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Human populations sustain themselves through child nurture, the passing on of skills and rules for behavior. Villages, in which children learn by imitating adults, have historically been more nurture-friendly than cities. Projections of falling populations worldwide reflect the disruption of nurture in industrialized societies; the biological and cultural continuity of humankind remains at risk until a viable urban substitute for traditional village communities can be found.

We commonly take the succession of generations for granted. Ever since our species diverged from ancestral life forms between 200,000 and 130,000 years ago, children everywhere grew up to become very much like their parents. Behavioral change was never wholly absent, but came so slowly that continuity of experience—a “cake of custom,” as nineteenth-century anthropologists called it—united successive generations. Despite enormous local diversity, human populations sustained themselves successfully in radically different climates and continents. Local disasters were never so great as to reverse the long-range tend toward population increase.

Nurturing Environments

This continuity depended on reliable forms of nurture that allowed for passing on of time-tested skills and rules for personal and collective behavior to the rising generation. As long as the great majority of human beings lived in small, semiautonomous groups—first itinerant bands of hunters and gatherers, then in agricultural villages and pastoral nomadic communities— nurture took care of itself. The daily round of everyday life allowed, indeed required, children to watch and learn to help their elders as the adults around them did whatever needed to be done. Within each family, imitation of parents and older children came naturally. Instruction and correction was inseparable from everyday work and play. Accordingly, within a few years helpless infants were transmuted, as it were automatically, into useful assistants and then into responsible adults capable of nurturing children just as effectively as they had been nurtured themselves.

To be sure not all was serene. There were always times of crisis when food ran short and people died of starvation and disease. Farmers were rather more vulnerable than hunters and gatherers whose food sources were more various and who were also less exposed to disease. For farmers, bad weather or blight might cause crops to fail, epidemic disease might break out, or armed raiders make off with the harvest. As a result, death and depopulation often ensued locally, but survivors remained after even the most severe disasters. Time and again they started up again, producing the food they needed in accustomed ways and giving birth to children who carried on more or less as before.

The Burden of Civilization

The rise of cities and civilization, beginning after 3500 BCE in few propitious environments where population was unusually dense, put a new burden on village life. City dwellers did not raise the food they consumed; instead they compelled villagers round about to part with a share of their harvest in return for always imperfect protection from disaster. Initially, specialized priests undertook to safeguard the rural population from supernatural anger by collecting a share of the harvest to sustain monumental temples where they propitiated the gods with prayer and splendid ceremonies.

Subsequently, when human raiding became a more serious threat, specialized warriors, equipped with expensive armor and metal weapons, undertook to protect the rural majority from outsiders, demanding part of the harvest for their support in return. Priests and warriors then proceeded to negotiate an unstable, ever-fluctuating balance of power (and flow of income) within the cities and civilizations of Eurasia and the Americas.

Simultaneously, artisans and merchants also carved out urban niches for themselves: only so could priests acquire precious goods to please the gods; only so could warriors secure the armor and weapons they required. That, of course, added to the number of humans dependent on food transferred from villagers to urban consumers by a combination of rents, taxes, and, just occasionally, sale of a metal tool or the like to villagers in return for food or some needed raw material they were able to provide for city folk to use.

Tumultuous political rivalries and sporadic organized warfare ensued in all civilized lands. Warfare cost rural populations dearly. Nevertheless, the fabric of civilized society was sustained across millennia by flows of food and of manpower from hinterland villages to cities nearby. Food transfers were central and conspicuous. Manpower was just as important but less obvious, since most migrants came individually and voluntarily.

Cities seldom or never sustained their population biologically. Intensified lethal infections were, or soon became, too great. Without effective garbage disposal, contaminated water was the norm; and strangers bringing supplies of precious goods from afar carried with them whatever new infections were in circulation, even across long distances. A second reason for urban failure to reproduce was that most humble urban occupations were inimical to marriage and family formation. Masters seldom allowed domestic servants to marry and raise children, for example. Sailors and caravan attendants were always on the move and unlikely to form families of their own. In general, most unskilled migrants from the countryside probably found it hard to acquire sufficient income to raise children. Newcomers were especially liable to lethal infection and early death because they lacked childhood exposure to many urban infections.

