Fertility, Marriage and Religion In My World

This Father's Day weekend, I am thinking about fertility.

Children

I have twelve first cousins and a brother, for a total of fourteen people in my generation, of whom eight are men and six are women. Of the fourteen:

Six have no children (four female, two male)

One has one child (male)

Six have two children (five male, one female)

One has three children (female)

Overall, the fourteen people in my generation have sixteen children. My brother and I, who are in our forties, are the youngest in our generation, so there aren't likely to be any more. This is a lifetime fertility rate of 1.14, which is well below the replacement rate of about 2.1.

My father had one brother, and my mother had five siblings, for a total of eight people in my parent's generation - although, of course, that makes for only seven independent sets of parents. Of those seven sets of parents:

Two had no children (one female, one unknown)

Three had two children (three male)

Two had four children (one male, one female)

This is a lifetime fertility rate equivalent of 2.

The weighted average lifetime fertility rate of the two generations is 1.43.

Marriage

All sixteen children were born in wedlock and none of the marriages that produced children have ended in divorce. Of the six who do not have children, both of the men and one of the women are married, one of the women has been in a marriage-like decades long committed opposite sex relationship that has not broken up, one of the women was married one for less than a year before divorcing, and one of the women was never married and died as a young adult.

In my parent's generation, all of the children were born in wedlock and none divorced. My father remarried as a widower, but no one else in that generation has remarried after losing a spouse to death at this point (this could conceivably change). Of the two who did not have children, neither married; one died as an infant and one died as an adult from a condition (M.S.) that first manifested when she was in college.

Religion

All of the members of my parents generation were/are life long members of mainline Lutheran denominations (the names changed over the years due to denominational mergers), and all of them raised their children in those churches.

In my generation, of the fourteen of us, at least four of us (29%) are no longer religious, nine (64%) are still mainline Lutherans and one (7%) is Christian but has been participated in non-Lutheran churches as an adult.

Analysis

My extended family is an extreme example, but not that much of an exceptional one. Birth rates in the United States are at record lows as companies that make diapers are well aware.

Birth rates are also low in both Northern Europe, where my extended family's ancestors originate, and in Korea, where my wife's extended family's ancestors' originate.

As I note above, I had twelve first cousins. My two children have three first cousins.