Natural Fertility: How many kids will a woman have in her lifetime?

If humans are ever put in a zoo by an alien race, and we are left to our own devices with plenty of food, medicine, exercise and safety, and with an ideology that neither shuns children or demands loads of them, how many children would women have?

Well it turns out researchers have been asking this question for a long time.
The Amish

I just read an interesting research paper called Population growth and fertility paterns in an Old Order Amish Settlement. by L. P. Greksa.

It looks at 1,337 Amish wives in the Geauga settlement in Ohio from 1908 - 1993. The Amish are considered an ultra high fertility group (in today's standards) straight out of the 19th century in their breeding habits, yet they use modern medicine. This makes them perfect for studying and looking at what the rest of society would look like if we still had traditional 'pro-fertility' attitudes. The conclusion of the paper says that the women do not attempt to control their fertility either up or down in any major way. To the researchers, this means the group in question is a "natural fertility population", which they desire to define so as to have a benchmark to measure from.

So how many babies do you think these perfect specimen, natural fertility, married Amish women have? Are they all like Michelle Duggar with 19 kids per woman?

Is it more than 19? Does it round down lower to around 10? (that was my guess). Let's see:

The mean number of pregnancies per married woman was 7.7 (SD 3.6). Fifty-two pregnancies terminated  in a stillbirth and 41 women gave birth to one set of twins, four gave birth to two sets of twins, and one woman gave birth to four sets of twins, for a twinning rate of 13.9 per 1000 pregnancies [1.4% -DM] resulting in a live birth. Mean completed marital fertility was 7.7 (SD 3.6) births, ranging from 0 to 17 births. About 3% of these women were childless while 28% had 10 or more births.

The men get married at 22.2 years, women at 21.1 years. The birth of the first child is consistently a year later when the woman is 22.1 years. The second child is consistently born 1.5 years after the first, with subsequent births spaced just under 2 years apart. For the period studied ('08-'93), the age of the last birth has dropped from age 40 to 35, marriage age and first birth age both dropped by one year, and spacing also dropped slightly. The fertility rate also dropped by 1 child during this time.

In this study, the 7.7 children per woman is per married woman, and I am unclear if this study ever actually says what the Total Fertility Rate for the community is. It does give data on sterile couples (3%), stillbirths and twins though. After all that is factored in, the number is still 7.7 per married woman, and of those with children the average is 7.94.

Normal Fertility Rate

So what does this all mean? Almost all of these numbers were different than I expected. I expected them to be marrying younger, having more kids for a longer time, and I expected the natural infertility to be higher. Instead the study shows that

 normal human women have a very reasonable 7.7 kids within a 14 year timespan.

The biggest family of all 1,337 of these women had 17 kids (so even Michelle Duggar would have a big family in this Amish community). And only 28% of families had 10 or more kids, with ony 3% of couples being infertile (way lower than I thought). Another fun fact is that the 7.7 "completed marital fertility rate" is not comparable to the "Total Fertility Rate" we are used to seeing. Total Fertility Rate includes all women of childbearing age, which will include singles who will never have kids such as nuns, the severely disabled, or those who otherwise have a vocation other than marriage.

If 30% of our study population remained unmarried and childless, the Total Fertility Rate would be still be 5.4 children per woman! That is three times the U.S. Total fertility rate!

My take away from this is just how incredibly... normal... and natural all these numbers seem. As a father of 5 myself, who can easily imagine more kids in my home, but find it harder to imagine having 10+ kids, I took comfort that 7 or 8 kids is naturally where fertility will end up (on average) for people in a healthy marriage. It is so easy to believe our culture that says having 3 or 4 kids is "a lot". Well it just isn't. In fact those 3 or 4 kids are 

below the average for where a couple will naturally be.


Our American TFR of 1.9 children per woman is now "well below" the replacement level of 2.1 needed to just keep a population steady. And much of that number is from new immigrants, who quickly adjust their fertility habits in the first and second generation, and anyway the countries who have been sending immigrants are no longer doing so and will soon stop. The American middle class is down to a TFR of 1.6 and falling.


