I recently read an article on the falling birth rate and how countries are trying to encourage families to have more kids. Taiwan has spent more than $3 billion with no results. The replacement rate, the number of children a woman must have for the population to remain stable is 2.1. Taiwan is 0.87. Even the USA has dropped to 1.66,
How will this affect the Mormon Church? Let’s look at Utah as a bellwether. As recently as 2008, Utah had the highest fertility rate in the country at 2.6. Today it is below 2. Same with Idaho, another heavily Mormon state. While this does not bode well for the Church in the USA, the good news is that most of the new converts to the church are coming from countries that have very high birth rates. The church is growing fastest in Africa, which has 4.2 births per woman.
For an excellent report of LDS birth rates, see the website Fuller Consideration. From that website is the below graph.
While growing up in the 60’s and 70’s in central California, there was always several large families in our wards. By “large” I mean 6-8 kids. The norm seemed to be 3-4 kids, and the outliers had 1-2 kids. Today in my ward here in California there are no “large” families, and 2-3 kids seem to be the average. There are also several members with high profile callings that only have 1-2 kids. This anecdotal evidence correlates with the above graph.
While “children of record” only make of 1/2 to 1/3 of the church growth in any given year, this, coupled with declining baptism rates will further contribute to the decline in the Church growth.
What have you noticed in your ward? Are families smaller? Is your family smaller than the ones you grew up with? Will we see council to “have more children” in the future, or has that ship sailed in modern society?
Wheat & Tares 
The trend towards smaller families is part of the issue. Starting this graph at the height of the post-war baby-boom years is another part of the problem. It makes the decrease appear more dramatic than if the graph also included the fertility drop of the war years.
When we measure the number of children, per 1000 members in the US, that measurement also captures the aging of the church membership and our nation. The number of women of child-bearing age, as a percentage of the overall population, is decreasing.
Add the realities of motherhood in modern society. Early motherhood can be very socially isolating. Having children is often economically devastating for a young couple.
There is little societal tolerance for the realities of parenthood. Being stuck on a plane with crying baby is often treated like the worst thing ever. A few hours of a crying infant is often compared to war zones, plague and severe mental health diagnoses.
Last week, I was visiting with a couple. She just turned 30. He is 34. She is making over $400,000 a year. He is making around $150,000. They are saving and planning. They want children but they both want the wife to be able to be a SAHM. Her loss of income will be significant. Can they live off of his income? Yes. Do they want to? No. They are trying to figure it out — and are losing years of fertility while they wait. While most young couples are not in that tax bracket, the underlying issues are the same.
Well, as the eldest of 7 raised in the church, I have just 2 children. That was plenty for me. My siblings vary and have 5, 9, 3, 2, 7 and 3 respectively. My parents had just one sibling each.
I am the youngest of 6 (end of the baby boomer era). I have 3 children. My siblings had 6, 3, 1, 4, and 4 respectively. My parents were faithful latter-day saints with few birth control options. I think their plan was to stop at 4, yet 2 more of us arrived. While they were faithful to the exhortation to reproduce, in reality they had no idea what to do with us once we arrived. Our upbringing was benign neglect. As parents, my siblings and I have tried to do better with our children, but the reality is that every parent screws up their child(ren) in their own unique ways.
I can totally see the leadership urging couples to have more children. They are 2 or 3 generations away from young couples and live in an artificial bubble. They have no idea how much more difficult it is currently, despite information they’re given. Given the “respect” shown to women in the church and the fact that most of the senior leadership probably did little in the actual raising of their children, I can see them urging more children. It’s vital in keeping the membership numbers from diving. Cynical? Yes, but I see too many decisions made that only serve the organizations needs/goals, not the members.
Coincidentally the op-ed on the front page of my preferred news source headlines “why I’m not going to have children.” Anxiety due to a dozen things is the reasoning: climate, politics, healthcare, housing, cost of education etc make it seem unethical to bring a child into the world.
I have four adult kids. Two are married and don’t want kids two are not married and don’t seem interested in marriage. I have 25 employees, most 25-40 years old. Not a single one has more than 2 kids. There seems to be simply no incentive and no interest in having kids.
