I’m a married woman who does not have children, and I am interested in the statistics of married couples who remained childless throughout history, but I’m not sure:
(a) if there are any, or
(b) where to find them.
I found this Wikipedia page which has a few statistics starting with 1976. Is that all that’s out there? I know having children is less of a “thing” now than it has been throughout history, but I’d still like to see statistics going further back.
I can’t think of a reason why such statistics would have been collected in previous centuries, let alone how.
I was thinking Census Bureau data, at least in the U.S. But looking online, the Census Bureau wasn’t formed until 1902, so even if there were Census data, it would still only show me trends from the 1900s, and what I’m really interested in is trends before that. So you’re probably right.
Did you happen to note when they started asking the question that you are asking now?
It wasn’t uncommon, long ago, for records to be kept of who had what children (for instance, in the baptismal records of local churches), and these sorts of records are often used by genealogists. So the information is out there. The challenge, though, is that most of the collations of these records are done by people looking for information on their ancestors, and so the people who you’re interested in are precisely the ones who would be left out. You could go back to the original records and search for all of the people who didn’t make it into the genealogical databases, but that’d be a lot of work.
The other problem is that it’s really hard to establish that people didn’t have children. You can confirm that many people did have children by matching up marriage and baptismal records in a particular parish, but if you have a record of a marriage and no baptisms, you don’t know whether the couple was childless, or whether they moved away and had children elsewhere. Likewise, wills that mention children are good evidence that the children existed, but wills that don’t mention children could mean that there were none, or that they predeceased their parents, or that they were disinherited at some point. Census records only show children who were alive and living in the household at the time of the census.
Well, throughout most of history, having children was expected because it was a necessity simply because so many people died so young. It wasn’t uncommon for a family with six kids to see two reach adulthood. If a married couple was without children, it was almost a stigma. They usually blamed the women for being “barren” when, in reality, there were men who were sterile, too. It was a really big deal. So, I wouldn’t be too concerned about delving back too far because, I can say for a certainty, the percentage was extremely small.
As the 20th century progressed and people began living longer and longer, the outlook changed. Slowly but surely, having children became much more of a choice than a necessity. Now, it’s not uncommon to find couples who choose not to have to kids for any number of different reasons, financial expenditure not being the least of these. Italy, for example, has pretty much reached zero population growth, which means childless couples must be far from uncommon.
It’s actually far below that: Googling says the recent fertility rate is 1.45 births per woman, vs. the commonly accepted ZPG rate of 2.1.
By any consistent measure of fertility rate, the ZPG rate is exactly 2.0 . Either you measure the expected number of children any given newborn will eventually have over a lifetime, or you measure the expected number of children who grow to adulthood any given adult will eventually have. You only get a number greater than 2 if you for some reason consider only children born (who might not necessarily reach adulthood) to people who have already reached adulthood, and how much greater than 2 that is will depend on the child mortality rate. 2.1, however, would even so require an extremely high child mortality rate.
Oh that’s a good point.
Yeah, I understand the general trend and the cultural reasons behind it. What I’m interested in, and haven’t really found, is the changing trend. From the Wikipedia article, childlessness fluctuated between 15 and 20 percent between 1871 and 1915 (which is a higher number than I had expected to read). And if it was at 15% in 1871, then I would guess that the number trended upwards in the 1800s, and that the percentage didn’t suddenly jump from 0.5% to 15%.
And even if I’m wrong, and the number was a very sudden and pronounced jump, I’d be interested to see what the trend was in previous centuries, and if there were other pronounced jumps during times of, I don’t know, economic hardship or plagues or something.
Apparently, while rates are highly nation-specific, the majority of the developed world cluster around 2.1 (rates for developing nations are much higher).
According to this at least, a ZPG rate of 2.1, therefore, doesn’t require an extremely high infant mortality rate - it seems to be the ‘developed world average’.
I couldn’t find those numbers for 1871-1915 in the Wikipedia article- but I do want to point out that most of the research numbers in that article refer to 'childless adults" without regard to marriage. One of the statistics broken down by marital status is :
I can’t tell if that is from the 2004 footnote or the 2009 one , but in any event , if 12.9% of married women between 35-44 were childless in either 2004 or 2009, I wouldn’t expect the rate to have been higher between 1871 and 1915. I suspect the numbers you have for 1871-1915 are for women between a certain age range, married or not.
It surprised me, too, but this is from the beginning of the Statistics section in the Wikipedia article:
0.5% seems far too low to have ever been the childless rate, in my opinion. In fact, I’m not so sure childlessness is even steadily increasing in the modern world. Certainly, more people can and do decide not to have kids nowadays, but also, there are a lot better health and fertility treatments that allow people who do want to have kids to have them, who couldn’t have had children in other eras.
The Wikipedia article mentions that childlessness was between 15 and 20% in 1915, but dropped to a low of 7% during the baby boom before it started rising again. It also mentions natural sterility is around 2%, making that the lowest childless rate we can expect. Social sterility caused by malnutrition, disease and other problems associated with poverty adds to that number before we ever get to people who are childless by choice. I wonder if the baby boom childless rate is the historical low?
And before governments got into the business, adoptions were much more informal; an adopted infant might directly be listed as being the child of the adoptive parents without any other references.
There were two distinct types of childlessness: not having had children of the body ever, and having lost them in infancy. The second may seem less important until one remembers how many lives were lost in succession wars; inheritance of lesser fortunes might not lead to so much loss of life but it still caused a lot of problems.
There is not going to be anything in the birth records to signify whether a child is adopted. Adopted children are listed as being the child of their adoptive parents and get a new birth certificate saying so. Now the original certificate is supposedly somewhere, but it is sealed. There may be some hidden clue in the birth certificate, like the date, but it is pretty murky because an adopted child IS the child of the parents who adopted it.
Posters above have canvassed the main issues, but the main point is probably that the concept of nuclear family operated much more in the 20th century, and perhaps more prevalent in the US where the big extended family did not exist due to immigration. In the absence of social welfare structures people took on care of children within their extended family who would otherwise be considered as orphans, to ensure [if they had assets] that inheritance within the family was maintained, or because they didn’t have enough of their own and it was considered the right thing.
Imperfect as they are, a browse through 18th-early 20th century family trees online might at least give you the flavour of a common pattern in earlier times - lots of children, lots of early death, lots of them never having recorded children and ended lines of descent [and reading between the lines - massive loss of marriageable men through war, daughters being denied a separate life to look after ageing parents, possible kids never recorded because they were born out of wedlock etc]. They wont necessarily record within family guardianship / adoption.
Varies by location. For starters, some locations don’t even have a document called a “birth certificate”.
I don’t know whether Bulgaria has birth certificates but Spain doesn’t (we have other documents which cover different functions of a US birth certificate), and The Newest Nephew’s entry in the Spanish Civil Registry states:
his DOB in Bulgaria,
his DOAdoption in Bulgaria by his mother,
the date in which that was recorded in Spain (same one), which is also the first time he is listed under his current “full name” (Spanish version of his firstname, his maternal lastname as first, our lastname as second)
and his DO-coAdoption by my brother in Spain.
A birth rate of 2.1 as ZPG seems to have the built-in assumption that 1 in 20 people (women?) will not have children for one reason or another - died in infancy, never married / reproduced by choice, medically unable to, etc. Most western countries are well below replacement (Japan and Russia are IIRC the worst).
Also consider that in the Good Old Days, children were your old age pension and social security, so the choice to “not have children for economic reasons” made no sense, and with limited knowledge of contraception and none available, and no TV, reproduction was pretty common.