As we were growing our family, each parity level fundamentally represented something different to the world about who you were. It went something like this, but experiences may vary:
0 kids) Very atypical for married Latter-day Saint, the operating assumption if you’re old enough is that you have fertility problems. For gentiles there’s the possibility that you’re just a power couple or really into traveling and have decided to not have kids. (I’ve never understood people who choose this demographic; if you’re going to live the free-living, unattached life, then why be married in the first place? But I digress).
1 kid) Within the past couple of decades this has entered into the confidence intervals of “normal” for gentiles. Again, for Latter-day Saints it’s assumed the one-kid family is from infertility/health issues, and it’s still somewhat atypical. I suspect that if you were to look at the parity distribution of completed fertility for members there’d be a hill at 0 and 2, with a valley at 1.
2 kids) The golden mean all-American family. You’re a picture perfect “family man” (I’d say “or family woman,” but that’s not really a term in common use, for a variety of interesting reasons). There’s actually some evidence in demography if you have one boy and one girl you’re much more likely to stop, presumably because you’ve hit the perfect American family. For members in the past this level was indicative of infertility or health problems but I’m surprised at how many Church members I personally know are opting for this, even in the absence of any health, psychological, or financial issues. I get the sense that this being the lowest tier needed to fulfill the “replenish” mandate has some heft with members.
3 kids) Similarly, three is the lowest tier needed to “multiply,” of the “multiply and replenish,” command, and I think that means something for members. For gentiles 3 kids puts you squarely in the super duper family, life-in-the-suburbs category.
4 kids) This is where things start to get weird for gentiles. (Large family comedian Jim Gaffigan noted that after three kids people stop congratulating you). I think the operating assumption here is that either 1) you’re a mixed family with multiple marriages, or 2) you’re religious. Not extremely so necessarily, but you’re probably a weekly church attender. I remember when we got to four officially thinking of ourselves as a “big family” (with some reason, as seen below). For super orthodox Latter-day Saints this has become the “one boy, one girl” version of the all-American family. This is where you start to get the “you have your hands full” comment that we big families outside of Utah hear every other minute.
5 kids) You’re clearly weird, and this is where they start to suspect that you’re a Trad Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, or Latter-day Saint. However, in some sectors of Latter-day Saint culture this number is considered honorable and even praiseworthy even if slightly atypical. We haven’t gotten to “weird even for Latter-day Saints” territory yet.
6 kids) For your gentile friends you have the largest family they know. For Latter-day Saints it’s still considered noble, but it’s getting theoretical in 2026 with its rarity. You start to come up with canned responses to little slights (my favorite: “don’t you know what makes children?” “Yeah, and we’re getting really good at it!”)
7 kids) Everybody assumes you homeschool your kids so they don’t learn about evolution or something.
8 kids) People stop asking you if you’re done, because they kind of know the answer, and even Latter-day Saints think that you’re weird and stop congratulating you. I assume this is rare outside of hard core Trad Catholics, Quiverfull Protestants, Latter-day Saint seminary teacher types (besides myself, every member family I know this large under the age of 50 works for either the Church or BYU-Idaho), or Haredi Jews.
Outside of my own anecdotal observations, I was curious about exactly how “weird” different levels of big families were, so I looked at the total, national rates for 18-50 year olds in 2024. I already did a post on religion and big families using the CES. However, the CES, while large (60,000 some years), is still not quite large enough for super big families, since we’re such a small portion of the population, so I used the Census IPUMS data, using a simple crosstab and subsetting for 2024.
The left column shows the ratio of 18–50 year olds to every one person at that parity. So there are 1.7 18-50 year olds in the country for every 1 that is not living with any of their own children, 6.8 for every 1 that is living with exactly one of their own children, etc.
| 0 | 1.7 |
| 1 | 6.8 |
| 2 | 6.1 |
| 3 | 14.0 |
| 4 | 42.8 |
| 5 | 151.1 |
| 6 | 462.7 |
| 7 | 1262.9 |
| 8 | 3025.7 |
| 9 | 3662.3 |
So I am one out of 3,025 (maybe 3,662 depending on labor timing). When we graph it we see that it starts to get really “weird” and exponentially rarer at around four. (Of course these numbers shift around if we set our age limits differently, but I doubt it changes the overall curve.) Which makes sense to me, given my observations above. Four is still in the realm of “that’s a huge family but you’re still kind of normal and that’s a nice even number” whereas with 5+ you’re clearly not somebody who goes with the flow, and then there’s another big drop-off going from 7 to 8.
I also wanted to see where large families were.
Even though Utah is below replacement childbearing and is the ninth highest for fertility (falling from 3rd highest in 2019), Utah is still far and away number one for number of people who live with 5+ of their own children (yes, it’s an oddly specific variable, but it’s the only proxy for number of own children the Census Bureau collects information on).
What I think this means is that Utah has enough childless or small families to offset the 3% of 18-50 year olds who are having huge families and bringing it down a few notches on the average rankings. However, the unique particularity of “big families,” not one when the expectation is none, or 2 when the default would have been one, but stereotypically, historically “big,” is still something that is very Utahn and, for this particular variable by extension, Latter-day Saint, even if our averages hide that fact.
So big families are quite rare, but in the right places and networks you can still know a handful, but in others, say, secular white people in Maine, they have largely become the stuff of legend.
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