I actually wonder if the church is in a death spiral and doesn’t know it yet (decreasing goods and services but increasing fixed costs). Death spiral + population decline = no bueno.
“…the good news is that most of the new converts to the church are coming from countries that have very high birth rates. The church is growing fastest in Africa, which has 4.2 births per woman.”
This is probably the most important element of this discussion. What will it ultimately mean for the church when the vast majority of members are located in Africa and what we North Americans prefer to call “developing nations”? Will (or can) the leadership remain Western, white, heteronormative, male, and old?
This, of course, is not just an LDS trend but found within most Christian denominations. In my own, Community of Christ, we’ve seen it coming for quite a while. The CofC is growing throughout Africa and the Indian subcontinent, in particular. Just this week I’ve been following the FB posts of an apostle at church conferences in Nepal and India where the venues are overflowing with enthusiastic participants, and predominately younger ones at that. It’s hard not to compare to the situation here “at home.”
Coincidentally (?), my church is in the midst of a major discernment process to determine not only who should be the next prophet-president but what direction the Holy Spirit is prompting us to take in the immediate and longer-term future. It’s instructive that the Council of 12 Apostles for the first time has seven apostles born outside the USA (okay, one is Canadian, but still) and an equal number of men and women.
While the exact situation and process is different for LDS as opposed to CofC, each church will be faced with dealing with a geographic shift in membership and all that entails. Entrenched leadership rarely if ever gives up power without a fight or some kind of crisis emerging. How will we respond?
We have four kids. We were the largest family in our last ward. I never would have expected that to be the case in Mormonland.
My wife’s sister has one kid. He’s about six. They live in London. Yesterday they were turned away from a pub that doesn’t allow kids. That kills me.
As the OP noted, airlines are trying to relegate families to the back of the plane. Some of the worst people who hate kids are parents of adult kids. Because kids today…
As discovered by Taiwan, you can’t buy your way out of this. A culture that hates kids has to be overthrown.
My company is far from perfect but it offers a pretty incredible maternity and paternity leave program with full pay. We could start there.
Use the SDA Church as a barometer; a real divide is occurring between its North American, Western Europe, and Australian members vs third world countries. Why? Only 5% of its members are from North America. Areas of growth are largely from Africa and South America etc.
The result are divisions over agendas such as women’s ordination and other progressive issues. Get ready Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I saw the news pieces about the Taiwan parental leave thing and the declining birth rates globally.These articles usually conclude with a proverbial throwing up of the hands and saying “it’s not our fault, look! we can’t even pay them enough to have kids, they must not want children period and there’s nothing we can do about it”
I don’t think this conclusion is quite accurate. First, Taiwan’s generous parental leave policy is (up to) two years of paid leave. Obviously that’s very nice compared to the USA, but it kind of misses the point. All of us know that it takes *more* than two years to raise a child. They’re not in school all day until 5-6 years old.
After twi years of parental leave, you’re back to the same problem, both parents have to work, but now there’s a two year old that you need to do something with.
The problem isn’t *only* a lack of parental leave, the problem is that you need two working adults just to keep a family afloat nowadays.
If governments actually wanted to do something meaningful about this, they’d need to implement a series of living wage mandates along with rent and price controls so that more families could survive on a single-worker income.
Dallin Oaks has been talking about this for a long time, actually. I think it’s at least partly the basis for his animosity toward the LGBTQ+ community. Mormons have a responsibility to get married early and reproduce often, regardless of practical or financial considerations, or the church and the nation will evaporate.
Dallin Oaks, April 2022: “…Satan’s most strenuous opposition is directed at whatever is most important to that plan. Consequently, he seeks to oppose progress toward exaltation by distorting marriage, discouraging childbearing, or confusing gender.”
Worldwide devotional, May 2023: “President Oaks expressed worry about the high number of people who aren’t married or are choosing not to have children, as well as the rising age at which Latter-day Saint men and women decide to marry.”
Dallin Oaks, 1984: “One generation of homosexual ‘marriages’ would depopulate a nation, and, if sufficiently widespread, would extinguish its people. Our marriage laws should not abet national suicide.”
