Latter-day Saints in the U.S. still have more children than other Americans do, but their families are not as large as they used to be.
First, let’s look at fertility in previous generations. According to research from the 2016 Next Mormons Survey (NMS), today’s Latter-day Saint adults grew up in families of 4.02 children.
This was higher than the national average — and, depending on the year, sometimes significantly so. For example, we have Latter-day Saint and national data from the early 1980s indicating that when Americans as a whole had a total fertility rate of 1.