I kind of like the speculative theology that people who do not have the ability to raise children in this life, whether through death, accident, or lack of opportunity, will be able to in the next.
The TLDR: Latter-day Saint women are less likely to be childless than non-Latter-day Saint women. Specifically, we’ve gone from a little under 70% of LDS women 18-45 having young children to a little under 60%, while for non-Latter-day Saints the decline went from about 55% to 45%.
The gap between us and non-Latter-day Saints has basically stayed the same over the past 17 years. Latter-day Saints are more likely to be childless than they were in the past, but so too are non-Latter-day Saints.
One of the most notable empirical findings in the religion and fertility literature (back when there was sociology literature about something else besides politics and “gender, race, and inequality”) was that the storied Catholic fertility advantage collapsed in the mid-twentieth century. I’ve long wondered whether we’re going through something similar with Latter-day Saints. As I’ve noted before, we still do enjoy a fertility advantage, but it’s hard to know how much it’s grown or declined relative to everybody else simply because it’s hard to have a long enough time series of data that has enough Latter-day Saints to really draw a lot of conclusions from (the GSS has a longer time series, but it only has a few dozen Latter-day Saints or so in every wave, so once you start splicing different ages out it isn’t very helpful for this kind of analysis).
The Cooperative Election Survey does have a lot of Latter-day Saints across a longer timeframe, but it only has whether they were a parent or guardian of any child under 18. This isn’t ideal obviously, but as a rough proxy it’s the best we have. So I subset the data to just include women under the age of 45 and took the average number who answered that they were the parent or guardian of any child under 18. Again, it’s not ideal, there are a lot who just haven’t had their children yet, we throw out all the variation of how many children, and “parent or guardian” isn’t the same as children ever born. (And yes, I’m only using women, but that’s a standard operating procedure in demography for a variety of reasons). Still, as a proxy for Latter-day Saint pronatalism it works and, again, is the best that we have data for.
So what do the results show? Unsurprisingly, Latter-day Saint women under the age of 46 are indeed much more likely to be parents of young children than their non-Latter-day Saint counterparts. Furthermore, when we fit a simple trend line it doesn’t look like the gap is closing either. Both us and non-Latter-day Saints are becoming more childless in tandem (although the increase in childlessness isn’t as much as I would have thought off the top of my head). In 2023 there was one fluke year where we had higher childlessness than everybody else, but in the CES every other year has about half the sample size of the other years, so they’re worth less in terms of predictive accuracy. The 2023 numbers are based on only 69 LDS under-46 women, whereas when we have the larger sample in 2024 of 142 women the gap becomes big again, so I feel okay chalking that up to a statistical fluke.
Code:
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
library(pollster)
df <- readRDS(“LOCATION/dataverse_files/cumulative_2006-2024.rds”)
attributes(df$has_child)
table(df$has_child)
#Under 45 year old
df$has_child_num<-ifelse(df$has_child==”Yes”, 1, 0)
table(df$has_child, df$has_child_num)
attributes(df$religion)
df$LDS<-ifelse(df$religion==3, 1, 0)
table(df$LDS, df$religion)
table(df$year)
attributes(df$age)
table(df$gender, df$year)
table(df$LDS, df$year)
df<-subset(df, age<46)
table(df$age)
df<-subset(df, gender==2)
attributes(df$gender)
df_summary_wide <- df %>%
group_by(LDS, year) %>%
summarise(
avg_has_child = weighted.mean(has_child_num, weight, na.rm = TRUE),
.groups = “drop”
) %>%
pivot_wider(
names_from = year,
values_from = avg_has_child
)
X<-df_summary_wide
table(df$year, df$LDS)
#Check
afd<-subset(df, year==2015 & LDS==1)
wtd.mean(afd$has_child_num, afd$weight)
Comments
15 responses to “Childless Church Members and the LDS Fertility Advantage”
I like looking at numbers and curated displays of numbers, although I am not a statistician. I accept your statements that childlessness is increasing among us, both within the religion and also within society as a while. I also understand marriage rates are down, marriage age is getting higher, and so forth.
I try not to make value judgments on matters like this. I cannot say that any of these trends are bad, because I do not want to condemn any individual for being childless, unmarried, married at an older age, or so forth. I believe God can still accomplish his work despite these societal trends, that God saves individuals wherever they are, and that conformance to a previous generation’s standards is not necessary for salvation.
I am also concerned that a fundamentalist call to change those trends for the better could be short-sighted. For example, yes, I hope every woman can have the opportunity to bear children, and yes, I rejoice in young love. But I would not want us to insist on returning to a previous generation’s “good” outcomes if doing so also resulted in returning to that generation’s “bad” outcomes. For example, I wouldn’t want a fundamentalist focus on increasing birth rates if that also meant abandoning progress we have made in fair treatment of women in society.