Seconding Schwimmy here; paying two years of paternity leave, generous as though that may be, still does nothing to address the living expenses of the next 16 years of childcare after that (to say nothing of college tuition). Ultimately, paternity leave is just a bandage on the much larger problem of decades-long stagnant wages, rising housing, medical, and schooling costs, and legitimate fear for the future driven by our wholly inadequate response to the climate crisis. As a general rule, I have observed that those wringing their hands the most about declining birthrates haven’t been wringing their hands nearly as much about the rising costs of literally everything. They address the effects, not the causes; the symptoms, not the underlying causes.
In short, you incentivize people to have more kids by actively trying to make the world a better place for everyone to live in, not by finger-wagging them or just offering to spot them a couple years.
I’m a millennial born in 1991. For both my husband and me, most of our grandparents came from families of 2-4 siblings. One of my grandma’s grew up on a farm (her family was not LDS at that point) and had I think 8 siblings. My husband also had one grandpa who had 6 siblings, I don’t know much about them. But all of these grandparents had 7-11 kids, and felt it was morally the correct thing to have as many kids as possible. The threshold of that being for one of my grandma’s until “her uterus broke” (I think that meant a really bad prolapse?) and my other grandma had rh negative blood which meant a number of her babies had to have blood transfusions at birth, and I’m guessing she had less because of that.
Anyhow, basically my point is that we’re dealing with a past where people had more kids than they would’ve without the past morals of no birth control, and pushing to women’s physical boundaries where they would’ve died without modern medicine. And a present where it’s harder to get married, and harder to have lots of kids. I’ve made a lot of my decisions of when to have another baby based off of car seats fitting in our cars. (There’s a big gap between kid 3 & 4 until we upgraded from a coup to a minivan). There’s a lot of little things like that that my grandparents generation didn’t have to think about.
I’ve moved too much to compare family size from my ward growing up to where I am now. (In San Jose California my family was an outlier with 6 kids, whereas where I am now in Arizona (east of Mesa) the largest families have been 8-13 kids. I have 5 kids and that’s slightly large. A lot of families have 3-4 kids, though plenty have 2-5. I live where housing is comparably a little more affordable than most of the west. Though it’s still too high since covid.)
We have four kids (all adults now). I can’t imagine any of my four kids having four kids. They just look at everything so differently than we did. We thought having four kids was pretty average for LDS couples and maybe above average for society. My kids think having four kids is utterly unrealistic. In one generation the entire outlook has changed. That’s our experience at least.
…and dont expect the church to help out with those practical and financial considerations. Rules are rules and it has ever been thus.
What Schwimmy said. Both parents have to work, and child care is budget killing expensive. Parental leave is nice but it is only one issue out of dozens. All of the issues that make having and raising children just too expensive will have to be addressed before people can have the children they want, and that is all before we even address why people no longer want children.
The Republicans are all worried about the declining birth rate, and all too happy to force women to give birth, meanwhile, they are the ones fighting all the things families need in order to have and raise children. Democrats seem almost happy with the declining birth rate….sort of like China with their one child policy until they discovered that one child per woman was a dangerously declining workforce.
So, why are families limiting children to between two and zero?
Let’s start with getting pregnant in the first place and look at the problems related to pregnancy and childbirth that are getting worse in the US. Air pollution is causing men’s sperm count to drop and in many areas this becoming a fertility problem. And what do republicans want to do? They want more deregulation of factories and cars that produce the pollution. There are women who want children who simply cannot afford the medical intervention they need to become and or stay pregnant. IV pregnancies are costly at tens of thousands per attempt. Then there is the danger of pregnancy and child birth. The US has a problem with maternal death. More women are dying of complications of pregnancy and childbirth, most of which are preventable. This isn’t happening in other developed countries. Then there is the financial cost of birth. Giving birth can cost as much as buying a house. Fifty years ago, my children cost between $2 and $100. The child with the most complications and born a month early was the same complications my daughter had 25 years later. I paid about $100, she paid about 40k. That is a pretty steep price increase just for the medical costs and 25 years later, it has gotten even worse what the parents with “good” insurance have to pay out of pocket. That is for hospitalization during pregnancy for preeclampsia, and then a premature birth. Insurance deductibles and things they refuse to pay for have skyrocketed. Our own medical coverage has gone from free with his employment to $200 per month, same supposed coverage, meanwhile what insurance covers keeps shrinking and copays, deductibles and percentages the person pays keep going up. Hospitals are shutting down maternity care, doctors are leaving that speciality. There are big areas where a woman cannot get medical care within a 50 mile driving range. This is getting worse, not better. The complication of pregnancy are now even more dangerous in states where abortion is restricted.
