Why Families Used to Have 10+ Kids

People often romanticize the 10-child family because they are looking backward from a world that removed most of the conditions that produced it. The photographs, the farmhouse, and the family Bible containing a handwritten record of births live on. But the repeated pregnancies, children who died, unpaid labor, financial calculations, and physical cost to women were less likely to become part of the family story. Once those conditions disappear from view, an economic and demographic system can often be mistaken for a set of superior personal values.

Large families were real (more on that in a bit), and some were enormous by today's standards. Historical estimates place total fertility among white American women at approximately 7 births (per woman) in 1800. Families with 10, 12, or more children were therefore not rare enough to be treated as historical curiosities. Their prevalence varied by region, class, race, religion, occupation, legal status, and whether a household was located in a city or an agricultural community. The United States never had one family model, even during periods of time when large households are most remembered.

The scale of those families is not entirely abstract to me. One of my best friends throughout elementary and middle school was one of 27 children in a large agricultural family that included several sets of twins and a set of triplets. They lived in a modest ranch house where the family could barely fit comfortably. Knowing her gave me a living point of reference for household sizes that can sound exaggerated to people raised in smaller families. It also stripped away the spacious-farmhouse fantasy that often accompanies stories about large agricultural households, particularly the image of a sprawling, many-roomed home associated with prosperous farms in the Midwest and Great Plains. Actual farmhouses varied by region, period, and income, and many became crowded as families grew. A very large household could mean shared bedrooms, constant movement, few private possessions, and a domestic system in which nearly everyone had work to do.

This discussion concerns primarily free households because much of the historical research on voluntary family limitation concerns them. Enslaved women lived under coercive conditions that cannot be folded into the same account of household choice. Their reproductive lives were shaped by forced labor, sexual violence, family separation, sale, and the financial value enslavers assigned to their children. Treating those births as evidence of ordinary family preference would erase the institution controlling them.

When I started college in the early 1990s, Sociology 101 gave me my first formal framework for understanding the family as a social institution. The course examined how household structure responds to economic conditions, mortality, religion, law, available technology, and the organization of labor. Family size was not presented as a private preference operating outside history. Instead, it reflected the opportunities, risks, and restrictions people encountered in the world around them. That approach helped me make sense of the large agricultural families I had known and the smaller families that were becoming more common.

One sentimental explanation often claimed for high fertility is that earlier generations loved children more, while another claim credits stronger family values. Neither claim can account for the historical record: parents loved their children, worried about them, and grieved when they died. Yet total fertility among white American women remained close to 7 births (per woman) in the year 1800. That statistic complicates any attempt to interpret large families as simple evidence of greater affection or moral strength. Anyone making that argument must also explain why fertility declined steadily even though parents continued to love and want children. Family size responded to societal and material conditions as well as emotion, and those conditions were already changing long before the cultural disputes now attached to birth rates.

Land formed one part of the older system because early America offered many white settlers access to comparatively inexpensive farmland. Much of that land became available through policies and violence that displaced Native peoples. That history deserves its own article, but it cannot be fully omitted in this one. Where farmland was available, young couples could establish households earlier than people who had to wait for property, employment, or inherited resources. Earlier marriage extended the number of years during which pregnancy could occur. Parents who expected their surviving children to establish farms nearby could imagine both the physical room and the economic future needed to support a large family. The prospect of these things, though, became less practical as towns expanded, populations grew denser, and land prices rose.

Children also occupied a different economic position within those households. For many American families today, childhood is organized around schooling, development, protection, recreation, technology, and preparation for adult employment. For much of American history, children participated directly in the productive work of the family. Their responsibilities increased with age, strength, and judgment, but small useful tasks could begin before formal schooling. Agricultural labor remained part of ordinary childhood in many communities well into the 20th century.

I encountered a surviving version of that world when I was nine, although my circumstances differed sharply from those of children whose families depended on their earnings. I was an only child in a family with money, and I had to beg my parents for permission to work in the fields. My father was one of six children and came from a large farm family, but my parents were never farmers. They built their careers in commercial real estate, and my father was also retired military. Nobody sent me into the fields because our household needed another wage.

A friend of mine did need to work to help support her household. She was one of 6 children, and her father had been killed in an accident before the youngest child was born. Her and her siblings earnings were important to the family. I wanted to work beside her, so I pleaded with my parents until they finally agreed. I began by picking rocks out of bean fields and later pulled weeds in other agricultural fields. By middle school and throughout high school, I was detasseling corn. Although I chose to be there, the work itself was real. The days were long and physically demanding, with heat, dirt, repetition, and production expectations that did not change because we were under 18.

My circumstances were not equivalent to those of a child whose wages helped pay for food, housing, or utilities, but they show how ordinary agricultural employment by children remained in farming communities. Some children worked because a family farm required every available pair of hands, while others earned wages their households depended on. I entered the fields because I wanted to work beside a friend, not because my family needed the income.

My father described the work he was expected to perform as a child. He fed animals, carried water, gathered crops, watched younger siblings, helped prepare food, cleaned buildings, made whatever repairs he could manage, and worked in the fields. His responsibilities increased with his age and strength. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that children as young as 5 could be expected to help with household and farm labor. Agricultural work accounted for a large share of child labor during the Gilded Age, while an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million children were engaged in wage labor by 1900.

