How Many Kids Should I Have?

I'm a recently married student, and my wife and I have been discussing our future family. We're trying to settle on the number of kids we should have. She's in favor of a large family and I'm not sure how many kids I want. This week in my Family Relations class, we discussed recent societal trends ranging from family sizes and birth rates to divorce rates and frequency of cohabitation (interesting fact, those who cohabitate before getting married are three times more likely to divorce 😲). We also discussed overpopulation which, as you can imagine, was rather impactful to me. So, let's start with some shocking news:

The UN predicts that the world population will reach about 10 billion people by 2050 (check out this graph of predicted population growth https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/).

Elder Boyd K. Packer taught that whenever we are presented with new information, we should always ask ourselves, "so what? What implications does this information have on me and my family as well as the world?"

So, let's ask ourselves that. So, what? What implications does the growth of the population to almost 10 billion have for me, my family, and the world at large?

Honestly, not much. It sounds like Earth is going to be bursting at the seams, right? Well consider this, there are 16,245,000 square miles between both American continents that translate to roughly 10,396,800,000 (10.3968 billion) acres. We could literally give every single person an acre of land and fit everyone onto the north and south American continents. A family of four needs 2 acres of land for subsistence farming so we're not even close to becoming overpopulated quite yet (there's still the whole other side of the world!). In fact, we could grow by another 5.8 trillion families and still have enough space for every family to have 4 acres of land! With the advent of technologies like hydroponics (growing plants in nothing but water), we don’t really need to worry about whether the land is arable or not, all you need is a water source which shouldn’t be too hard to find.

However, even though the world population is projected to climb this high, it's entirely possible that it will start declining either before or shortly after reaching this peak. This is because of something called "fertility rates." A fertility rate is the average number of children a woman will have over the course of her life. The replacement fertility rate (the amount that's needed to keep the population where it's at) is about 2.13 and the current fertility rate (according to cia.gov) is about 2.43 across the world with many of the developed countries below 1.8. This means that while the population is growing now, it's going to begin declining at some point unless things change.

So, what are the ramifications of population decline? Quite bad. Let’s just look at Social Security for a bit. When Social Security was conceived of, originally it was designed so that for every one retiree, there were 13 workers supporting them. Now it’s closer to two workers for every one retiree and I don’t think I need to tell you how difficult it’s going to be when the age pyramid reverses and every one worker is supporting two retirees or heaven forbid 13!

So, what? What does population decline mean for me and my family? Well, for starters, if you want a big family, go for it! You’re not going to destroy the world by having more than two kids. In fact, you’re going to be helping! Our economy is based on increasing populations. The more people that exist, the more demand there is, the easier it is to supply it, and growth occurs! Innovation will improve too! The more people that exist, the easier it will be for the world to innovate new ways of solving issues. You know the saying, “two heads are better than one?” Well, 10 billion heads are better than 7 billion.

I’d like to sum up with a scripture "For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves." (D&C 104:17).