Past holds lessons for future families

If you can believe the projections, we can expect to see Euro-Americans being a minority by 2040. The faces of third world people will be in the majority, especially Hispanics. How did this downward spiral of Euro-Americans start?

As World War II intensified, women were asked to take off their kitchen aprons and join in the war effort. We had many households with two paychecks fattened by lots of overtime and not much to spend it on in as we were on a wartime footing with many shortages of goods.

That created disposable income to jump-start our economy at war's end. Most American households before the war felt content and lucky to have basic necessities. That point of view would change. Apartment renters wanted their own home in the suburbs and public transit riders went to automobiles. A massive appetite for materialism developed. That got worse with the introduction of credit cards. It became apparent that this newfound lifestyle could not be sustained on a one-income household, and women moved from wartime jobs to peacetime jobs.

More and more young women opted for years of higher education, getting married later, when the biological clock starts running out. Some even favored careers over marriage. Massive household debts highly contributed to our 50 percent divorce rate destroying the family structure that creates new generations. We could perhaps look to the past and future for an answer to stabilize our birth rates. Post World War I Italy quickly subsidized new births to offset the staggering loss of 600,000 battlefield casualties. a concept recently revamped by France and Germany to offset low birth rates. Or perhaps an answer lies in the family structure of the third-world families of the future. Will they show us that the jewels of the family is children? Or will materialism overtake them also?

Walter Santi

Bloomingdale