I am not saying couples with zero or 1 or 2 kids should feel second class. Unless they have that few because they have an unhealthy view of children and their place in marriage. Obviously couples can be infertile (even 3% of Amish are), can have vocations or health issues which make it prudent to limit the number of kids, even to zero potentially. But these exceptions prove the rule that families should naturally be much larger than they are in our culture.

The exceptions that prove the rule.
Infertility.
3% infertile couples is... 3%. Get over it! That is a very small amount of couples! Yet if I had a nickel for every time I hear this as a reason why every family I see has only 1 or 2 kids, I could buy my own tropical island. Even factoring in infertility, the normal fertility rate for married women is still 7.7 kids

Insanity.
All parents have mental issues to some degree that having more kids may make worse. But are Amish women with 8 kids going insane by the truckload? I don't think so. Will having child number 4 really push most women over the edge? Or is it more likely that only a small percentage of parents have true psychiatric problems that make it unwise to have more kids? Even if I were generous and assumed that 30% (!!!) of women went clinically insane the day their third child was born, and never had another child, the Normal Married Fertility Rate would only drop by 1.41 kids per woman to 6.29.

Going to college extends time of marriage and first birth.
This is another very valid reason that a woman's fertility might be reduced. And using our Normal Married Fertility Rate of 7.7, with women becoming mothers at age 22.1, we could account for a generous 2 years of post college time to get married and conceive, and then she gives birth at age 24. That is a full six years after high school graduation, plenty of time for a college degree or two. So to account for this lost 2 years from her reproductive clock, lets deduct a full child from every woman in our study. That's right folks, we will assume universal college education from our women! They all lose one child and our average drops to 5.29.

Working outside the home. Some people say that families are so small because women have to work, and no longer have the time to give birth and to properly take care of lots of kids. To this I say... yep that is true. This is on the one hand a valid reason to reduce the number of kids you have, but at the same time is a bad excuse because it should not be happening nearly on the scale it is. Ask any woman to list the most fulfilling aspects of her life. If she has kids, she will have them higher on the list than a career. Yet the same woman will often say that her career is the reason she did not have more children. This makes no sense. If raising good human beings from childhood to adulthood is the most important job on earth, which we all agree that it is, then why do so many women choose something less fulfilling to fill their time? This one is hard to estimate, but my guess that in a healthy society no more than 30% of married women would want to work outside of the home in such a way as to reduce normal fertility. If these 30% each limited themselves to an average of 2 kids each, our average drops to 3.88 kids per married woman.

So assuming all the modern things we blame for our low fertility, we are still left with 3.88 kids per married woman in a healthy society.

Now let's take this society and assume that 20% of the women do not get married and become nuns or run businesses or whatever (20% seems like a lot by the way). After we factor that 20% in, we are still left with 3.1 as our total fertility rate. 3.1 is considered by demographers to be a high growth rate and significantly higher than the replacement rate of 2.1.
You might ask: Where the heck are you going with this you long winded weirdo?
Here is my point:
If we believe what our culture tells us, that it is perfectly fine that families come in all shapes, colors and sizes, and arrangements, with same sex parents or divorced parents, with any number of kids, with either mom or dad (or both) working and sending junior to the public school... if that is really true... and all that is just so *great* for families and we live in such a wonderful new springtime of humanity... then why do all the families I see buying into these modern notions look so much the same, with the same abnormally low number of kids (0-2), with most of the moms working outside the home and still doing the housework**, with 50% divorce rates?

Instead of being progressive and bold, our new culture is homogeneous and boring.

On a basic level using the simplest of math, think about it like this: Not every woman is called to marriage. And of those that do marry, I would argue that most married women will have various trials (described above) that prevent them from having lots of kids.
So if both of these things are true, and the replacement fertility rate is 2.1 children per woman in general, then how can we think that having 2 kids per married woman is healthy? Married people need to be having far more than 2.1 kids for a society to simply replace itself because they need to be having the kids to replace those who will not or cannot have them. As I have shown above, when we see a family with 3.88 kids we should be thinking "that is an average, healthy family size". And considering how conservative I was with my math (20% of women not marrying would be very high), we should consider the 3.88 to be on the low side.

