We are told simply they did not understand Jesus reply that he had to be about his Father s business. We must be convinced of the importance of the family and we must pray for our own families constantly and regularly and we must pray for the institution of the family in our society. There are immense changes taking place in family life, not just through the increase in divorce although that is very significant, but because people are living longer and having fewer children. In our newspapers we still hear writers moralizing solemnly about the problems of over-population in Asia and South America, while in fact our own situation is absolutely the reverse. There is no country in the Western world which is producing enough children to keep the population levels stable.
Some countries are already in serious population decline, such as Russia.
One of the contributors is Umberto Eco, an Italian atheist and a fine writer. His best-known book written about fifteen or twenty years ago is called The Name of the Rose . He included predictions for the coming century. One of those was that population pressures will force us to follow the Chinese pattern and limit children to one child per family. He claims that in the future it will be difficult to explain to a child what it means to love a sister or brother.