Americans' Preference for Larger Families Highest Since 1971

I was real content with 4 kids, but my wife convinced me that we should have another. We now have 5 and that new baby is such a blessing. We did end up getting a bigger vehicle though. I cannot help but wonder how much of a role vehicles play in planning the size of families.

Maybe these days people plan a little bit more for their vehicle size than when it didn’t matter so much, but I don’t know anyone who restricted the size of their family because they wouldn’t be able to get a car to use for all of them. I do think people count the eventual cost much more now, and it often scares them off from having larger families.

In the 1970s, when I was a kid (born in 1963), we knew a lot of people with large families. One family we knew had 7 children, and their vehicles were a station wagon and a pickup. Of course, in those days we all rode around in the back of pickups, and nobody thought much of it (at the time, the pickup was basically just the 20th century version of a wagon like on “Little House on the Prairie” where all the kids rode in the back when it wasn’t being used for work). Families would pile their kids in either station wagons (almost as common then as SUVs are today) or pickups, and there was no issue getting everyone in. Of course, seat belts weren’t required then either.

I didn’t know many families that had an economy car then. Such a car would have been very impractical with the typical family size. The families I knew that did have smaller cars also had larger ones. My dad’s commute vehicle was a VW Beetle, but it was never used on long trips. There were only 3 kids in my family, but even that was too many for the Bug. I remember our family cars being typical of the “ocean liners” that were common in those days, with large trunks, and lots of interior space.

Even today though, people wanting families typically buy at least one larger car (as you did), like a minivan or SUV, but the 2nd car being smaller or more economical seems much more common than back then. I guess the cost of a larger vehicle could figure into family size planning maybe more than it once did, but I don’t personally know anyone for whom that was a factor.