Uh Oh. Watch the racists freak out. What's it like when the majority becomes the numerical minority?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/10/more-minority-babies-will_n_492742.html
"Minorities make up nearly half the children born in the U.S., part of a historic trend in which minorities are expected to become the U.S. majority over the next 40 years."
This article wasn't surprising. Family tends to be valued more, especially among Hispanics and East Asians. Where the trend for a many white families is to have one or two kids, many Hispanics marry and start families earlier than whites because that core element is still very much in tact. It also seems that more white people my age, including myself, don't plan to have any children. Therefore, the rate may continue to increase even more than predicted.
I feel that there is more pressure, especially for Hispanics, to have kids because of the social norms of their culture. Many of the Hispanic people I'm friends with or know got married really early (some before graduating high school) and started having kids soon thereafter. I think that we push the cultural norm of waiting to get married and have kids till after college but it isn't a norm for everyone. Not everyone is on the college > career > kids path. There is also a lot more in-family support for Hispanics and Asians where other family members take care of the kids while the parents work. We just have to come to terms with the fact that we won't always be the majority and it isn't a big deal. People will probably freak out because of the in-group resource protection factor, but just because we enslaved people who didn't look like us doesn't mean the reverse will happen. It's coming and the more we learn about other cultures and let ourselves be open to other groups, the greater the possibility that we can stop worrying about majority-minority stuff and just start caring about everyone.
I agree with a lot of what Dan had to say.
I think that he did miss one large reason for the greater number of minority babies though. There is a taboo about using birth control in many Latin American countries. This could be a big contributor to the number of Hispanic children born in America. With the increasing immigration from Latin American countries that the article talks about it would stand to reason that there has also been an increase in the stigma about using contraceptives in the Hispanic population in areas with greater numbers of immigrants.
I can't help but link this to the post I made where Georgia Right to Life is claiming that abortions are being targeted at African American women. The stats are a bit different in this story (1.87 children for whites and 2.04 for Blacks vs 2.0 for each for the other story), but if minorities are being targeted for abortions this shouldn't be the trend at all. I can't help but think that if the stats folks were controlling for socioeconomic status they would find that the number of children in each earner category would be similar. So this could be a situation where more minorities are of lower SES leading to less access to birth control and therefore have more children.