SOCIAL CHANGE AND MOTIVATIONS FOR HAVING LARGER FAMILIES: SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS1

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increase in the size of the American family. This is especially marked in the middle class where more families have three or four children than formerly. Furthermore, it has been estab lished that this increase is due not only to medical advances or to ineffective family planning; it is largely the result of choice. Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell (8), interviewing a national sample of married women between 18 and 39, found that almost three-quarters of their sample expected to have families of two, three, or four children; a similar number felt that three or four children would be ideal. The authors also reported that the number of children considered ideal has increased even since 1941 when

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.