What Effect Does Family Size Have on Child Bearing?

Size of parental and ancestral families influences the size of current families. Children who were reared with siblings tend to want their children to be reared with siblings, according to Stephanie H. Murray. Larger families can strengthen communities, states, and nations. 

I grew up in what, by modern standards, is a pretty big family. I have four siblings, including two sisters – one older and one younger. At the moment, my older sister has four children. My younger sister and I are each in the process of welcoming our thirds….

Given that we’re all millennials with graduate degrees, the childbearing trajectory my sisters and I have followed is already a bit unusual. These days, an American woman with a master’s degree has an average of 1.4 kids, and won’t have her first child until she is 30. At that age, my sisters and I already had two each….

But in another sense, the earlier-and-more approach to parenthood my sisters and I have taken is entirely in step with a pattern demographers have observed in many countries: the “intergenerational transmission of fertility.” That’s just a big way of saying that people tend to mirror the older generations in their family tree when starting a family. Kids without a sibling are more likely than others to stay childless in adulthood. Those who grow up with a bunch of siblings are more likely to go on to have a lot of kids themselves. The more children that your aunts, uncles, grandparents and in-laws have, the more you’re likely to have. Bigger families beget bigger families.

My experience testifies that bigger families have bigger families although the size of families has grown smaller. My parents have twelve children, most of whom have larger families:  Brother #1 (3 children), Brother #2 (9 children), Sister #1 (8 children), Sister #2 (5 children), Brother #3 (3 children), Sister #3 (4 children), (Sister #4 (1 child by adoption), Me (6 children), Brother #4 (9 children), Sister #5 (7 children), Sister #6 (10 children), and Sister #7 (5 children) for a total of 70 grandchildren for my parents and an average of nearly 6 grandchildren per child.

My husband’s parents have three children: Son #1 (6 children), Son #2 (infertile), and Daughter #1 (2 children) for a total of 8 grandchildren and an average of almost 3 grandchildren per child.

I have six children, half the number that my parents have, but twice the number that my husband’s parents have. However, my six children follow the same pattern: Daughter #1 (infertile), Daughter #2 (4 children), Son #1 (4 children), Daughter #3 (4 children), Son #2  (1 child – wife has brain cancer), and Daughter #4 (6 children) for a total of 19 grandchildren and an average of more than three grandchildren per child.

Murray discussed how children in larger families have fewer temporal/physical blessings than children in smaller families. Children in larger families tend share bedrooms, wear hand-me-downs, and get “a smaller slice of your parents’ resources, be that money or time.” I know that this is true because I come from a family of twelve children. I did not miss the “things” as a child, but I understood as an adult that there were other blessings that made up for the material things that we did not have.

Having seven sisters necessitated that we shared beds – three to a double bed with the baby sleeping with parents. The boys slept two to a bed. I grew close to my siblings because we did so much together. During the daytime, we worked together to haul hay, herd cattle or sheep, and milk cows. At night, we had “pillow talk” until sleep took us. We were never alone and always had someone with whom to play.

Murray stated that statisticians have studied for more than 120 years the way that “family sizes correlate across generations” to determine how and why. They found three prominent theories [that] “fall into three broad – and not entirely distinct – categories.”

The first is genetics: We all have the same genes as our parents. “Those genes may influence several aspects of a woman’s life that, in turn, impact the number of kids she has.”

But arguably the best-evidenced explanation for the intergenerational transmission of fertility is what Bernardi refers to as status inheritance. “We are born in families that have a given educational level, a given social status, a given residential outlook,” she says. As such, we share quite a few sociodemographic characteristics with our parents that are “proven to be very much related to fertility levels, fertility timing and preferences.”

Factors like these explain a good chunk of the link between siblings and fertility in the U.S., but not all of it, Vogl says. Tinkering with data from the General Social Survey, he couldn’t get the association to disappear by accounting for such attributes, “so there’s a lot left that I don’t know how to explain.”

[Second] The children of college-educated Americans tend to go to college themselves, for example, and women with a college education tend to have fewer kids than their less-educated counterparts. [This is not true for my daughters by blood and marriage: Five of the six women have master’s degrees with one having a doctorate; the sixth daughter has a five-year nursing degree. All fathers have master’s degrees or doctorates.] Likewise, religion tends to be passed from parent to child, and religious folks tend to have more kids than nonreligious ones…. [My family is also religious, so we are influenced by genetics, education, and religion.]

The last, and perhaps murkiest, of the possible causes of the big family to big family link is what Bernardi calls “socialization.” This would include all the ways that growing up in a particular family shape one’s attitudes toward family formation. As our first reference, our families offer a model for what a family ought to look like. Likewise, parents may hold certain values that they impress upon their kids….

And despite its persistence, the intergenerational transmission of fertility has not been enough to counteract the massive decline in fertility that has occurred across the world over the past couple of centuries….

If that’s the case, the tendency for people from big families to have more kids will not be enough to reverse our country’s ongoing baby bust. But I suspect that America may still have something to learn from big families. America would be a more family-friendly place if its culture more closely resembled that of a large family. If the effort of raising children was more broadly valued, if parenthood was more relaxed, if kids weren’t tucked away in gated playgrounds and schools, but were an ever-present aspect of daily life. Maybe then, even those who didn’t grow up in big families might not hesitate so much to raise a family, small or big, themselves.

Larger families that are bound together in love and commitment are stronger, and strong families strengthen communities, states, and nations.