Hogwarts Professors/HP universe - no partners; no children

[bluesqueak]

No: HPFGUIDX 154886

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Sarah Schreffler" <sarah at ...> 
wrote:
>
> Susan McGee said:
> >Okay, not ONLY do none of the professors have 
partners/spouses/lovers, 
> >but it seems NONE of them have children.
>  
> [...]
> 
> >The Weasleys seem to be the only family with a lot of kids...
> >well of course Lily and James didn't have time, but the Malfoys 
> >only have one, the Lestranges have none, Barty Crouch only has 
> >one, the Diggorys only have one, Crabbe and Goyle seem to only 
> > have one.....neither Sirius or Regulus have  had any kids that 
> >we know of...the Patils and Creevys seem to be the only other  
siblings.....
> 
> Sarah:
> 1. You do have Sirius and Regulus, and Narcissa, Andromeda, and
> Bellatrix,  then how about Fleur and Gabrielle?  And Molly had two
> brothers
> 
> 2. to a great extent, this seems to reflect real life in UK (I 
> suspected this because even in the US, the average number of 
> children in a family have dropped)

Pip!Squeak
Agreed. It's definitely real life in the UK to have families with 
one or at most two kids. Three is not common (though not too 
uncommon). Four or more is highly unusual. And this has gone on for 
a longish time. I was one of two kids, my mother was one of two 
kids, and my father was an only child. You'd have to go back to my 
grandparents generation to find large families.

Don't forget that the entire United Kingdom is slightly smaller than 
the State of Oregon - and we have nearly 60 million people to fit 
into it. If we all started having three or four kids it'd very 
quickly be either standing room only, or forced mass emigration. {g} 
The British Wizarding World will be in the same problem, very 
likely, made worse by the need for secrecy. 

Sarah:
> Add in to this that in the wizarding world, you've got a war 
> having gone on, where quite a few members of the world 
> (comparatively in such a small population) died young, before they 
> had a chance to have as many children or where, during 
> traditionally childbearing years, they were just struggling to    
> survive. (And maybe no baby boom like the end of WW I
> and II because the people hadn't left home for there to be the same
> "Open armed welcome back" of those days?)


Pip!Squeak:

James and Lily seem to have married very young; which might be part 
of the other 'wartime' effect - the desire to have a child in case 
one of the partnership dies. If that's the case, you'd expect 
the 'wartime generation' to produce a fair number of single orphans -
 and that's what we have. In Harry's Gryffindor class we have Harry, 
Neville (effectively orphaned) and Dean (who lost his wizard 
father). 

The other effect you have to consider is the 'dramatic' one {g}. 
Hermione being an only child is very likely one of the things that 
makes her 'lock on' to Harry and Ron - they're substitute siblings. 
It also means she has no younger brother/sister to divert her 
emotional attention from the boys. Draco being an only child was 
obviously planned for dramatic reasons - it's Narcissa's motivating 
passion - though I wonder whether she had no other children because 
she *couldn't*, or simply because she couldn't stand Lucius. All 
three of the Black sisters have some plot point (Andromeda to marry 
a muggle and produce Tonks). Gabrielle also has a 'plot' reason to 
exist.

I'm not sure that the small number of kids is supposed to represent 
the WW dying out - I think the pure-blood obsession is shown 
slightly differently. It's not that the married pure-bloods have 
*less* children (half-bloods also seem to produce a fair number of 
only children) - it's that the continual marrying of cousins results 
in something being *wrong* with the children. Consider Sirius's 
instability, versus Bellatrix's instability.  Barty Crouch Jr - and, 
indeed, Barty Crouch Sr. In the House of Gaunt chapter in HBP, 
Dumbledore talks about 'a vein of instability and violence that 
flourished ... due to their habit of marrying their own cousins'. 

We found out in OOP that the pure-blood families basically only 
marry their cousins. Instability and violence ... it seems to run 
through quite a few of the 'old' families. And a tendency to be 
unstable and violent isn't exactly an advantage in the marriage 
stakes. 

Pip!Squeak