Issue Date: April 6, 2008

More money, more kids

Stats show that wealthier families are having more children.

The gap between the rich and poor is getting smaller -- at least when it comes to family size.

Has having a bigger family become a sign of wealth?

Since the 19th century, the nation's poorest families have traditionally had more children than those with large incomes. But within the past 15 years, that gap appears to be shrinking, Census data shows.

Fewer families whose incomes fall in the bottom 10% of the population are having three or more children: 33.7% of such families had at least three kids in 2006, down from 39.8% in 1990, according to Census surveys.

By contrast, the wealthiest families are having more children: In 2004, an estimated 41.3% of the wealthiest families had at least three children, much higher than in 1996, when an estimated 29.3% of families earning in the highest income bracket (that year, $300,000-plus) had three or more kids.

"Having more than two children is a luxury," says Paul Demeny of the Population Council, a non-profit research group. "Three or four is getting to be a size that only the affluent can afford."

With contraception more effective these days and the cost of raising children so high, couples are thinking more about economics as they plan their families, Demeny says.

Once families have more than two children, everything becomes much more expensive, he says, pointing out that larger families need bigger cars and homes.

"These trends have been unfolding during the last 20 or 30 years," but they are just now showing up in statistics, he says. They reflect the movement of women into the workforce, the complications of finding quality, affordable child care and America becoming a more secular society (secular couples tend to have fewer children).

Children were considered a financial asset to the poor in the 19th century, providing a cheap source of unskilled labor and the potential to bring additional income to the family. But with industrialization and the need for children to spend their youth in school, the economics of large families dramatically changed.

Now, "people hurt their own standard of living and diminish prospects for their own children if they have more than two," Demeny says.

The very wealthy, however, don't need to worry about economic constraints. For them, children have become part of having it all.

-- Rochelle Sharpe