Three child-families part of a growing trend

THE Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are to join the growing ranks of Britain’s three-child families.

While the average number of children per family has been in broad decline since the Nineties, there has been a quiet revival of larger families in the past five years.

The number of families with three or more dependent children reached 1.18 million in 2016, the highest it had been since 2003, the last time it was more than 1.2m. The number with exactly three children reached 883,000 in 2015, the largest figure since 2010, when it was 884,000. By contrast, the number of one-child families has been falling since 2011, from 3.7m to 3.56m.

Professor Ann Buchanan, an expert in parenting and childhood at Oxford University, said the poorest and wealthiest were the most likely to have large families: “Certainly, the ONS data shows that areas with high diversity have larger families.”

Research suggests that women born outside the UK are more likely to have three and more children. The fertility rate of non-uk born women is 2.08, compared with born in the UK.

A study by the Centre for Population Change published earlier this year suggested that immigration and the increased likelihood for women to have multiple partners were both factors in this increase.

It suggested that couples who already had children tended to “cement their commitment with a ‘shared child’”, thereby increasing their family size. But commentators have also suggested that among wealthy families, having a large number of children is a status symbol. 1.76 for those