The Numbers on Large Families

With three children, our family is considered “large”.  I find that quite funny because we don’t feel very large.  In fact, we want to grow our family even larger.  We aren’t set at any number, but I know that we aren’t stopping at three.  Punky talks all the time about the babies in my tummy (not that there are any!).  And Spunky always tells me that she wants a baby girl-sister in my tummy.  Just last week, Punky told me, all on his own, that he would be very sad if we didn’t have any more babies.  Although we have no immediate plans for more children, we hope to have more… some day.

Here are some interesting facts that I recently read:

U.S. fertility rates reveal that large families used to be the norm in this country.

In 1800, the total U.S. fertility rate was 7.04 children per woman, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 1850, that number had dropped to 5.42, before falling even further to 3.56 in 1900. The U.S. fertility rate continued to decline throughout the first half of the 20th century before rising briefly to 3.53 in 1960. The rate bottomed out at 1.77 in 1980 and has been on a slow rise ever since. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the total U.S. fertility rate for 2009 is 2.05—the same as it was in 2000.

Census data shows that in 1976, 59 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 44 had three or more kids. Three decades later, the percentage of women in that age group with three or more children had decreased to 28 percent.

taken from this article

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