All these problems and our theoretical baby isn’t a day old yet.
And I think I will just say that those same increases in expenses follow the child until they are self supporting, which is also getting later, with some of my nieces and nephews not making it to self supporting until age 40.
Then there is wanting a baby. 3 of my 5 grandchildren have already more or less announced they will never have children and two of those three aren’t even 21 yet. They have reasons. One is asexual. One’s partner doesn’t want to risk childbirth. Of my three children, only one may see their own grandchildren.
Growing up in Utah County in the 80s and 90s I knew at least 5 families with 8 or more kids. I was the youngest of 6 kids. It was a massive competition how many kids you could have. Now living in Salt Lake County, I know many families with 5 kids and two with 8 and one with 7. Many of my wife’s cousins have 5 kids. I have 2. My wife has infertility issues and we adopted our first. We successfully did in vitro for our second. We will not pursue anymore kids. It has been hard on my wife who has felt inadequate because her cousins have had so many kids and she hasn’t been able to. But I have told her as well that I don’t want anymore because I don’t think I could mentally handle more. I’ve been the major caretaker for our kids. She has accepted that, and we settled upon getting a dog. I’m not a dog person, but I’m sure the boys will love it.
I don’t think you can get people to have more kids just by insisting. Around the world total fertility rates have fallen, especially in Europe and East Asia (South Korea is in a dire situation with so few kids). Efforts to incentivize women to have more children in the developed world have yielded extremely meager results. In general there appears to be a correlation between female education and number of children. The more educated women are in the general population, the fewer kids they tend to have. The least educated places have the youngest populations. My belief is that the general policy of the developed world should not be in getting their own citizens to have more kids (since this is often fruitless) but in increasing the number of migrants who enter their borders. There is no shortage of young people in Africa, Afghanistan, Haiti, Guatemala, and Yemen. A very large number of them want to go and work in more developed countries. Make it happen. Bring them in train them in a variety of important skills and eventually naturalize them as citizens and treat them as equals, not just of the US, but of Poland, Japan, China, Greece, Finland, and wherever there is need to help make up for declining populations.
A second thumbs up for both Schwimmy’s and Anna’s comments.
I read the Vox.com article that Bishop Bill based this post on, and I want to take some thoughts from that article to expand on what Brad D said: “In general there appears to be a correlation between female education and number of children. The more educated women are in the general population, the fewer kids they tend to have.”
That’s a success story. From the Vox article: “In many ways, the falling birth rate is a success story — the result of young people, especially women, having more options and freedoms than ever before.” Well educated women who have options have fewer children on average. That’s true in every nation. As women’s rights make progress, the birth rate drops. Those nations that currently have high birth rates may see a drop.
I read another article focused on the falling birth rates in Korea and Japan, and one of the reasons the women don’t want children is the deep sexism in that country. A wife with a child is a second class citizen. She’s punished for reproducing; she’ll get fired or mommy-tracked at her job if she tries to work. Women want an education so they can have a respectable job, and keep their independence so there isn’t a man entitled to treat her like the housekeeper. Plus, while she gets mommy-tracked, the child’s father is working 60 hour weeks, seven days per week, and can’t help with the child. The workaholic culture encourages people to not have responsibilities outside of work.
I agree the economic reasons are one of the biggest challenges with having children today. Both men and women should be able to make a decent living on working 30-40 hours per week. You need time and relaxation and an economic cushion to be a parent. I’ve felt the pressure of trying to work like I don’t have children at home. It sucks. That sort of pressure shouldn’t be applied to the fathers either.