So the next time you see a family with 4 or 5 kids, remember that that is a very average number. And a family with 8 kids should look no stranger to us than a family with only 1. We cannot let our suicidal culture dictate to us what a normal family size is. The simple, scientific fact is that a normal, healthy family size, even in the modern world with all its challenges, will be far larger than is culturally acceptable.


*If we were to translate the 7.7 married fertility rate into a Total Fertiltiy Rate, it can only go down because we are adding in non-breeding women. Let's pretend 10% of all Amish women never marry. If the married fertility is 7.7, then the total fertility would drop to 6.9. Married women would still have their 7.7 kids, but overall, the Total Fertility Rate would drop due to the 1 in 10 of all women that will never reproduce. If the number of unmarrieds rises to 30% of women in this population, the TFR drops to 5.4. If fully half of women in our naturally fertile society never marry and reproduce, then the total fertility rate drops to 3.85. 10-30% of women never marrying and procreating does not seem all that unreasonable. Particularly if marriage is seen as the important vocation it is, to not be entered into lightly. I think one thing that is perhaps not natural with our Amish case study is the high marriage rate, which I suspect is well over 95%. So although their family fertility is "natural", perhaps the number of families is unaturally high due to their anabaptist religion and a lack of vocational choice.


**The studies I read on European demographics last week had hard evidence of this. Unfortunately I cant recall where the data is located. But it was astounding how even in northern Europe, where women are supposedly so advanced in equality, they still do most of the housework.

Understanding Christian Education (CLAA Article)

William Michael, the founder of the CLAA (Classical Liberal Arts Academy) has a great post about education. I really like this guy. He is a Catholic agrarian/Distributist type who runs his own family farm PLUS an incredible online school. He is also a former Calvinist and convert to Catholicism who wrote curriculum for Veritas Press, which is the Reformed curriculum we used pre-Catholicism. For those interested in homeschooling, I highly recommend the CLAA. My family has used it and will be using it more in the future. Here is an excerpt from the article...

"If you’re a parent, you are responsible for providing your children with a sound Christian education. Obviously, that includes a sound faith formation program, but what about everything else? Look, for example, at the painting featured with the article. It is titled “Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics”, and was painted in 1490 and today adorns a Catholic chapel in Rome. Christians today would be unable to interpret the painting or identify the characters and their significance. It is foreign to us because the modern Christian mind has been divorced from the historic Christian mind. Who are the women seated beside St. Thomas? Who are the men standing before him, or the man under his feet? Why would the artist go through the effort of creating such an image? Why would this image be on display in a Catholic church? We should know the answers to these questions. Cicero said, “He who does not know what happened before he was born remains forever a child.” We need to grow up as Christians and learn our history so that we can make right decisions in life and avoid wandering around like children. After all, we have children depending on our guidance. Wise people don’t live by trial and error, but by deliberation and forethought.


The women in the painting represent..."

 You'll have to read the rest of the article on the CLAA news site if you want to find out what the women represent! ;-)

Example of a Homestead Site

I wanted to see what I could come up with after cross referencing some of my data for homestead considerations. After some very minimal searching, I came up with something, which is encouraging. This place in Oklahoma fits a number of categories for a good homestead. Here is the map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=E1020+and+N3710&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=N&tab=wl

The actual location is outlined in yellow here:

Here are it's assets:

1. Oklahoma is a great state for homeschooling.

2. The location is 1 hour west of Tulsa, and 1.5 hours east of OK City. So within distance to do a CSA or some selling to two large populations, yet not to close to either one.

3. The property is $2125/ac, which for arable land in the eastern half of OK is not a horrible price. And the terms seem good.

4. It has pasture, woods and a pond.

5. It is on a county highway.

6. 35-40 inches of rain a year.

7. 3 Catholic Churches within easy driving distance.


Problems:

1. Only 20 acres.

2. For someone who needs to work in a city while getting things going, the drive is too far for a commute. So this is an "all or nothing" location.

3. Not sure I like Oklahoma that much. Flat, and not enough winter. But who knows.


Anyway, that was fun. In about a half hour I came up with a place that fits a really good amount of my criteria. That gives me hope that there are probably loads of places out there just waiting for me.

