The Lesson Colonial America Can Teach Modern Families
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
Gottlieb Mittelberger came to Pennsylvania to write a report and ended up writing a compliment. Colonial families were big, loud, and functional, and outsiders noticed. That's the whole story here, and it's worth sitting with instead of rushing past.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Visitors to the American Colonies in the mid-18th century were astonished by the families they encountered. Schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger, dispatched in 1750 by the Duke of Wuertenberg to report on German settlers in Pennsylvania, was typical. “It must be confessed that the female sex in this new country is very fruitful,” he wrote.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Gottlieb Mittelberger came to Pennsylvania to write a report and ended up writing a compliment. Colonial families were big, loud, and functional, and outsiders noticed. That's the whole story here, and it's worth sitting with instead of rushing past.
We don't romanticize the 1750s. No indoor plumbing, no anesthesia, no antibiotics for the fever that could take a child in a week. But those families built something we've quietly lost: the assumption that a household is where life happens, not an obstacle to a life happening somewhere else. Kids weren't a scheduling problem. They were the point.
Modern America inverted that. We optimized careers, square footage, and vacation photos, and treated children as the expensive variable you fit in around everything else, if at all. The birth rate reflects the choice, not an accident of circumstance.
Nobody's asking families to churn butter. But a culture that once impressed foreign schoolmasters with its fruitfulness now can't replace itself, and that's not a coincidence worth shrugging off.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.