We also have to look at how miserable and risky it can be for a woman to have lots of children and be a SAHM in today’s world too. I bet some of the women who are choosing education and career instead of lots of children watched a mother who had to tolerate a difficult marriage because there was no other way to take care of 6 kids.
Superficially, it seems to primarily be male church leaders that I hear expressing concern about low birth rates. (Maybe this is because we don’t get to hear from female leaders, and there are fewer of them, too.) But maybe if the women don’t want to raise the kids, they should encourage the men to stay home with them.
(I am both joking and not. I’m joking because men staying home raising children probably horrifies the Q15 even more than low birth rates. But also, I’m not joking because we should be encouraging families to split money making and child rearing duties however works best for them.)
Janey, yes, I saw my mother stay in a miserable abusive marriage because there was no way she could support 5 children. She consoled herself with the idea that at least he was a good father. But he just abused the children where she couldn’t see it and reminded us that if we told, mom would divorce him and we would be left to go hungry. She ended her education to get married and follow him while he completed his doctorate in law, which he did just to get his own mother and manipulative dying father off his back. No way did he want to be a lawyer. Even after seeing her helplessness, I got into the same situation, quitting my education to follow my husband around the world with his career. Our church teaches it is righteousness for women to be helplessly dependent on a husband with no way to protect herself or her children from abuse, and a disaster waiting in the event of death or divorce. Then refuses to help them escape if the man is abusive. So, have more babies so you are in an even worse situation.
Having lived in Asia, I saw a lot of the problems that happen when too much control over these decisions is exerted. In China, we sat down for tea with a woman who was roughly my age in her kitchen to chat as part of a “hutong” tour, visiting the local Beijing neighborhoods that have multiple families in apartments sharing communal courtyards and shared public restrooms rather than private bathrooms in their homes. Like me, this woman was the youngest of 7 siblings. Unlike me, she only had one daughter due to the one-child policy in China; I had 3, a kind of middle of the road number for Mormons at the time. China is now reversing these draconian policies that included forced abortion and abandoned infants to escape government detection. The policies were extremely invasive, although many citizens defended the necessity to avoid famine.
In Singapore, the high cost of living (most expensive place to live in the world one of the years we were there, and in the top 3 most expensive countries the whole time we were there) and the cultural issues mentioned above led to a downward spiral in fertility. Add to that another cultural staple in many Asian households, that the adult son & his wife often live with his parents for the first few years of marriage. This was leading to a lack of sexy time, and a rise in the prevalence of sex taxis, taxis you could hire that blocked out the windows so couples could have some alone time away from parents’ prying ears. The taxis would park in a designated more private area. There is something similar in Vietnam, where you can rent a pair of lawn chairs on the river with a privacy umbrella to have romantic interludes on the cheap. Necessity really is the mother of invention. No conversation about dropping birth rates is complete until I share the videolink of an ad Singapore’s government did in conjunction with Mentos for National Night, an ad designed to encourage citizens to do their civic duty and have a baby. The ad is definitely better than anything I can imagine the church putting out on this topic, but still, I don’t think the financial incentives offered were sufficient by a long stretch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jxU89x78ac
As to the church’s desire for a higher birth rate, I see several problems. First and foremost, they don’t even remotely put their money (which is substantial) where their mouth is. The child care and health insurance support through the BYUs are all about forcing women to give birth (you can’t get birth control until you have at least 5 kids! Let me just say how appalling it is that they are involved in the number of children. I was warned not to have more kids due to a blood clotting disorder, although I’ve of course never worked for the church. Church insurance policies don’t care about women’s health, physical or mental, and they have literally no respect for women or the agency of couples to make choices about these most intimate of matters–throw another woman on the fire). Secondly, the more kids you have, the odds one or more of your kids are LGBTQ increase, and guess what church leaders? You’ve declared war on those families! You are literally going to drive them out of the church because protecting bigotry is far more important than protecting queer kids. And the other problem with Oaks’ expectation that gay marriage will lead to the extinction of the species is that gay couples often raise families, providing loving homes for adoptions and caring for these children. It’s just that he hates gay people and doesn’t see their loving homes as valid.
