A recent poll from Gallup found that “Americans’ belief that the ideal family size includes three or more children has been rising steadily in recent years.” Yet families with three or more children have been increasingly rare for more than a generation. Why do Americans desire larger families, and why are they unable to do so? What is the Catholic response to this news?
Why do Americans want bigger families?
As Catholic News Agency reports, a total of 45% of recent respondents to Gallup’s decades-long survey claim that the ideal family size is at least three children. The 45% figure is “currently up four percentage points from the previous reading in 2018 to its highest point since 1971.”
What could be driving this shift? A few things come to mind. First, Americans are scarred by the loneliness and isolation that defined the pandemic response starting in 2020. Most Americans endured two-plus years of enforced isolation as a result of federal, state, and local policy.
This response led to what the US Department of Health and Human Services is now referring to as “Our Epidemic of Loneliness.” As a result of that experience, perhaps Americans value togetherness and family more now than in the years before the pandemic. As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
Likewise, as generations have grown up, so have the demographics in which they have aged. Americans may simply be longing for something that was a part of their past. Many millennials, for example, grew up with cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles nearby. As those members of their family move or pass away, the family circle has become smaller. Someone at child-bearing age today may realize that their child will not have the experience of having siblings or cousins, and their children’s children will not have the experience of having aunts and uncles.
Plus, life is tough right now for many people, a result of the threat of wars, increasing global instability, rising crime, and so on. Americans may be comforted imagining the peace and love that come with having a sizeable family, something they can manage in their own little part of the world.
Why aren’t Americans having larger families?
Every indicator shows that Americans are continuing to have fewer, or no, children. Why is this? One big reason is that having children in America is not cheap; the cost of childcare alone is enough to cause some women to quit their jobs and stay at home. For many families, however, this option is not possible, thus leading to the decision to limit the size of one’s family to what is economically feasible. Beyond that, buying a home is impossible for the majority of young Americans, wages are stagnant, many Americans hold large amounts of student loan debt, inflation is crushing domestic budgets – you get the idea.
Further, with marriage on the decline, logically so, too, is the decision to have children. Even for those who do choose marriage, another factor is at play. Given the now multi-generational experience of divorce and broken homes, many couples may decide that parenthood simply isn’t for them. They want to spare any future children the dysfunction they endured.
Some Americans, as well, have bought into the lie – based in eugenicist theory – that the planet is overpopulated. Compound that fear with the climate scare: a generation-plus has been raised to believe that not only are there too many humans and that the existing human population is destroying the planet, but that to have children is to condemn them to a future of boiling seas and melting glaciers. Certain celebrities popularize this idea.
Plus, American culture in general is not family-friendly. The Church often talks about the need to create “a culture of life,” a phrase associated with the pro-life movement. However, the idea of a culture of life expands far beyond the goal of preventing abortions. To create a culture of life is to make it such that room is available for every new life. This culture will provide support for mothers and fathers in every form, including financially, before and after birth. Until our national culture sees families as a good and prioritizes their creation and well-being, a large cultural hurdle to the goal of normalizing large families will persist.
In addition, of course, are simply the lifestyle changes that come with modernization, including women delaying child-bearing in order to build their careers and far fewer families working large farms that need the help of multiple hands.
In other words, both the economic and cultural conditions required to make large families feasible do not exist in most parts of America today.
What can Catholics do?
There’s no doubt about it: we have a long way to go to create the right conditions for families to flourish. In the next article, we will discuss what the Church says about the meaning of family, and what Catholics, no matter the size of their own family, can do to promote a culture of life.
7 thoughts on “Americans Want More Kids, and That’s a Great Thing – Part 1”
The church did not want divorced people to feel alienated so we stopped talking in a family way.
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We have schools, I’d say they are thriving, I see families in church. That said, it probably should be better though, my witness as to how it was as a kid. You all at Catholic Stand perhaps should write up on the growth of the Church in Africa or the Philippines. Sometimes, when I see pictures, it seems like that was the way it once was here in the USA. We have the Knights of Columbus (big in Philippines and even Poland) or Legion of Mary (big in Africa) but as a kid, I think these were really big deals. I’m in the Knights as my father was.
The church does not need to “form families” intentionally or through targeted “ministries”. And should not attempt to. Singles events did not exist two generations ago. They weren’t needed then, and they aren’t needed now. A few church nerds always show up and everyone else is discouraged from ever coming again. But when parishes had social events that appealed to all, a single man might, say, notice a single woman helping children on the playground, or he might work along side an older couple who’d give him a nudge to contact their neighbor’s hairdresser’s cousin who attends a parish two towns over. That’s the basic stuff that has been lost, and I don’t know how to bring it back. Singles ministry can’t do these things.
Why should the Church not play an active role? You lose the battle if you do nothing. Catholic ministry organizations like Communio do great work with churches and are advancing family, marriage, and relationships: https://communio.org/
If people have lost the ability to make organic connections, why would it NOT be for the Church to fill the void? Also, the idea that singles events didn’t exist at churches two generations ago simply isn’t true.
More importantly, you have to evangelize the world as it exists, not as it existed several generations ago, or as you wished it existed now. I wrote an article about that, Evangelizing a Post-Christian World: https://catholicstand.com/evangelizing-a-post-christian-world/
What can Catholics do? Well, if you look around at a typical parish mass, the almost total absence of families with children tells you that the Church is now reaping what it sowed back in the 1980’s and 1990’s when parishes pretty much killed off their social activities. Without the basic networking that helped singles of past generations to meet and date and marry, singles have been trickling away from the Church since then, and most have not returned.
Agreed, Larry. There is much the Church can do to actually FORM families, not just passively support those that already exist. Many churches do have singles ministries, though, but they simply aren’t well attended. That could be because there are other ways people meet now (for example, online), or just because younger people, generally, are not at church to begin with. Also, see above – marriage is not a priority, so why attend a singles event? Lots of work to be done. Thank you for reading.