Free Republic

A growing number of people in America prefer families of three or more children, hitting the highest desire for large families since 1971. According to a Gallup survey released Monday, the number of people who prefer smaller and larger family sizes are statistically tied, bouncing back from a decadeslong trend of believing one or two children was ideal. "Overall, this recent survey shows that Americans might finally be climbing out of the anti-family bomb shelter caused by the myths of the 1960’s of a population explosion disaster," Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, told the Washington Examiner....

A few years ago, I spoke with a young man preparing to get married. His aunt told him that she thought he and his fiancée were too financially-strapped to have a child, and that it wouldn’t be fair to bring up a baby in poverty. Keenly aware of his joblessness and his minuscule bank account, he concluded she was probably right. The young man and his fiancée were ready to tie the knot in a few months and they expected that she would be at the infertile phase of her cycle around the time of their honeymoon, so they would...

The Christian world is losing population because of a declining birthrate. The US is also losing population but that fact is being hidden by the large amount of immigration into this country. I am a mother of two daughters in their thirties. One is married and the other is single. My daughters and I have had a discussion about the state of marriage and family among young people of my daughters' generation. Many thirty somethings are having a hard time finding someone to marry and settle down with. In other generations young people of this age would have been married...

In an earlier post, I presented numbers from the General Social Survey (GSS) that squared with Steve Sailer's thesis (isteve.com) that low housing prices facilitate family formation among whites which then turns them into political conservatives. So my next question is: what does a large family do to black parents? According to the GSS, lots of kids moves blacks to the left. Data on the 2000 presidential election (the most recent available to the public) reveals that blacks who voted for Gore had a mean of .75 children living at home with them, while Bush supporters averaged only .38. (The...

I wanted to quantify the pattern of religious people having more children than the irreligious. Starting with the U.S, the General Social Survey (2004) indicates that Americans who never go to church average 1.67 kids: it's 2.25 for those who go weekly and a slightly lower 2.14 for those who go more often. By the way, the fertile "attends weekly" group is not fringe: it is the modal category of religious behavior in America. As for the world, I looked at the World Values Survey and calculated that those who never attend religious services have 1.72 children, compared to 2.47...

WASHINGTON, D.C., FEB. 27, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Less time with Mom and Dad has contributed to more problems for more kids over the last few decades. So says Mary Eberstadt, a part-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of "Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes" (Penguin). Eberstadt shared with ZENIT how this separation of children and their parents is producing unforeseen negative consequences. Q: If children are better off materially than ever before, why are they beset by so many troubles such as psychiatric problems, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases?...

PRINCE WILLIAM Commonwealth's Attorney Paul B. Ebert did the right thing, of course, when he filed charges against the father who on a hot day accidentally left his daughter to die in the family van.To bring you up to date, Kevin Kelly of Manassas was put in charge of 12 of his 13 kids early last month while his wife and eldest child were on a trip to Ireland.After returning from errands one day, everyone piled out of the van and moved on to new things--everyone except 21-month-old Frances, who was left strapped in her safety seat in the closed...