I was born at the tail end of the baby boom. I remember going to schools from which children poured out like an enthusiastic tide. It was an oddity for a couple not to have children then – and even a minor source of embarrassment. It was also an oddity for people not to marry at a fairly young age. Of course, by this time a kind of stigma was already creeping in at the other end of the spectrum. Families of six or seven, not uncommon in my grandparents’ day, were more and more being seen as socially irresponsible – a throwback to a now distant time in which many babies and children didn’t survive. Now we now live in a better world where people have been freed from the cultural burden of having big families – or families of any kind. Many young people live in random little groups – making a semi-permanent lifestyle of the arrangements one finds in college dorms. In our particular brave new world, people are free to lavish their attention either on...(Read Full Article)