Many (or maybe even all?) societal changes are driven by realities of the economy and so forth. Few (or maybe none?) are driven by purposeful desire to be sinful and societal or individual abandonment of godly principles. I know we sometimes tend to look at these matters through moralistic eyes, and I am saddened by some trends, but I tend to think that most societal trends are economic and that other things like religion that along and adapt. People have to make a living and live within the economic construct that they find themselves.
I use the word “economic” very broadly to mean the reality of living, in contrast I suppose to religion. Reality is real, and that is where people have to live — religion is supposed to help people live in reality but cannot supersede reality. So I fear fundamentalism, because it puts religion as more important that economics or reality, and condemns people for doing the best they can to live within their reality.
I acknowledge that the OP has not advocated fundamentalism, but is only sharing numbers. I am glad for his effort and his posting. But I know from sad experience that some people will use those numbers to think less of their fellow Saints and fellow citizens and fellow sojourners for allegedly not living the appropriate standard, and this sadness prompted my comment here.
As a single woman who has begged and begged the Lord for the blessings of a temple marriage and children in this life (and been told “not yet”), I am sure I am on the path the Lord wants. I refuse to marry a man and can’t respect or love just to fit into socities expectations and I refuse to marry outside the temple. I don’t think the Lord wants that for any of his daughters. I appreciate jt’s comment about the short sightedness of “just getting married”. I don’t think the Lord cares about societal trends. He doesn’t want his daughters in crappy marriages. This is just another sign to me that the Lord’s ways are higher than ours.
I’m very open to the idea that there are some people whose divinely appointed mission in life does not involve marriage or having or rearing children. But since we’re speaking in general trends we can speak generally. We shouldn’t judge anybody’s particular circumstances, but we can make judgement about societal movements in general. And on average I think a decline in people having children is a bad thing. Now, there are some individual cases like the ones where you alluded to where the decline is a good thing (e.g. people less likely to coercively have children or enter into poor marriages), but I suspect that at the TFRs we’re looking at that the decline is more of a symptom of bad things (for example, people not making family a life priority; I’m not saying any readers are guilty of that, but surveys show a lot of people are: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-gen-zs-gender-divide-reaches-politics-views-marriage-children-suc-rcna229255) on the net than it is of good things, although both are happening at the same time.
Some might bristle at us even identifying having a family as a “good” thing because it could cause distress and pain to those who unfortunately do not have the opportunity in this life (hence my graphic at the top), but we don’t do this with anything else; for example, we are fine seeing education as a good thing even though not everybody has the chance to get an education.
Not judging is the key. It’s possible to look at population data and make a strong case that much of the decline in fertility over time is due to changes in values the Lord does not approve of (though I think the modern economy is responsible for another big chunk of it). But individuals have the number of children they do, including zero, for a wide variety of reasons: physical health, mental health, economic circumstances, you name it. To assume an individual doesn’t have children, or has few children, because of selfishness or other negative values doesn’t just go against Jesus’s unambiguous commandment to “judge not,” it’s very likely to be inaccurate.
And yet many women in the Church, and a fair number of men, have had the experience of being judged for their marital status or family size. That’s what makes fertility a sensitive topic in a way that education is not. (In fact, we frequently valorize “humble” uneducated people.) There’s a reason the Handbook takes the time to say “The decision about how many children to have and when to have them is extremely personal and private. It should be left between the couple and the Lord. Church members should not judge one another in this matter.”
This is not a criticism of Stephen’s post, which does not do any judging. But I get the responses to it. We can and should talk about fertility, and we should be sensitive when we do.
(I got curious: The Handbook’s “Church Policies and Guidelines” chapter discusses dozens of topics, and just four of them include a warning against judgement. The other three are suicide, dress and appearance, and politics.)
I think I remember seeing fertility increases with salary/ net worth. Not sure how to crack the nut of fertility in the West but the answer is not what Elon is doing probably.
Did polygamy actually increase fertility back in the day?
RLD: You would say that as a childless democrat who dresses immodestly…but seriously that’s actually a really interesting finding.
RL: I can’t remember the direction of relationship on income and fertility, but I do know that the declines in fertility have been across the board socioeconomically speaking. So while housing affordability and the like aren’t irrelevant, I don’t get the sense they’re the big explanatory factor here.
And yes, polygamy did increase average family size because there were hardly any unmarried women: https://mormonr.org/qnas/fX8STb/polygamy_and_population_growth.