Nurture-Sustainable Villages

What made cities and civilization sustainable was that village farmers married young and usually raised more children than were needed to keep the village going. In village communities traditional division of labor between men and women depended on marriage. From a very early age children began to contribute to family income by helping in the house and fields. Moreover, in old age parents could count on their adult children to look after them even when they could no longer do much useful work. Finally, the uncertainties of life, especially in infancy and old age, meant that a plurality of children was needed to ensure sufficient family help lifelong. With such incentives, sexual instinct sufficed to guarantee high birth rates in nearly all villages, even, or especially, under precarious conditions, when sudden death from famine, disease of violence was commonplace.

But persistent rural fecundity carried risks of its own. In particular whenever war, famine, or pestilence failed to wreak their havoc for a decade or longer, land shortages were likely to arise. As children matured, apportioning rights to cultivate specific fields and gardens among a plurality of potential heirs was always problematic. Marriage involved formal transfer of land rights from one generation to the next. Parents of both bride and groom nearly always contributed to the support of each newly married pair through some sort of negotiated dowry or bride-price system. But dividing land sufficient to support a single family among numerous children was usually impracticable.

Sometimes fertile and unoccupied land existed within reach, and for a generation or two surplus children could make a good life by bringing it under cultivation, but such circumstances were unusual. Long term, the effect was to expand cultivated areas and civilizations at the expense of less formidable societies, but thinly inhabited and accessible frontier regions filled rather rapidly. Land shortage was merely postponed, not solved.

Sometimes new crops or some new technique could produce more food than before, allowing families to survive on less land. But that too was exceptional, usually meant harder work, and seldom assured a satisfactory livelihood for extra children within existing village boundaries.

When commercial connection with the wider world came on stream, villagers could sometimes use spare time to work at home, spinning or weaving for example, or making something else for sale in town. That assimilated their lives with those of town artisans who were dependent on market prices to earn enough money to feed themselves. Hybrid farmer-artisans tended to become more numerous as transport improved. The stark alternatives earlier generations of peasants had faced when land shortages arose blurred accordingly but never entirely disappeared.

But the gradual intensification of commercial farming and spread of artisan activity to the countryside also weakened village solidarity and diminished local independence. Some rural families got richer; some lost their land and became wage laborers working for someone else. Consequently, the social rivalries and economic inequalities of city life spread to villages in some degree or other. Having many children became not a guarantee of family security but a guarantee of poverty.

Affects of Migration

Peasant rebellions were a desperate form of response to such circumstances. Nearly always they failed, after provoking the horrors of civil war. A more common rural response was to send extra children off to seek their fortune in nearby towns and cities. There they competed with other rural immigrants for unskilled work and only occasionally established families of their own. Few ever attained a satisfying life in their new environment, yet their presence often sufficed to maintain urban populations and made sure nasty jobs were adequately staffed. In early times, voluntary recruitment from the countryside often fell short, whereupon urban populations regularly resorted to compulsion, bringing enslaved strangers from afar to do work no one would do voluntarily.

The balance between forcible enslavement and voluntary migration fluctuated irregularly. In Eurasia slavery tended to diminish as hinterlands expanded and filled with a prolific peasantry. But when the Americas were depopulated after 1492, primarily by wholesale transfers of Eurasian and African diseases, slavery expanded once more. Millions of enslaved Africans were carried across the Atlantic and compelled to work in American mines and on sugar and cotton plantations. Black slavery remained a basic feature of American societies until 1865 in the United States and was abolished in Brazil only in 1888. Its aftermath still lingers among us.

The long-range civilized record shows that nothing guarantees a stable balance between human numbers and the means of subsistence. Epidemics and warfare could reduce local populations drastically—by a third or more within as little as two or three years. Thereupon, the resilience of village living restored human numbers time and again. In the long term, sporadic discoveries of new, more productive crops and improved techniques of cultivation, together with the creation of other forms of wealth, permitted total human numbers to creep upward. That record is truly amazing. Across the millennia we enlarged our control over Earth’s energy flows as no other species has ever been able to do, thanks to our changeable behavior and restless ingenuity.