Research on 19th-century American counties has found that greater access to banking was associated with lower fertility. The correlation does not prove that couples consciously traded another child for a bank account, or establish banking as the sole cause of the declining family sizes. But it does fit a broader change in how households managed financial risk. That is, savings and other financial institutions gave families more ways to prepare for illness, crop failure, disability, and old age. As those options expanded, dependence on land and adult children as the principal sources of long-term security began to weaken.

Child mortality shaped family life from another direction. Samuel Preston and Michael Haines used census material from 1900 to estimate that nearly one child in five (1:5) died before reaching their fifth birthday. Infectious disease, diarrhea, respiratory illness, contaminated water, inadequate sanitation, and limited medical treatment could kill children with a speed that is difficult to imagine from the standpoint of modern pediatrics.

High mortality does not mean that parents deliberately had 10 children because they expected a predetermined number to die. Reproductive decisions were not made with that kind of precision, and American fertility had begun declining decades before the country experienced a sustained reduction in mortality. Childhood death therefore cannot explain the size of earlier families by itself, although it did shape what a large family became over time. A record of 10 births did not guarantee that 10 children would survive to adulthood or gather at the family table. Names recorded in family Bibles or birth registers often disappeared from later censuses because some children died before the next household count.

Repeated pregnancy also carried medical danger. Historical estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention place maternal mortality in 1900 at an average of 6 to 9 deaths for every 1,000 live births. A woman who delivered 10 children experienced pregnancy, labor, postpartum recovery, and exposure to complications 10 separate times. She might also have endured miscarriages, stillbirths, or infant deaths between the births of surviving children. Those losses rarely appear in nostalgic descriptions of the large family, although women experienced them in their bodies and homes repeatedly.

People attempted to control fertility long before modern contraceptives became widely available. They used abstinence, withdrawal, condoms and other barrier methods, abortion, and commercial preparations whose effectiveness varied considerably. No available method at the time combined the effectiveness, safety, convenience, reversibility, and broad access associated with today's contraception. The long decline in fertility shows that couples were limiting births under conditions that allowed far more uncertainty and failure.

Women did not enter marriage with equal power to negotiate sexual frequency or contraceptive use. Reliable information could be difficult to obtain, and the law created additional barriers. The federal Comstock Act of 1873 restricted the mailing of material classified as obscene, a category applied to contraceptive information and devices. State laws imposed further restrictions. Even physicians practiced within legal and cultural limits that would be unfamiliar in today's examination room.

Religion influenced reproductive behavior, although it did not operate as a single national command. Historical demographic research has found associations between religious culture and fertility, but denominations, congregations, families, and individuals differed. Many religious teachings discouraged contraception, praised childbearing within marriage, and reinforced expectations about motherhood. Reproductive behavior was also shaped by health, money, marital relations, available knowledge, and the practical demands of maintaining a household.

The decline toward smaller families began earlier than many modern explanations acknowledge. Between 1800 and 1880, estimated total fertility among white American women fell from approximately 7 births (per woman) to about 4.2. By 1900, historical summaries from the CDC place average family size at about 3.5 children. The movement was well established before the birth-control pill, television, women’s liberation, two-income suburban households, and most of the cultural developments later blamed for reducing family size.

Additionally, land became more expensive in established areas, urban populations increased, and factory employment moved production away from the field and household. School attendance expanded while child labor came under legal attack. Children who once entered productive work at young ages were increasingly expected to remain in classrooms. This meant they needed to depend on their parents for longer periods. The cost of raising them rose at the same time that their immediate economic contribution declined.

Medical and financial institutions changed society even more. Improved sanitation, safer water, vaccination, antibiotics, and better medical care allowed more children to survive. Advances in obstetric practice reduced some of the dangers women faced during pregnancy and childbirth. Banking, pensions, Social Security, and other forms of support gave adults alternatives to complete dependence on their children in old age. More reliable contraception gave women and couples greater control over how many pregnancies occurred.

Although these developments altered family size without eliminating the emotional meaning of family, parents in earlier generations did not regard their children only as workers, caregivers, or economic safeguards. They wanted sons and daughters for reasons that cannot be expressed through a balance sheet.

By 1935, total fertility in the United States had fallen to approximately 2.1 births per woman, and the enormous family had already been receding for more than a century.

Sources That Don’t Suck

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2017). History of child labor in the United States—Part 1: Little children working. Monthly Labor Review.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (1999). Achievements in public health, 1900–1999: Family planning. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 48(47), 1073–1080.

Connell, E. B. (1999). Contraception in the prepill era. Contraception, 59(1 Suppl.), 7S–10S.

Hacker, J. D., Haines, M. R., & Jaremski, M. (2021). Early fertility decline in the United States: Tests of alternative hypotheses using new IPUMS complete-count census microdata and enhanced county-level data. Research in Economic History, 37, 89–128.

Klepp, S. E. (2009). Revolutionary conceptions: Women, fertility, and family limitation in America, 1760–1820. University of North Carolina Press.

Preston, S. H., & Haines, M. R. (1991). Fatal years: Child mortality in late nineteenth-century America. Princeton University Press.