The Rise Of The Only Child

On sunny days, elderly women in the working-class Rome neighborhood of Testaccio bring their grandchildren to the local playground to socialize with other kids. Maria Ceccani, watches warily as her 3-year-old grandson, Fabrizio, tussles with a playmate over a dump truck. "He doesn't have any brothers or sisters or cousins," she laments. "We did wrong by having only one child. I keep telling my son to have another, have another." But Ceccani's son and daughter-in-law seem disinclined, no doubt in part because they still live with her. "It used to be that Italian families had lots of kids," says Ceccani. "But now the mothers work and don't have time to have big families. It's a shame."

It's more than just a grandmother's worry. With an average of 1.18 children per woman, Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. That means there are fewer births than deaths each year, resulting in what demographers call "subreplacement fertility." At that rate, massive immigration is the only way to maintain the total population. With the national pension system deeply in debt, demographer Antonio Golini of the University of Rome "La Sapienza" says the country is already becoming dependent on immigrants to bear the economic load. And as far as he is concerned, that puts the future of Italian culture at risk. "Italy will no longer be Italian," he says. "It will be the end of society as we know it."

That may be an overstatement. But at the very least, it's the end of the big, boisterous family crowded around the dinner table--and not just in Italy. Family size is shrinking in many places around the globe, particularly in the richest countries. Across Europe, the average fertility rate in 2000 was 1.46, down from 1.72 10 years before. Asia's dropped from just over three children per woman to 2.54 in the same period. Even in heavily Roman Catholic Latin America the fertility rate is plunging. Women in Brazil now average 2.3 children each, down sharply from 6.3 40 years ago. The big picture is more dramatic still: according to the United Nations, the fertility rate in the most developed nations is approaching an all-time low of 1.57 children per woman. In the 48 least developed countries, the current fertility rate of 5.74 is expected to fall sharply to 2.51 by 2050.

Most striking, more parents than ever are having just one child, whether by necessity or by choice. Precise numbers are impossible to come by: counting only children requires asking families whether they plan to have more kids, and often they say yes but then don't. Demographer Margarita Delgado says that in Spain the declining birthrate, which has halved in the past 28 years to 1.2 in 2000, paired with the rising percentage of first births--more than 50 percent now, compared with 38 percent 25 years ago--illustrates the trend. "The one-child family is on the rise," she says. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one-child families are the fastest-growing unit in America, jumping from 9.6 percent in 1976 to more than 17 percent in 1998. (In that same period, by contrast, the percentage of families with three or more children shrank 21 percent.) In Germany more than 50 percent of the 12.9 million families with children in 1999 had only one child, compared with 46 percent in 1972 (though the 1972 survey didn't include East Germany) In China parents who stop after one child are merely complying with the law. But the birthrate there has shrunk so dramatically that the government is, unofficially at least, beginning to relax its draconian 20-year-old policy (accompanying story).

Who would have guessed? Thirty years ago the big worry was that runaway population growth would decimate the earth's resources. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich warned direly of "The Population Bomb" in his 1968 book; four years later a team of MIT researchers predicted that the world would soon run out of gold, oil and arable land. None of it happened. And though the world's population is still growing rapidly--6.1 billion today, and expected to swell to 9.3 billion by 2050--the rate of growth has slowed to 1.2 percent. Better contraception, delayed childbearing, more women in the work force and the widespread migration from rural to urban areas have all played a role. So has public awareness: bombarded with doomsday predictions, many countries, including Mexico, launched aggressive family-planning campaigns back in the 1970s--and they worked.

There's another reason for having fewer kids that today's exhausted, overworked parents may be reluctant to admit: it's easier. And cheaper. French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufman attributes the rise in one-child families to "the growth of individualism." "It increasingly results from a compromise between an individual's hopes for himself or herself and the dream of a family," he says. "[A one-child family] is not an ideal but a way of resolving a contradiction." With one child, it's more feasible, fiscally as well as emotionally, to take the family to a four-star restaurant, or on safari to Tanzania. It's much more manageable to live in a cramped, big-city apartment with one kid than with two or three. And when it comes to education, there's no comparison: only children are much more likely than their friends with brothers and sisters to go to elite private schools. "I wanted one child so I could give her the best education possible," says Brazilian Ana Claudia Juca, a 37-year-old single mother who organizes lavish birthday parties for kids.