Looking at the Future: Statistics and Trends

Recently, the multiplication of human numbers reached a climax that is almost certain to remain unmatched in time to come. Environmental limits seem sure to prevent anything like the four-fold increase of human population that occurred in the twentieth century. Shortages of fresh water and of cultivable soil are already apparent in many parts of the Earth. Even more to the point, urbanized populations are not reproducing themselves today. The reasons are somewhat different from those that used to prevail, but are no less compelling.

Beginning a discussion of the future requires the help of a few figures. First of all, world population continues to grow at a decreasing, but still very rapid rate. United Nations estimates project that between 2000 and 2050 human numbers will swell by 2.6 billions—“a net increase larger than the total world population in 1950” (Demeny and McNichol 2006, 255). Subsequent numbers also come from this source. But U.N. demographers also project that in developed (that is, wealthy and urbanized) countries births will fall significantly short of deaths across the same period of time. Europe is the principal region where populations are failing to reproduce themselves today. In 2005, the total number of persons living in Europe was about 728 million—including millions of recent immigrants from poorer lands. By 2050 that total is projected to shrink to about 653 million, due to shortfall in births.

Disruptive Patterns

What lies behind these statistical facts and projections is the disruption of traditional patterns of nurture in European villages. The process began long ago with the gradual expansion of commercial farming and the spread of new crops and methods of cultivation. More recently, two world wars, 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, disrupted rural and urban routines of life throughout Europe. Then after 1950, improved roads and electricity, together with radio, TV, and computers, brought familiarity with urban lifestyles to all, or almost all, European villages.

The effect on village communities was drastic. Innumerable children coming of age were no longer content to follow their parents’ ways of life. Emigration to towns and cities seemed more attractive, and the countryside began to empty. In flat and fertile landscapes modern machinery allowed relatively few large-scale operators to raise crops that once had required hand labor. In poor hill villages fields were often abandoned and drastic—even total— depopulation ensued.

Simultaneously, the spread of new methods of birth control allowed sexual intercourse and childbirth to be dissociated more or less at will. The age-old pattern of early marriage followed by the speedy birth of a plurality of children swiftly disappeared. Consequently the rural reservoir of surplus children soon ceased to exist, and European cities began to attract migrants from across linguistic and cultural borders—often Muslims—to perform the low-paying jobs formerly filled by rural recruits from their immediate hinterlands.

A similar phenomenon exists in the United States, Canada, and other lands of European settlement overseas, even though rural villages scarcely existed in those lands, and by the eighteenth century individual farm families were already closely dependent on urban markets. All the same, in twenty-first-century United States, non-Hispanic whites no longer reproduce themselves at their former rates, even though immigrants bringing rural habits with them from Latin America and other lands seem likely to sustain continued population growth for the nation as a whole as far ahead as 2050. The U.S. Census Bureau projects a growth of 50 million between 2000 and 2050, when the total will be 429 million (Demeny and McNichol 2006, 282).

Whether the world as a whole will eventually exhibit the pattern of demographic decay that prevails among Europeans today remains uncertain. But there are strong reasons to suppose that the recent worldwide reduction in birth rates will continue and perhaps gain velocity in the near future.

Falling Birthrates Worldwide

What explains falling birthrates worldwide is the fact that soon after the year 2000, for the first time in history, a majority of humankind ceased to live on the land and began to depend on food someone else had raised. Money incomes and a worldwide market in foodstuffs made this possible, together with modes of transport and storage operating on a scale unimaginable before railroads and steamships began to use fossil fuels to carry all sorts of goods longer distances and far more cheaply than before.

Medical and sanitary advances after 1850 improved urban health markedly, and after 1950 it even looked as though urban “die-off” might be effectually counteracted by sanitary engineering and antibiotics. But cities, reshaped by wholesale application of modern forms of mechanical energy, were simultaneously becoming far more inimical to child rearing than before.

Changing—and Disappearing— Role Models

Before water power, steam power, and electrical power transformed what we still call manufacturing (Latin for “making by hand”), most urban artisans lived and worked at home, where many of the characteristics of village forms of nurture prevailed. That is to say children and adults intermingled closely on a daily basis, so children could watch their parents at work from infancy and learn most of the relevant skills simply by imitating their elders. In medieval cities guilds of artisans commonly lived close together so neighbors reinforced traditional patterns of nurture, just as happened in villages. Continuities were further confirmed by formal apprenticeship, whereby an established craftsman took young boys into his household for a period of years and taught them what they needed to know to become master craftsmen themselves.

