Larger Families Yield Better Leaders?

 It happens often, that on reading one article, you find another that hammers the same theme.  Today it is at Townhall.com by Michael Barone entitled Maybe Larger Families Will Produce Better Leaders. He points to a number of our greatest leaders who would not have been born had their parents at the time stopped at two, or one child. As such it is based on anecdote. But it is a compelling theory nontheless.

Why was America in the Revolutionary War era, with 3 million people, able to generate leaders of the quality of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, while today's America, with 333 million people, generates the likes of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump?

That's a question I keep asking as I alternate between writing about current affairs in this space and reading about the Revolution and the early republic for my book "Mental Maps of the Founders."

I think I've found clues to answers in a seemingly unrelated quarter, in my Washington Examiner colleague Tim Carney's book "Family Unfriendly." Carney argues that more people should have more children, that governments and employers should make that easier, and that parents should, as the title of his first chapter reads, "have lower ambitions for your kids."

I think there are many reasons for having more children in the colonial era. First, most people lived on farms, and needed the manpower to produce food. But I also think people's outlook was more optimistic. They tended to see their lives as God intended them to be.

My research on the Founders produced several surprises, including the fact that most of them did not come from cultures of rigid primogeniture -- in which not only inheritances but families' hopes were concentrated on oldest sons.

On the contrary, among large families -- seven children seems to have been the median family size -- parents and even the children themselves were on the lookout for brothers with exceptionally high talents and concentrated on developing them. Many outstanding leaders had such backgrounds.

The author cites several such cases including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Notice that it is not just the parents, but the siblings as well who spot special talents and help develop them. But if the family has only one child, and both father and mother are working, who notices the child's special abilities? The so-called "experts" have proven to be woefully inadequate. Thus we end up with "leaders" like Biden.

None of these leaders would ever have been born if their parents, like typical people today, had no more than two children. Today's aspirational upscale parents, Carney writes, "worry that they are failing if their kids are not prodigies by age 8, or aren't on the path to dominance in violin, tennis, or math." But the odds that any one child will -- like Washington and Franklin, Jackson and Adams, Calhoun and Garfield -- have exceptional talents are less than if their parents had had a houseful of children.

Demographers worry that adults aren't producing enough taxpayers to pay for Social Security and Medicare. Reading Carney and about the Founders has me worried that people, unlike their forebears, aren't producing enough exceptional leaders.