LONDON, Aug. 2 (Xinhua) -- For generations 2.4 children has been used as the benchmark for the average size nuclear family in Britain.
A statistics expert at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) posed the question Friday, should it be finally ditched altogether, or lowered in the face of changing trends.
ONS Head of Life Events, Nick Stripe, delved into numbers and statistics going back decades to discover whether the 2.4 family figure still applies in 2019.
His investigation followed a report by ONS on Thursday revealing that the birth rate in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest number since records began in 1938.
"The broad picture painted by our analysis of births in is one of decreases and record lows. A birth rate of 11.1 births per 1,000 total population was the lowest ever recorded. And a fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman, was lower than all years except 1977 and 1999-2002," said Stripe.
Eighty years on, after intensive number crunching, Stripe concluded that the stereotypical family size in British families is as valid today as it was decades ago.
Stripe recalled a long running television series called 2.4 Children in the 1990s, but his research showed that at the height of the baby boom in the late 1940s and mid 1960s, England and Wales was the scene of nearly 900,000 births per year.
This represented a birth rate of around 20 births for every 1,000 people in the country. If the fertility rates of those years had persisted, women would, on average, have each given birth to around 2.8 children.
Births, birth rates and fertility rates in Britain have been falling since 2012, a rate of decline which has accelerated in the last couple of years.
"We are now at or near record low levels, and we're on a downward trend," added Stripe.
Stripe said of women born in 1972 around 18 percent are childfree.
"On that basis, the average number of children born to women who have had at least one child, stands at about 2.3 for women born in the early 1970s. In which case, 2.4 could still be argued to be a valid enough number," Stripe concluded.
He said: "When it was first coined, 2.4 children was based on the traditional nuclear family. But there are increasing numbers of people in different family units now. As well as childfree families, we have single parent families, step families, extended families, and grandparent families."
So he questioned whether maybe it's time to put the 2.4 children phrase to bed.
