A big, happy family

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5 hours ago

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. I honestly don't know how many we'll end up with between us because we're all still in our early-to-mid-30s, with a fair bit of time for more kids to enter the picture.
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. In my 60-some-odd-person graduate school cohort, there was only one other student with young kids. I found out I was pregnant with my eldest the day before my first semester of classes began, and I remember feeling almost embarrassed to tell my classmates about it, like I'd messed up somehow. When I finally did, everyone was kind, but many were utterly flummoxed.
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.
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.'
When I first learned about this phenomenon, it struck me as fairly intuitive, but also somewhat puzzling. There is a decent amount of evidence that kids from bigger families, and particularly those who fall later in the lineup, end up worse off in a variety of ways as adults. They tend not to go as far or do as well in school, for one thing. Having a lot of siblings often means sharing bedrooms, hand-me-downs and generally getting a smaller slice of your parents' resources, be that money or time. Surely those of us who grew up in big families (especially if we're, like me, not among the oldest) know better than anyone else of the sacrifices the lifestyle involves. What about the allure of having a big family of your own — with all the bills and bulk grocery shopping and crammed calendars — is bigger than the drawbacks? A childhood in a big family, for all its chaos and sacrifice, offers an answer for future generations. And it may provide a smoother on-ramp to future parenthood than exists elsewhere in modern American life.
Studying how — and why — family sizes correlate across generations is a question that statisticians have been focused on 'for as long as their tools have existed,' says Tom Vogl, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. It's been over a century of study, beginning with English statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson estimating the continuity in family size for his own analysis using the correlation coefficient he developed and that's still widely used today.
Despite 120-something years of statistical examination, there's still a lot we don't know about how family size is passed from one generation to the next. Generally speaking, the most prominent theories fall into three broad — and not entirely distinct — categories, Laura Bernardi, an associate professor of demography at the University of Lausanne, says. The first is genetic. 'You have the same genes of your parents,' Bernardi explains. 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.'
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. Likewise, religion tends to be passed from parent to child, and religious folks tend to have more kids than nonreligious ones. (Unlike the educational component, which, as I alluded to above, doesn't appear terribly relevant in my particular family, the religious influence checks out. We're Catholic.)
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 shapes 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. 'Some people are more child-oriented or family-friendly,' Martin Kolk, an associate professor of demography at Stockholm University, says. 'In turn, their children are more child-oriented or family-oriented.' Or those of us growing up surrounded by children may simply come to 'like having children around,' Eva Beaujouan, an associate professor of demography at the University of Vienna, says.
I grew up with a strong sense that raising kids was a good thing to do. Even beyond the 'be fruitful and multiply' outlook that is common to the sort of traditional Catholic community I was raised in, I always got the sense that my parents and extended family members truly believed that parenthood was a worthy use of one's talents. But when I reflect on what led me to launch myself into parenthood so much earlier than my peers, I find myself wondering if having so many siblings merely helped to demystify family life in a way that made it seem less daunting.
This is not something that existing research can verify or refute, but there are tidbits of evidence that seem to give it credence. A study based in Poland found that so-called parentification — defined rather broadly as having 'early caregiving responsibilities' — is positively associated with the future decision to have a child, perhaps playing an important role in 'shaping childbearing motivations and desires,' the authors concluded. Parentification can, of course, be damaging for a child if taken to the extreme. But it seems that, where appropriate, the small-scale introduction to caregiving that life with siblings offers can function as a sort of apprenticeship for parenting down the road.
The more children that your aunts, uncles, grandparents and in-laws have, the more you're likely to have. Bigger families beget bigger families.
In another recent study, researchers in Finland found that those who grow up with more siblings tend to want more kids, but that the association is particularly strong for childless folks, which suggests that one's childhood family size has the strongest sway for people navigating the transition to parenthood, Kateryna Golovina, a psychologist at the University of Helsinki, says. To her, it seems plausible that growing up in a big family would provide experience with children that many young people these days lack, and in that way make raising kids seem less intimidating. In an environment in which the expectations of parenthood are so high, and the time that people spend as adults without kids stretches ever longer, the thought of having a child can feel like 'one big unknown.'
Bernardi, the professor of demography in Lausanne, Switzerland, says that while studying the social forces that influence childbearing decisions for her dissertation, she picked up on one mechanism that was 'difficult to communicate,' but discernible in all of her interviews. In conversation with childless women about their fertility plans, many noted that something about watching a sister or friend become a parent provoked an almost emotional drive to have a child themselves. This could offer another potential explanation for why people with many siblings have more kids: They have more opportunities for such exposure. Research published in 2010 by the Population Association of America suggests you are more likely to become a parent if your sibling has a child. Perhaps one reason I went ahead and had a child in graduate school, despite being surrounded by baffled childless peers, is that my older sister was having kids, too.
And then, of course, there's the simple fact that almost by necessity, parenting in a large family tends to be more relaxed. I'm convinced that having an extra couple of kids automatically sets your parenting style back a generation. There is simply no way for parents to maintain the same level of vigilance you might with one child when there are five. I imagine this helps to explain why those in larger families don't do quite as well in school as their peers from smaller families — I'm certainly open to the idea that I might have been a better student with a little more focused attention from my parents. But, given that my siblings and I all mostly turned out just fine, our less structured childhood didn't saddle me with resentment so much as it left me with the impression that parenthood simply isn't the tightrope walk that many make it out to be.
Of course, the influence of one's family background on childbearing is complex. There's evidence, for example, that childhood experiences can shape people's views on families in unpredictable ways. In one paper, associate professor of demography Beaujouan looked at the impact of parental death in childhood on fertility in adulthood and found a polarizing effect: Some went on to be childless, while others swung in the other direction and had many kids. Other research suggests that whether someone goes on to replicate their childhood experience depends, to an extent, on how fondly they think of their parents. This finding aligns with Golovina's study, which found that in addition to the sibling effect, those who held a negative view of their childhood environment tended to want fewer kids.
America would be a more family-friendly place if its culture more closely resembled that of a large family.
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. Whereas the average American woman had five or six kids in the 1850s, she'll have fewer than two today. Whatever upward pressure growing up with a lot of siblings has on a person's approach to family formation has been swamped by stronger cultural and economic shifts pushing American family sizes down.
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.
For all the real challenges of modern parenthood, I am nevertheless grateful for the ways that growing up with many siblings seems to have primed me to pursue it. The simple fact is that, when I think about what sort of life this third baby of mine will have, I don't find myself worrying much about whether he will get enough love or attention or how he will fare in school. I think he'll get along fine, just like I did.
This story appears in the June 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.