Which brings us back to the core issue: being led by a gerontocracy. We no longer live in the 1950s. Most of us, including current senior citizens, were not even alive in the 1950s. But the perspectives behind our policies are based on a world that (thankfully) no longer exists.
Very interesting post and comments. Thank you!
A few observations:
Having lived in China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Okinawa for a total of 14 years,
I saw first-hand the traditional attitudes of Confucian (or Buddhist) men toward marriage and having children. Even if the woman works full-time outside outside the home, men are very reluctant to involve themselves with the day-to-day management of a household and raising of children. This is a bit less of a problem in the Church, but I think still applies to Church families. No wonder Asian birthrates have plummeted. And only a very small number of Church families have more than two children.
I also think Mormon attitudes toward having children have gradually evolved, although there is a wide variety of cultural beliefs. I remember my wife’s first gynecologist recommending and prescribing birth control medications, for us to control how many children we wanted to have (we eventually had a total of four children over 11 years).
Lastly, there is a silly joke about multiplying and replenishing the earth: God commanded Adam and Eve to multiply and replenish the Earth, but he told the Mormons to multiply and replenish the Earth, Mars, and half of Jupiter. (I think this is from a Grondahl cartoon.)
I am glad that Church families are more willing to follow their own wishes about having how many children. The Handbook of Instruction now fortunately teaches that this a couple’s own decision, and nobody else’s **** business!
Thank you,
Taiwan Missionary
From my viewpoint I see a constellation of issues at stake beyond the financial ones in having a family. Our church leaders have a very naive (totally clueless)mindset when it comes to having a family today vs back in the 50’s through the 80’s when they were having their own families. Between being an accelerated learning teacher for 9 years and being a mom I saw and experienced things that radically changed my attitudes towards having a family. Here are 2 issues that I’d like to address.
1. Not every woman is able to get pregnant at all, easily get pregnant or stay pregnant. My sister had 8-9 miscarriages before undergoing a hysterectomy at age 28. Her ob/gyn told her afterwards that because of inherited female issues from both sides of our family she would never have been able to have a physically or mentally normal baby and carry it to term. Going to church and hearing motherhood pushed so hard was pure torture for her. Although she and her husband were able to adopt a child they didn’t have the financial means to adopt a second one.
On the other hand, I was violently ill for the first 6.5 months of my only pregnancy. When the nausea finally ended my feet, toes and fingers swelled up to the point where I couldn’t wear shoes or hold a pen or pencil in my fingers for the last part of my pregnancy. Because of my son being a “low rider” the back pain was pure and unadulterated agony. My body didn’t like being pregnant. Period. In fact, there was a blizzard the day that he was born and it was about 20 degrees outside. All I could wear on my feet were flip flops (without socks) to go to the hospital!
After going through a horrific 9 months I was not ready to get pregnant anytime soon after my son’s birth. There was so much pressure from church members and relatives to have another child. I got pregnant nearly 3 years later but had a miscarriage at about 10 weeks. Weirdly enough, I felt relieved rather than sad and the desire to have another child ended at that time. I had such a strong feeling that I wasn’t supposed to have anymore children. Try telling other Mormons besides your spouse and your sister about this fact and have them understand!
Several years later I finally found a spine orthopedist who finally took my extreme chronic back pain seriously and he ordered me to have some scans of my spine done. Afterwards he asked me how many children I had and I told him about the miscarriage that I had had after my son’s birth and how any feeling of having another child had completely left me. My doctor told me that my decision had been the right one because my spine was such a mess. To have had another child would’ve eventually meant that I would’ve permanently been in a wheelchair because of the damage and toll that carrying another baby for 9 months would’ve caused. My intuition had been correct even though I had received all sorts of lectures from family and church members about being selfish by not having another child.
