The public’s ideal family size is a full baby greater than the actual family size
Timothy P. Carney
Video Embed
While the American family shrinks in size, the ideal family size is growing.
If you ask people the ideal number of children for a family to have, the answers will vary mostly from two to four. Gallup has been asking this question annually, and to the surprise of some, the average answer has been going up, hitting 2.7 this year, up 50% from the early 1980s and the highest number on record since the birth control pill took up wide usage in the early 1970s.
THE LEFT’S THOUGHT POLICE ARE DESTROYING AMERICA’S COLLEGES
About half the population says two or fewer is the ideal number of children, while the other half says three or more is best.
Almost nobody thinks one or no children is best for a family.
Only 2% say having no children is ideal, and only 3% say having one child is optimal. To put that 5% in perspective, 5% of black people told pollsters in 2016 that the Emancipation Proclamation was wrong. Another found that 7% of the public supposedly believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
The point: You can get just about any answer you want from about 6% of people. The truly anti-natal folks in America are a negligible minority.
So, if people want two to three babies and a growing share wants more, then why are we having fewer and fewer?
America has had fewer babies nearly every year since 2008. The total fertility rate, the most common measure of the birthrate, has fallen to record lows, about 1.65 babies per woman, in recent years, well below the replacement level of 2.1.
It’s easy to blame the cost of raising children, but that answer only gets you so far. Millennials are about as wealthy at this point in their lives as were Generation X and the baby boomers.
The birthrate has fallen over the past decade, although the affordability of raising a child seems to have improved.
But millennials and Generation Z aren’t wrong to complain about it being harder to raise children. It is. That’s because our culture supports raising children less than we used to — and less than we ought to.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Our cities and towns aren’t built to let children run around, our regulations make it harder for parents to work part time, our tax code makes owning a home too expensive, and our culture elevates career success over family ideals.
That’s a longer conversation that the Gallup numbers can’t explain. What is clear from this latest survey, though, is that our baby bust is not simply a matter of people rejecting the idea of big families. Instead, it’s a story of us, for some reason, falling short of our ideals.