By the time of menopause, some percentage of women will have had no children, some percentage will have had one, two, three, etc., on up to some crazy numbers in the 30s. My intuition says that the percentage goes to near zero past 6, but what do I know? Maybe there’s a healthy percentage of 9-kid families that I just never run across. Maybe there’s a peak hidden out in the tail of the data of women trying to hit 12, or something.
I’m trying to find data as to what those percentages actually are. It’s not fertility rate or total fertility rate or specific fertility rate or even individual fertility rate; these are averages. I’m looking for - what, exactly? I feel like I’m missing the correct term to search for. So the question is what such demographic information would be called.
I did find a press release of a Pew study (here that broke things down in the US by 1,2,3, or 4+ children, but didn’t include 0 or any granularity above 4. “Family sizer per mother” doesn’t get useful hits other than that Pew release.
There’s a variable for number of children a woman has ever had, you’d need to get that for women over say 45, so that they’ve completed their families.
What surprises me is that the two-child family is still more common than one child. I suppose to zero-child statistic makes up for that. Indeed, the proportion of 1-child families is declining from 1990. Also interesting is the dip in “zero children” in the 1970-1980 count. Is that social or medical reasons? Also the time when 3-child families peaked.