2) Just because a couple can have children doesn’t mean that they should populate Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Because the church considers sex before marriage as verboten we do a poor job teaching about contraception and family planning. As a result there are too many couples who breed like rabbits or fruit flies. These same couples have too many kids and they often have them too close together. This is mentally, emotionally and physically hard on the mother. From experience of my own (I’m the oldest of 5 children) and from 9 years in the classroom I’ve witnessed the situation where the oldest children end up raising their younger sibs. This is unfair to the older/oldest sib. I practically raised my two youngest brothers until I went to college. When my HS friends wanted to go hang out I was stuck at the home watching my brothers. My sister who was only 2 years younger than me begged my mom to allow her to watch our brothers. No dice. I was “the oldest and most responsible child and was the best person to care for our brothers”. My sister was angry because she didn’t get the opportunity to show that she was just as capable as me in caring for the boys. She also saw how angry I was because I had to give up so much fun and camaraderie with friends because I’d been arbitrarily designated as the “family babysitter”.
As a classroom and music teacher I have seen this scenario play out time and time again. Older children are tasked with raising their younger sibs while the younger sibs don’t get much meaningful attention from their parents-something that the older sibs did get to one degree or another. Over the years I’ve been a surrogate mom to students and young friends who are either forced to raise younger sibs at a young age (especially girls) and those who got too little parental attention because they got lost in the shuffle. This ought never to happen, but it happens on an alarmingly regular basis in the church because IMHO the leaders figure that raising children can’t be all that difficult. It’s just another way to prove that our “god given” mission is to care for children whether we’re physically, mentally and/or emotionally capable of doing so. One size definitely fits all in this situation seems to be their opinion. No wonder women are choosing to have small families or no children at all!
I for one am grateful that fewer people are having children they don’t actually want. I came from a big family, and my dad hated kids. He seriously couldn’t handle it. Why did he have so many? I think it was partly the commandment to multiply and replenish, and partly an outward sign of his supposed righteousness. Everyone could see how righteous he was. The consequences for me and my siblings can’t be measured. People who don’t want kids shouldn’t have them. We should not instigate policies to make people who don’t want kids have them.
What will it ultimately mean for the church when the vast majority of members are located in Africa and what we North Americans prefer to call “developing nations”? Will (or can) the leadership remain Western, white, heteronormative, male, and old?
Western, white, and old–no. Male and heteronormative–probably. Africa is no bastion of feminism or LGBTQ+ rights.
APWS, your comment reminded me of a recent conversation with a sibling (the one with 2 kids like me). They were talking about multiplying and replenishing (in favour). I said I had never understood, why if x number of spirits are waiting, there’s such a rush to get them here asap. Aren’t there sustainable ways of achieving that goal that aren’t going to ravage the planet, that allow parents to invest more in each child individually, so each child has a good start, and can go on to invest in their children. They thought there was plenty of uninhabited space on the planet still. I argued that was not so with many species on the verge of extinction due to loss of habitat etc. It baffles me we had to agree to differ on that as there was no changing their mind, given such and such a prophet had said such a thing back when world population considerably smaller than today, and environmental stresses less obvious than they are now.
In nearly every comment above there’s a version of (one of) the elephant in the room that is neither openly named nor discussed— women’s unpaid labor in support of their families. It is finally being seen and discussed in ‘worldly’ ‘librul’ places. Witness this meme I saw yesterday:
“GENTLE REMINDER that the 40 hour work week is outdated, and was designed with the assumption that someone else was always going to be taking care of cooking, cleaning, household errands, childcare, &etc. It wasn’t designed for a single person to handle all of those tasks in addition to being on the work clock. “
Patriarchal forces agitating for a remedy to our falling birth rate will absolutely refuse to see this unpaid labor as a valuable factor, and are clueless about seeing how they view it as an entitlement, and thus are unable to analyze it as part of either the problem or the fix. But my daughters and their peers see it and are not signing up for it, regardless of their level of desire for motherhood. If that’s the cost, they aren’t having kids.
And a related issue is the flaming mess that is current women’s healthcare, something that’s not always been that great for American families, but has become a serious obstacle even for families with adequate resources to navigate the maternity care/insurance labyrinth, and is a near impossibility for couples without enough resources to care for themselves.
The bottom line of my comment is that arguably the biggest problem is the almost universal lack of support for women’s needs before and during pregnancy and motherhood, and support for fatherhood as caregiving. Another meme that’s apropos:
“SHOUTING “self-care” at people who really need community care is how we fail them.”
I suggest watching just the first 10 minutes of the documentary* titled Idiocracy to better understand the declining birth rate of specific segments of affluent populations.