But shopkeepers, transport workers, and a great variety of other more marginal occupations provided far less adequate nurture for the young. Even when manufacturing was still done by hand, therefore, cities were socially unstable by comparison with villages. In particular, poor and unmarried marginal drifters, often fresh from the countryside, constituted a significant proportion of urban populations, though they seldom show up in surviving records.

In the Islamic lands, similar forms of nurture existed among urban artisans. Urban China too was similarly structured. But sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian American societies may have been different. Reliable statistics, even for Europe, are scant to non- existent.

All such long-standing urban patterns of nurture started to change whenever work moved from homes to factories and offices where children were not permitted to accompany their parents. To be sure, some early factories employed children, especially young girls, to tend spinning and weaving machines. But infants and toddlers were never welcome. Commonly mothers stayed home, keeping house and carrying almost the whole burden of nurturing small children.

As new kinds of factory machinery took over manufacturing, it took a good deal longer for urban children to start contributing to family income than before. Formal schooling became necessary to qualify for more and more jobs. So during the nineteenth century most European countries inaugurated compulsory public schooling. Insofar as such laws were enforced, more and more children went to school for an ever lengthening number of years. School teachers began to rival and sometimes conflicted with what parents had to teach the young. Formal schooling therefore both increased the cost of child-rearing and decreased parental influence.

But radical disruption of urban patterns nurture waited until the twentieth century. Several factors came into play. After about 1920, new household conveniences—washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and innumerable others—made housekeeping a part-time occupation. Electric refrigerators, frozen and packaged food, and all the wonders of contemporary supermarkets magnified the effect after 1950. Women responded by taking paid jobs to increase family income, and when necessary, hired others to look after their children. Parental nurturing diminished, and distinctive forms of youth culture, often rejecting both school and parental norms, became far more powerful than before.

Rebellious Youth

New forms of communication propagated these rebellious forms of youth culture far and wide. Radio and gramophone in the 1920s, TV and portable recordings in the 1950s, and computers and the Internet in the 1980s brought the American version of youth culture to world attention. Young persons everywhere—or almost everywhere—could sample and yearn for instant gratification, often entangled with drug-induced exaltation as exhibited by star performers of almost their own age.

These were teachers of a different stripe from those in school and at home. Beginning in the 1960s many young people embraced them as well as a variety of contradictory forms of rebellion—hippies seeking to live close to nature, religious fundamentalists aspiring to stricter sexual morals, and environmentalists foretelling imminent disaster if we do not change our ways at once. What all these movements had in common was rejection of older ways of life. But parental rules were what youths in practice were able to repudiate.

This was not difficult to bring about. Effective birth control pills became widely accessible during the 1960s. Simultaneously, in all the richer countries, governmental social security payments became available to old folk, and, as schooling became more prolonged, raising children cost more than ever. Not surprisingly, then, many young parents reconsidered giving birth to as many children as their predecessors had done. In response, urban birth rates plummeted in Europe and North America. Rural and urban birth rates fell drastically in Japan and China as well, though in China state policy seeking to enforce the limit of one child per couple played a far more intrusive role than elsewhere.

Accurate statistics for what is happening in cities of India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Muslim lands are unavailable. Probably, longstanding religious and family customs prevail for the most part, and village life still embraces most of the population. These are the regions where population growth continues so vigorously, despite millions of emigrants departing for Europe and America. Yet falling birthrates everywhere—even in Africa—suggest that old patterns of family and community life are already weakening.

If these lands replicate the disruption of nurture that took place in Europe and North America in the past fifty years, the world as a whole may well begin to see declining populations after 2050. Other factors are sure to come into play. Energy and other ecological shortages, epidemic disease, warfare, or the breakdown of long-distance economic exchanges may provoke sudden depopulation. On the other hand, new inventions—technological, social, and political—may make raising children easier and more rewarding.

But until a viable urban substitute for traditional village communities can be found, the biological and cultural continuity of humankind will remain at risk. Without more effective forms of nurture than prevail among us today, especially in cities but also increasingly in villages, our species is unlikely to survive very long into the future.

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