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CAPITAL REGION
Family size growing for some suburban couples
BY PAM ALLEN Gazette Reporter

A typical Thursday in the Cavert household involves dropping off and picking up kids at two schools, two trips to dance class and six trips to the Ice Arena.
In between shuttling her four children, Heidi Cavert works six hours at her job, runs to the grocery store, fixes dinner, does laundry and helps with nightly homework.
Thursday is the family’s slow day.
Mondays are the real killer, with an extra dance class and religious instruction crammed into the already packed schedule.
And Cavert and her husband, Brian, have their own commitments to squeeze into the week: He’s a hockey coach, and she’s a Girl Scout leader and Sunday school teacher.
With their four children, the Caverts aren’t an anomaly in their County Knolls neighborhood, where several other couples on their block have big families.
   While American families still average less than two children, demographers are seeing something of an uptick in family size for suburban professional couples. More often associated with poorer, less-educated and urban couples, families with four or more children seem to be increasing in affluent communities.
   Demographers and sociologists have pointed to various reasons, including changing attitudes about professional women dropping out of the work force to have families; a change in the notion that women can — or should — manage family and career at the same time; increased wealth; longer life expectancies; and a growing trend that has husbands doing more of the household and family chores.
DREAM FULFILLED
   Stephanie Coontz has heard enough anecdotal stories over the last few years to believe the trend is real.
   “No demographer has been able to confirm it, but I don’t doubt there’s a small increase,” said Coontz, a family historian and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofi t consortium of researchers based in Washington, D.C.
   A 2005 study by the Families and Work Institute titled “Generation and Gender in the Workplace” reported that professional women are having more children.
   The study indicated that in 2002, women professionals had twice as many children at home as women working in the same positions had 25 years earlier.
   It also indicated that in 2002, women with a minimum of a bachelor’s degree had three times as many children as women with the same educations had 25 years ago.
   In 2006, the most recent data available from the Census Bureau, U.S. families averaged 1.84 children.
   The last time the average topped two children was in 1977, when the average number of children per household was 2.01.
   For the Caverts, having a big family was always in the cards: Brian,
USE OF RESOURCES
   “It’s very slight, but there is an uptick in the number of children,” Matcha said.
   Any number of factors — including ethnic background, religion, education and income — help determine family size, he said.
   “It makes sense that families that have the means are deciding to have more children because they can afford to,” he said.
   The Hispanic population in the United States has higher fertility rates, but the rate of third-child births between 1995 and 2000 increased even among non-Hispanic whites, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
   Historically, couples in the suburbs have fewer children than couples in more urban areas, said Deidre Hill Butler, professor of sociology, women and gender studies and Africana studies at Union College.
   She hypothesizes why the change may be taking place: “It may be that [suburban couples] are choosing to use their child-bearing resources rather than buying that second Beamer.”
   Having four kids isn’t necessarily twice as hard as having two, said Meagan Francis, the author of “Table for Eight” and founder of http://www.largerfamilies.com, a Web site that features articles and blogs from women with between four and 11 children.
   Francis said here biggest parenting challenge came after having her second child. “That was really the hard transition,” said Francis, whose children are 10, 8, 4 and 2.
   “When I had one, people asked if I was having more. When I had two, they stopped asking. When I got pregnant with number four, people seemed to think I was crazy. Going from three to four was actually very easy,” she said.
46, is one of five children and Heidi, 41, is the youngest of four.
   “It’s what I always dreamed it would be. My family is my life,” said Heidi Cavert, who easily gave up a high-paying job as a purchasing specialist at GE to devote time to her children.
IDEA UNCONFIRMED
   The couple met about 15 years ago when both were working at GE. Both now work at Thermal Environment Systems in Halfmoon, a business owned by Heidi Cavert’s family that allows her to work fl exible hours.
   They were drawn to each other by a love for skiing that they hope to share again one day.
   Until then, their lives revolve around Alex, 14, Evan, 12, Paige, 9, and Meredith, 7.
   The idea that more children are being born in the suburbs can’t be confirmed by Census Bureau standards.
   There is no way to compare statistics on which demographic sectors are having more children now than, say, a decade ago, as the agency’s current system of categorizing data is different than it was 10 years ago, said Robert Bernstein, a Census Bureau spokesman.
   Besides, the tables lump together “suburban” and “rural” family statistics into a single unit. And the statistics necessary don’t distinguish between biological and blended, or “step” families, Bernstein said.
   Really big families are still rare, but couples in good financial shape seem the most likely to opt for bigger families, said Duane Matcha, associate professor of sociology at Siena College.
   “People in the suburbs tend to be better educated and generally have higher levels of income that would lead to the election of larger families,” Matcha said.
   The percentage of families with four children steadily dropped by more than half between 1976 to 2003, to 7.2 percent from 15.8 percent. The first increase came in 2004, when the number rose to 7.4 percent.
TIPS FOR MOTHERS
   A fifth child is not in the plans right now, but not out of the question, either, said Francis, who, at 30, has more child-bearing years ahead of her.
   A mainline Protestant whose family goes to church “when we can,” Francis says religion was not a factor in the couple’s decision to have a large family. “Mine is a world view rather than a religious view. I view children as really valuable,” said Francis, who grew up with three other siblings.
   She describes the family’s financial situation as “comfortable middle-class.”
   Her husband, John Bodson, is a computer technician.
   The couple’s two school-age boys are in a small, private school, and her 4-year-old attends half-day preschool three days a week.
   Francis works from home and writes for such publications as Parenting, American Baby and Yoga Journal. Her book, “Table for Eight,” offers a plethora of tips from mothers of larger families. The real-life experiences tackle everything from practical home furnishings and transportation, to eating out and keeping the peace on the home front.
FAITHFUL TO BIBLE
   Religion often does play a part in the creation of many large families. Catholics, Mormons and the Amish, for example, have traditionally had large families. And a small, evangelical Protestant movement called “Quiverfull,” whose adherents reject all forms of contraception, has taken hold in the United States since around 1989.
   Quiverfull first gained national press attention in 2004.
   A 2006 article in The Nation titled “Arrows for the War” featured a church in Coxsackie whose congregation practices the concept of building an “army for God.”
   Families at Coxsackie’s Gospel Community Church and others like it adhere to the biblical belief: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
   Quiverfull mothers try to have at least six children and follow biblical guidelines for male dominance and female submissiveness. Its followers are strongly inclined to home schooling and living in rural areas.
   It’s unclear how much, if any, effect Quiverfull mothers have on the census numbers. Published reports estimate their followers in the “thousands to low tens of thousands.”

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In between shuttling her four children, Heidi Cavert works six hours at her job, runs to the grocery store, fixes dinner, does laundry and helps with nightly homework.

And she can thank women's lib for this one!!

And so much for suburbia.The minorities who reside in the cities have been having flocks of kids for decades!! And we usuually support them with our government, tax paid programs!

That is how you 'beat' and empire...you out produce them with sperm and ovum........