*please note my tongue-in-cheek tone!!!
I’m from a family of 12 children. I have 2 of my own, and only 2 of my siblings have more than 4. I grew up in a ward (1980s) where it seemed like all of the really active families had 6. At the time preaching against contraception in general conference was a pretty recent thing, if not occasionally still happening. The high prevalence of 6 to me suggests that was the number at which a lot of couples felt it was acceptable to quietly start using contraception anyway. By the time I was married, it felt like 4 had become the new 6, and now only a few have 4. Mormons decided they were OK with contraception, and now their families look a lot like everyone else’s.
There seem to be a lot of governments worried about demographic collapse who are trying to incentivize childbirth. That’s fine, and I support that, but there are cultural problems that governments don’t have much power over. I think the more patriarchal a culture is, the more there will be women who will want nothing to do with motherhood. In many of those cultures they are be expected to be both a parent and an earner with little support from the fathers at either job. It’s hard to blame anyone for opting out of that arrangement. It seems to be part of the problem in all of the Asian countries mentioned here, but I’ve also read articles about the same factors at work in places like Italy, which has Europe’s lowest birthrate. In the modern world you’re not going to solve the birth rate problem until men fully buy into egalitarian parenting.
I don’t understand how childbearing is the highest and most important thing a woman can supposedly do. In the Old Testament, God makes it pretty clear that childbirth is actually a punishment.
It’s particularly gruesome to hear men encouraging women to have babies, babies, babies when women are STILL dying in childbirth. Something like 300,000 a year. Does my whole body matter to Dallin Oaks, ir just my womb? Wait, don’t answer that.
This is just another demographic trend where Mormons tend to be a generation behind the rest of the US. Mormons are just now catching up to the number of children non-mormons tend to have in the US.
Leaving aside economic explanations, most of my peers in their early 30s, late 20s only seem to want have 2-3 kids. That is true for those with both parents working, and for couples I know who are having the mom stay at home. I only know a few in that range who want more than 3. 2-3 kids just seems to be the expectation for Mormon Millennials now.
Almost 50… nearly all of my Mormon friends had 4 kids, me included. A few 5’s, an occasional 3 but mostly 4. I think my kids will have kids but much later than me and no more than 2.
Yeah, I’d love to have kids when I can financially support such- but as a gay man it’s hard to find a partner who wants the same- notwithstanding the hassles of adoption, fertility clinics, and/or finding a willing surrogate mother.
What have you noticed in your ward? Are families smaller?
Yes, but not drastically smaller. In my area it’s still not uncommon to see families with 4-5 children. 6 is now an outlier when in previous years it was fairly routine. I don’t see the big families of 7-9 children like we used to. There was one family with 7 kids in the ward but they moved. Now the biggest family I think has 6. I’d say the average is probably 3 kids.
Is your family smaller than the ones you grew up with?
Definitely. My parents and ancestors had a ton of kids, like 6 kids being on the low end. I have 2 myself. Among myself and my siblings’ families, we each have 2, 5, 5, 4, 2, and 2. Among my nieces and nephews, a bunch of them are stopping at 2 or 3 max. To put this in perspective – my dad was the youngest of 9. My grandmother was the oldest of 13.
Will we see council to “have more children” in the future, or has that ship sailed in modern society?
Both. Just because the ship has sailed doesn’t mean that the leaders of the church won’t still be counseling people to jump off the pier where the ship used to be. The church will probably come around 50 years too late, and then try to convince members they never preached against birth control.
As others have pointed out, this is due to many complicated factors and reflects a larger trend. But honestly I think The trend in the church is pretty simple and can be narrowed down.
1) Birth control is available and the church is no longer explicitly forbidding it like they used to (still frowning on it, but not openly calling it evil like they used to).
2) Women got tired of being exploited for free incubation, birthing, and child-raising services. We’re simply not going to be the church’s tithe-payer factories anymore. We saw what that blind obedience did to our mothers and our grandmothers.
3) People are more willing to draw the line and simply not follow church leaders’ instructions on this one. The leaders are obviously completely out of touch with the realities of family life today.