“Ohana Means Family…”

“Ohana means family and family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.” –Stitch

            This is one of my favorite quotes about family. No matter how crazy my family may get at some points, they are always there for me.

            Now for a slight introduction before I get into the main message of this post today, my name is Megan, and I am a current Marriage and Family studies major at Brigham Young University- Idaho. The purpose of this blog is for me to share what I am learning from my Family Relations class with all you lovely readers and for us to discuss the topic in a civil manner. My targeted audience in writing this blog is for those who are currently unmarried, for I myself am unmarried, and might share similar view points, but of course everyone is welcome! The majority of this blog will be to inform you all of the current status of family in relation to the world today… Where does it stand? Why is or isn’t it important today? I will try not to be bias but forgive me if I am.  If you feel what I am speaking about does not satisfy your need for learning I have a tab on my blog labeled “More Like This” which will direct you to several other links to blogs on family matters. 

            The Population Bomb a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich, once a professor at Stanford struck fear into the hearts of many people during the late 1960’s and in some way still affects society today. For those not familiar with The Population Bomb, I, myself hadn’t heard about it until this week, it is a book that in essence stated that children were going to destroy the world. That sounds really dramatic doesn’t it? Well, basically the research that Ehrlich did showed that soon our population would grow so much that we would soon run out of natural resources. Here’s the thing you guys, because of this book the family was impacted. 

For my family relations class, we had to watch a documentary called New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter that was broadcast on BYU TV. The broadcast was quite interesting and informative. (I would definitely recommend you all watch it if you want more information about family trends in the world today.) The documentary defines fertility rate as “the average number of children that a woman will have in her life time”. Now this is how The Population Bomb is linked to impacting the family. Roughly stated in New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter the U.S fertility rate in 1957 was 3.7 and a was on a slow decline but with the appearance of Ehrlich’s book the fertility rate continued to decline even more. In fact, the documentary tells us that not but 3 years after the book was published the average woman was only having 2.13 children. That number is referred to as the replacement fertility rate. When a fertility rate drops below that, the trends show that the society’s population will eventually decrease substantially. 

It saddens me to say that this is what is happening all over the world today. After the publication of The Population Bomb,the hearts of the people were changed, and now people do not see the need for big families. At the rate everything is going, we are going to be seeing less children being born, and most people are going to have to work twice as hard for what they need because there are less young generations to fill the places of the older ones. 

What are your thoughts on the decrease of fertility rate? I would definitely appreciate hearing what you lovely reader’s think about the information that I have shared with you all today. Leave comments and let’s get a discussion going!

Work Cited: BYU Broadcasting. “New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter.” BYUtv, 2018,   www.byutv.org/player/59b6b917-984a-478f-93b1-521a647779c4/new-economic-reality-demographic-winter-part-1?q=demographic winter.