The Changing Face of Families

Starting today and continuing for the next several Tuesdays, I’ll be giving readers a sneak peak chapter-by-chapter at what’s inside my new book, Ending Sibling Rivalry: Moving Your Kids From War to Peace, which is available in October, with permission of Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City.

As a society we’ve changed our expectations of child rearing—that raising children is so difficult that fewer kids makes things easier for all involved. In reality, being a sibling isn’t unusual. Estimates indicate around 80 percent of people have brothers or sisters. What has changed in the last half century is the average family size. 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 twentieth century before rising briefly to 3.53 in 1960 (the baby boom generation). The rate bottomed out at 1.77 in 1980, then slowly rose before leveling out early in the twenty-first century. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the total U.S. fertility rate at 1.88 children for 2012, below the 2009 rate of 2.05 and under the replacement fertility rate of around 2.1.

Those statistics underscore that the desired family size has fluctuated over the years. In the United States, the typical early nineteenth century woman birthed between seven and ten children. The Gallup organization, which has gathered data on what Americans deem as their ideal family size since 1936, reported that up until 1957, the majority of Americans wanted families with three or more kids. The number of kids per family dropped between 1957 and 1978 to an average of about 2.5 children, around where it hovers today.

A mere decade later, more women began having only two children which meant the number women having more than three children dropped. Census data shows that in 1976, 59 percent of women between the ages of forty and forty-four 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. Nowadays, in the United States, two children per family has become the number-one choice, with 52 percent of adults surveyed by Gallup in 2007 saying that two kids were the ideal number. Part of the switch to smaller family sizes can be attributed to the fact that more children live to adulthood in twenty-first century America than in the not-so-distant past. As recently as 1900, a U.S.-born baby had only a 50 percent chance to reach adulthood.

As our ideal family size has shrunk, our view of how children should be raised has become more complicated—and with that, the expectations of who children should behave toward one another. By all accounts, families with multiple children are experiencing more sibling rivalry than in the past. Parents are frustrated and concerned about the battles that erupt on a frequent—even daily or hourly—basis in their homes.

Read more about how family size expectations contribute to parental reaction to sibling conflict in Ending Sibling Rivalry: Moving Your Kids From War to Peace, available for pre-order now on Amazon.com, CBD.com and Beacon Hill Press.