Zion Very Far From Well
Down, down, down. From here.
Bonneville County is Idaho Falls.
Here is an interesting contrast. I just picked whatever years came up first on a search.
1979 LDS Statistical Report
Members 4,439,000
Children of Record 107,000
24 children per 1,000
(Children of record is the number of babies blessed, which means its the birthrate among people who still have some connection to the Church.)
1986 LDS Statistical Report
Members 6,170,000
Children of Record 93,000
15 children per 1,000
2019 LDS Statistical Report
Members 16,565,000
Children of Record 94,000
6 children per 1,000
2020 LDS Statistical Report
Members 16,660,000
Children of Record 65,540
3 children per 1,000
What strikes me is that we have fewer children now than we did in the late 70s with a quarter of the Saints.
Bookslinger
December 20, 2021
2020 saw less babies being blessed partly due to meetings being canceled or done via streaming, and maybe some vulnerable grand-parents not wanting to travel.
I also suppose that planned pregnancies were delayed, starting in March 2020, but that would not show up until dec 2020.
The decline though 2019 is frightening enough. But 2020 is a special case, because you’re looking at “baby blessings _at church_”, not actual births.
2021, with the vaccines and lifting of travel/gathering restrictions, will give a better picture of what happened in 2020 in regards to actual births among members.
Another confounding factor, though worrisome in its own right, is that active members as a percent of total members declined from 1979 to 1986, and even more so from 1986 to 2019. That would exaggerate the decline of baby-blessings-in-church when the denominator remains total members.
Btw, the 2020 figure should read 3.9 per 1,000.
Rozy
December 20, 2021
Book – I thought “children of record” meant any child who was blessed and put on the records of the church; doesn’t matter where the blessing takes place, as long as it is witnessed and recorded. Right?
I’ve long wanted the church to emphasize large families, whether in photos in church magazines or by having articles about the joys of large families in the magazines. By consistently showing couples with one, two, or three children in church materials that becomes the accepted norm; goodness, wouldn’t want to offend anyone who can’t have children. And so young couples go along with the wisdom of the world (which isn’t at all wise) and limit their families. I’m so glad my grandparents didn’t limit theirs. Nana gave birth to 15 children, my mom was #12.
Bookslinger
December 20, 2021
There was a long discussion of it at ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com
Net: it was not fully replaced by at-home or private-meeting-at-church arrangements. It looks like a third were “let’s just do this when we can safely get the two families together again.”
Leo
December 20, 2021
What at the statistics for Madison County, Idaho, where BYU-Idaho is located?
G.
December 21, 2021
The big fall from 2019 to 2020 makes me think there must have been something going on with the stats. Though overall Western birth rates have fallen a lot during the covidation