As Daph and I get ready for the paperback launch (Feb 26) of Only Child, I came across this historical perspective on only childness in an article by Carl Zimmer in Wired, courtesy of CCF:

Starting about two centuries ago, families in Western Europe began to shrink, and then — country by country, continent by continent — the rest of the world followed suit. The trend is so big that it may rein in the world population’s exponential growth, perhaps even causing it to stop growing altogether over the next century. But exactly why families are shrinking is a mystery.

Hmmm…Well, why may be a mystery, but what it’s like ain’t. More on that, of course, in the book 🙂

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(Image cred–oddly, a site for pets! No subcontext there – total accident. I saw the image and thought the bone signified historical artifact — not dog! Oh well.)