When I was ten years old, there was around 180 million Americans. The current population of the US is 340 million Americans. While our population has not quite doubled, we have added 160+ million people to the country. By comparison, China has seen growth from around 650 million to 1.4 billion during that same time frame. India has seen growth from 450 million to 1.4 billion. Mexico 92 million to 129 million. Nigeria 45 million to 205 million. Iran 25 million to 86 million. France 46 million to 68 million. United Kingdom 52 million to 65 million. As you can see some countries have grown considerably in those 60+ years and others not so much. This shifting population worldwide has had a profound effect on how the world has functioned in the past and even more on how the future will unfold.
When I was 10 years old the world was vastly different than what the 10-year-old of today experiences. I grew up in Crookston, MN where at least 98% of the population was white. Our minority population consisted of migrant workers who worked in extreme heat hoeing beets and often lived in shacks on the farmstead for a few months during the summer and then returned to Mexico. Civil rights for minority populations in my hometown were rarely, if ever, discussed while significant civil rights activism was going on throughout the country.
I remember spending many days playing with my friends behind the dikes in a large, wooded area and in the neighborhood park playing baseball for hours. My mother, for most of my early years prior to high school, did not work or worked part-time. We basically wandered throughout the neighborhood with little adult supervision and had no fear of abduction or any other nefarious behavior, they existed, but not really in small towns in most of America. I lived in a quintessential middle-class family. My father from his 30s to his early 50s worked as a traveling agriculture fertilizer salesman, gone 2 to 3 nights most weeks, covering a service area from northwest Minnesota to two-thirds of North Dakota. My mother early on did in-home childcare and then worked as a part-time grocery store and drug store clerk when my sister, 4 years younger, and I were both in grade school. Her schedule was arranged to send us off to school and be home when school was over. We lived in a modest two-story home in an older neighborhood called the Woods Addition. Crookston had 4-5 distinctive neighborhoods, three were of more modest middle-income families and two were where the higher income families resided. I grew up playing football, baseball (grade school), basketball, hockey (grade school) and golf (9-12th grade). No real major traumas (divorce, parental death, poverty) experienced during my youth.
The average 10-year-old today experiences a much different world than I did growing up in the late 1950s and 60s. Perhaps as many as 50% come from single parent homes, mostly the product of divorce. While not in all cases, divorce is a traumatic experience that can greatly impact the lives of affected children. There is now more openness to once closeted sexual behavior that recently is becoming a very blatant political wedge issue used to divide factions of society. The 10-year-old has seen mass shootings take place throughout the country with regularity, something very rare in my youthful days. We have around 350 million residents and over 400 million weapons with only marginal efforts to better regulate the use of this overwhelming supply. Way too many 10-year-olds grow up believing that these many guns are what a normal society does. Nowhere else in the developed world does love of the gun exist. Technology has thrust on the youth violent video games, social media cruelty, instant gratification and access to other information unimaginable to the 10-year-old of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
Raising children today is very difficult. Each generation has had issues and complexities that they had to deal with while raising children. Can you imagine what obstacles the early homesteaders faced raising children in a grass hut in the remote prairie, especially during the winter months. Each generation has had medical issues that impacted their society. We experienced Covid but previous generations had tuberculosis, polio, 1918 flu epidemic, and the HIV epidemic all killed or injured thousands, in the case of Covid more than 1 million dead. Future generations will have to deal with artificial intelligence, greater global climate change, more pandemics like Covid, and an increasingly hostile world. There is some trepidation about what type of world our grandchildren will experience after the poor job done by the baby boom generation fostering a more perfect union by providing for the general welfare of society. In my opinion, the baby boom generation is, if not the worst, one of the worse generations in Americans history because many are so self-indulgent and loved using the national credit card to pile on debt to future generations. Millions of those baby boomers may wish to return to what they consider the good old days but there really is no moving the clock backward. Those days were not really that good for millions of low income and minority citizens that have little interest returning to those decades.
You can readily see the change in society over the past 50-60 years and while there have been positive outcomes there might have been an equal amount of, or greater, negative outcomes. Our society needs to take more interest in making sure the positive outcomes greatly exceed the negative outcomes. Not sure we are doing our due diligence creating a better society for future generations.
