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Your personal observations jibe with many that I have made as well. My mother-in-law tells me similar story's from her work in the Church in Butler County, PA.

They also go along with anecdotal societal trends on more young women wishing to be stay-at-home mom's of larger broods. Recall that the US Census found the number of stay-at-home mom's is on the rise.

My feeling is that there are not a lot more very large families (6 children and up), but that there are a lot more with three, four, and five than people quite realize now. Since many of these are young (like me), they may well have more. The parishes around me have relatively few very large families, but I do notice a large number with 3-5 children (i.e. a mini-van full). I wonder if the size of the mini-van is playing a part in this?

You can put my wife and I in the never contracepted category.

I've also noticed that as there are more people now marrying in their 30's, some of these have chosen to complete eschew birth control and let God take His course, since their years of fertility are relatively short, and it would be unlikely they have over four children. One man married at 31 that I know at work who is now in his 40's has three kids, and would have had four but for an ectopic pregnancy. Another similarly married at 30 has three kids with a fourth having miscarried between numbers 2 and 3.

I actually only know of two contracepting couples who married in the Church of my currently "having babies" friends, and both of them are in mixed-marriages with a Protestant woman. The contraceptors I do know seem to more frequently be the fallen away types.

Dear Hermann,

"My feeling is that there are not a lot more very large families (6 children and up), but that there are a lot more with three, four, and five than people quite realize now."

I don't know about the first assertion. It may just be that we're homeschoolers, and Catholic homeschoolers seem to often have rather large families. Six and more aren't unusual. We have some homeschooling friends who are our age, with five children, the youngest is under two. The wife seriously intends for more. She's just trying to keep up with the rest of the bunch.

But you're probably right among folks sending their children to Catholic school, or public school (though our K of C family of the year this year has seven children, all in, or destined for Catholic school).

Folks my age (I'm 43) usually have smaller families, and I know several who have gone as far as sterilization. But the folks about ten years younger seem to be "going for the gusto."

"I've also noticed that as there are more people now marrying in their 30's, some of these have chosen to complete eschew birth control and let God take His course, since their years of fertility are relatively short, and it would be unlikely they have over four children."

As well, when we were young, we were told that fertility would hold up well at least until about age 35. There are a lot of baby boomers who found out the hard way that fertility declines rapidly past one's late 20s.

Perhaps the younger ones are learning from the hard-learned lessons of others.

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