As someone born in a situation like this (east Germany also had a fertility rate of 0.8 in the mid nineties, albeit under different circumstances), I now find

As someone born in a situation like this (east Germany also had a fertility rate of 0.8 in the mid nineties, albeit under different circumstances), I now find it interesting how unimportant that is to you as a child. Sure, in retro-perspective it is clear that all those schools closing or down-sizing was an extreme trend but that aside, I cannot say that I ever felt like we were few kids. I mean, I had all my friends at school and many of those had siblings, neighbors had usually kids, most of my parents friends eventually had kids. And when we were starting university, we thought we were too many as mandatory military draft was abolished and hence more students were starting that year. I am not sure what this tells me but probably that there must have been a marginalized fraction of the population that I never noticed (and living in a relatively young university town probably helped at that). Then again, obviously, our fertility rate was only that low for a couple of years and 'rebounded' to 1.3-1.5 soon after.