It is an interesting exercise to work from questions demographers asked toward answers to other related questions. This CES gives information about the fraction of adult women 45 or younger currently with children under their care, which is an interesting piece of information regarding life in America. The related question that appears to be the focus of this web post is what fraction of women give birth at some point in their lives. (The aside about first-time mothers older than 45 is one aspect of that direction of thought.)
It seems that the desired poll sample and question would be to ask a group of 45-year-olds if they ever gave birth. That would be a larger fraction than 55% or 45% since those numbers came from including in the denominator women under 25 who are not yet mothers but will become such within a decade.
In 2023, 12.5% of first-time mothers were 35 or older, so not including women whose first birth came past age 45 misses very few. What excludes an order of magnitude more mothers is missing those who gave birth when they were young, more than 18 years before being asked by a survey. (In 2023 2.51% of first-time mothers were 20-24, and 8.7% were under 20.)
(I will place a couple of URL links in a subsequent comment.)
Links
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-09.pdf
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/schweizer-guzzo-distribution-age-first-birth-fp-20-11.html
Latter-day Saints in the 1950s had more children, generally speaking, than Latter-day Saints today. Are their larger families (in the 1950s) attributable to their righteousness and holiness? I think not — I think Latter-day Saints in Utah simply followed societal trends for societal reasons.
I understand anecdotally that Latter-day Saint men in Spain marry later than Latter-day Saint men in the United States. Are LDS men less righteous or holy, or more sinful and selfish, than LDS men in the U.S.? I have no way of knowing, but I suspect later marriage age is due more to societal (incl. economic) trends and realities than to their own lack of righteousness.
I also understand anecdotally that a 27-y-o U.S. man in the 1950s could afford a wife a three kids and a mortgage on a blue collar wage. That really isn’t possible today, and I don’t think a lack of righteousness or holiness has anything to do with it. I think it is almost entirely a matter of societal trends and economic reality, and that righteousness or holiness has all.osy nothing to do with it.
Of course, I am speaking generally.
I feel sympathy for young people today. Times are different.
Again, I think it’s both. Yes, a lot of people have smaller or no families because of health, opportunity, finances, what have you. But so too are there people who have no or smaller families because in 2025 the opportunity cost is greater and the culture and its priorities have shifted. The fact is that the decline in fertility has happened across the socioeconomic board, so we should be able to talk about culture and priority shifts without defaulting to the proverbial person who wants the white picket fence but can’t because of infertility. Yes, that is a thing, but some people just don’t want kids anymore, and we should be able to talk about that.
Why is it anyone’s business if someone doesn’t want kids? For any reason? Why the need to push someone into something as serious having children if they don’t want children?
Again, we can value all sorts of things in society without it being “pushy” for people who don’t have the opportunity to access those things. Nobody should also be pushed into getting baptized, and it’s also none of my personal business whether somebody goes to church or college, or is successful in their career for that matter. Those are all very personal decisions, but regardless the latter two are now societally affirmed and esteemed. Regardless of personal situations and desires our theology is unabashedly pronatalist for people who has the opportunity (offspring in the next life [“eternal increase”] is literally the defining characteristic of Godhood). Nobody’s going to force anybody to do anything for any reason, but that’s true of every facet of the gospel.
Lily, I don’t think that Stephen C’s views on “our theology” or “the defining characteristic of Godhood” are dispositive — but I understand his perspective as I have read much of the same things he has from church leaders in the old days. I believe the gospel can work and souls can be saved even in the realities of many different societal environments and arrangements, and I cannot endorse a broad-brush thought that persons with more children, generally speaking, are more righteous than those with fewer children. I think our community benefits from conversations on matters such as this, and I wish we had more opportunity for such conversations.
Anecdotally, my wife and I had originally planned to get settled into married life and then think about kids, but we got a nudge from a religion class lesson, prayed about it, and decided to start our family sooner rather than later. Given the struggles we then had, that turned out to be a very good thing. I’m grateful we got that nudge.
You’re mostly not that far off on me, Stephen: only two kids (for non-ideological reasons), and haven’t voted for a Republican since the 1990s. But while I eventually learned not to judge *other* people for their appearance, if I lost my luggage and had to choose between going to church in something other than a white shirt and tie and not going at all, I’m not sure I could make myself do it. If I lost my razor too, forget it. :)
Infertile person here. I appreciate what you are trying to do here, especially focusing on data, but overall I hate the conversation. Because it comes from a premise that having children is the correct default. Until that default is eliminated it is not possible to have a reasonable conversation on the matter because all it does is spawn judgements of those who deviate from it