The Institute for Family Studies (where I contribute as a research fellow) has a great new report on housing and family size, arguing that we should build more apartments, and not just detached homes, for couples with kids. It draws together new survey data, housing stats, and more.
One of the charts going around shows that married people in bigger homes and apartments have more kids. Matthew Lilley pointed out to me, however, that the fertility of married people seemed rather high, at 2.7 kids even in studio apartments.
This is the “sum of age-specific birth rates,” which is basically the way we’d calculate the Total Fertility Rate for the general population—but I think it tells us something a little different when you limit it to the married. What’s happening, I believe, is that while very few people are married in their late teens and early 20s, those who are married are pretty fertile, and these high fertility numbers at lower ages drive up the overall number for the married when you add all the ages together. (To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of the chart, which isn’t presented as directly comparable to the general-population TFR.)
I grabbed the 2010-23 American Community Survey files from IPUMS and limited to women 15-50 (as in the report). Here’s the married share by age:
And here’s the share reporting they had a child in the past year, both in total and separately by marital status:
I’m a little surprised by how drastic this is! 20-year-old married women have a lot of babies, but very few women are married at 20.
May be partially skewed by shotgun weddings.