband and I have been married since 1988, and in many ways we find it easy to get along with each other. We have similar views about many things, such as relationships, society, responsibility, money, and raising children (although we’re mostly finished with the latter, now that our kids are away at college). Our household division of labor works well for us. We enjoy each other’s company and do a lot of things together; our kids’ friends have commented on how cute they think we are when we wear matching clothes. We still have the stuffed animals that we exchanged when we were dating, as well as many other sentimental items.

Even so, we’ve really had to work on understanding the differences in how we communicate. Most of my thinking is in text mode, and I usually take words at their face value. Nonverbal signals such as a cheerful voice register in my mind only as general indicators; they don’t trump the actual content of the words. If there appears to be a mismatch between the words and the nonverbals, I ask for clarification. My husband has a very different way of processing conversation; he relies much more on external cues and often responds to nonverbal impressions rather than to the actual words. As a result, we sometimes end up having muddled and frustrating conversations where we don’t realize that we are not talking about the same thing.

Another cause of confusion is sorting out what questions don’t call for literal answers. Let’s say that my husband asks me in a grumpy tone why I didn’t do something that he usually expects me to do, such as bringing in the mail. That doesn’t really mean he wants an explanation of why it wasn’t done. He just wants to be cheerfully reassured that I’ll take care of it. And to complicate things further, he’s not inflexible about who does the task; he is not in fact demanding that I should always be the one to do it. If I send a text message asking him to bring in the mail when he gets home from work because the weather has turned yucky, he is perfectly happy to stop his car at the mailbox so that I won’t have to walk along an icy driveway. What bugs him isn’t the chore itself; it’s the disruption of his routine when he gets home, sits down at the desk expecting to read the mail, and only then finds out that it’s not there.

There’s a saying that we both find instructive: “Failed expectations are the source of all conflict.” This is particularly true with regard to conversation and nonverbal signals. People often assume that their body language and use of words should be easily understandable by others. When that expectation proves false, we don’t immediately know how to go about broadening our concepts of interaction to include other styles of communication. Often what happens is not that we consciously judge the other person’s way of communicating to be wrong; rather, we don’t even comprehend the extent to which it may differ from our own.

Modern society is becoming more aware of differences in communication generally, as well as within marriages and other relationships. The bookstores are full of self-help titles that purport to explain how women can better understand men, or vice versa. Some authors focus on more specific circumstances: a marriage between an older woman and a younger man, for instance, or between people of different neurological types. These books have been criticized, often with good cause, as being full of simplistic and inaccurate stereotypes; yet they continue to sell because they help people to make sense of baffling situations, even though in superficial ways.

If I had relied on a self-help book for an explanation of what my husband thought about bringing in the mail, the book might have told me, “Men need routine!” And while that wouldn’t have been altogether wrong, it also wouldn’t have been the whole story. I might have reached the conclusion that I had to bring in the mail every day, rain or shine, to avoid any gripes about it. Then I would have felt resentful while slipping and sliding my way to the mailbox on a snowy winter afternoon, when in fact there was no need to do that. A much more useful approach was simply to talk with each other about how best to deal with the mail situation, while recognizing that we had different perspectives on it.

To understand why our expectations are not being met, it’s first necessary to examine our underlying assumptions and to acknowledge that they may be in need of revision. Self-help books can be useful in taking this first step of reframing things we find frustrating as communication issues that reflect our different perceptions, rather than as deliberately annoying or senseless behavior. But ultimately there are no shortcuts for the work that is needed to discover how a loved one communicates. While it would certainly be much easier if we could simply buy a book or attend a seminar and then comprehend everything perfectly, real life is way more complicated than that. As with learning to accommodate diversity in other social contexts, we must be willing to refrain from prejudging the other person’s experiences of the world and to seek understanding by way of respectful dialogue.

Introduction: A Place to Stand

February 14, 2012 · 25 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Welcome to my blog/story website! A little about me: I live in Vandalia, which is a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, in the United States. I have two grown children, who went away to college in other cities—both within driving distance, but far enough away to develop some independence and not hang around too much with their friends from high school. My husband and I thought that was just right. (Update, May 2014: They’ve graduated — YAY!!)

I work in the legal publishing industry and have a law degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Although I’m originally from Southern California, I came to Ohio in 1983 because I received a scholarship to law school. I met my husband while he was an engineering student at Case, and we have been together ever since.

I’ve always had an interest in how changing cultural narratives shape the development of our society, weaving together various aspects of history, law, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy, politics, religion, mythology, folklore, and the arts. On the occasions when many of these strands intersect and align, that’s where to find a place to stand with the lever to move the world.

One such change took place when the neurodiversity movement spread across the Internet several years ago. As with other civil rights advocacy efforts in the modern era, it calls for acceptance and accommodation of human differences—in particular, autism and other neurological differences. I expect that some readers will have come here from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, where I serve on the Board of Trustees, or from another site that focuses on neurodiversity and disability rights issues. My personal website may touch on these topics occasionally; however, I don’t intend it to be specifically about neurodiversity or autism politics. I’m not writing it to change anyone’s views or to promote any particular agenda.

Rather, it’s meant to reflect my impressions of life in a society that is changing more rapidly than any other in history—a society that is just beginning to discover the vast diversity it contains, to understand and feel comfortable with differences instead of suppressing them, and to draw strength from our shared stories and traditions in positive ways while navigating this complex cultural shift. I hope that my readers will find it meaningful when seen from this perspective.

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