Homestead Consideration: Homeschool Laws



Screen capture fromthe Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) website 2/28/12
http://www.hslda.org/laws/



In considering where to locate a homestead, I think a locations lack of intrusive regulations aimed at homeschooling is a key consideration. Even if you don't homeschool but use a good private school, will you always? Will your children? What if the school closes? What if you don't live close enough? If a government starts down the road of worrying about homeschoolers, you have a problem government, and chances are very good that they are overly intrusive in other areas as well.

I know in my state of Minnesota this is the case. Until recently, Minnesota was in red on the HSLDA homeschool freedom map. As parents without bachelors degrees, my wife and I were required to fill out forms each year informing the superintendent of our intent to homeschool, fill out quarterly report cards and submit them, and to do testing. There was even some insane language about home visits by state officials in the law. It was an egregious and unacceptable infringement on our rights as parents. Thankfully, those laws were recently improved so as to be more friendly to homeschoolers, but I am not fooled. Minnesota is a very liberal state, and I can easily see them taking one step forward and 2 steps back with homeschoolers.

So as far as Minnesota is considered for a future homestead, overall it fails. It has once gone down the path to the Dark Side of state over-reach, and I think it cannot be trusted. To be considered a good state for a homestead, it would need to really excel in other areas. The main thing is to have this in mind and to be deliberate. Even parents using a good Catholic school should have this one high on their list.

As far as the above map goes, I would consider the red states to be totally off limits, and most of the orange to be off limits to thoughtful homesteaders. But states do change for better or worse. Wisconsin, where I homeschooled myself through high school, was a green state a few years ago and sadly now it is yellow. And would it shock us if they went orange or red in 15 years? On the other hand I have always heard great things about Texas and Alaska, and I would be surprised if they changed from green to orange. Both states have a reputation and a tradition of having an "independent spirit". This is a key point. For some reason Big Brother still has a nostalgic forgiveness for places and groups that have roots. Texas, Alaska, and the Amish are good examples. They often get a "pass" for saying and doing things just because. The Amish in Pennsylvania (a Nazi-like Red state for homeschoolers) have almost zero regulations on their schools. If I were to move to Pennsylvania, you can bet I would get no such treatment for my homeschool. People just give the Amish a pass for whatever reason. I think getting into some of those situations or areas where that type of preferred treatment is a possibility is a very good idea. We need to seriously consider the possibility of a future in which there are national laws restricting homeschooling and how we can position ourselves like the Amish have so as to be "exempt" from the whims of Big Brother. And for that reason, a place like Texas gets extra points.

Click on the link below the map an explore particular states. It is very revealing.

UPDATE: Oklahoma seems to be pretty good. From the HSLDA website:
"Oklahoma is the only state with a constitutional provision guaranteeing the right to home school.

Section 4, Art. 13 of the Constitution of Oklahoma guarantees the home school exemption by stating that
the legislature “shall” provide for the “compulsory attendance at some public or other school, unless other means of education are provided of all children in the State who are sound in mind and body, between the ages of eight and sixteen, for at least three months each year.”

Location Considerations for a Homestead

Off the top of my head, and in no defined order as of yet, these are some things I thought of as serious considerations for where to look for an area to start a homestead. Not that I am doing any such thing next month, but gathering information is always a good idea. And hey, a guy can dream, right? So if you have any thoughts, whether new items or elaborations of current items, please comment and I will update the list!

1. Proximity to sacraments.


2. Proximity to a Catholic community that is traditional, and therefore less likely to change over time from a new priest, etc. Devin suggests: "Ideally a monastery or convent is close by that is a new evangelization/orthodox/traditional community."

3. Proximity to like minded families.

4. Close to a city large enough to support some selling of domestically produced products. (Salatin recommended within 40 miles of a city of 25,000 or more. So ideally, it would seem an area in the center of a 40 mile radius circle of 2 or more such cities on the perimeter would be perfect.)

5. Far enough away from metropolitan zones (starting at 50,000+ population) to be immune to urban sprawl. No closer than 60 miles from the center of a 0.5 Million+ metro area, perhaps adding ~10 miles for each additional 0.5 Million.

6. State or foreign country with liberal homeschooling laws that is likely to remain such.

7. State or foreign country with liberal agriculture laws that is likely to remain such.

8. Large variety of production types possible from the land.

9. Diversity of landscapes. Pasture, woods, water, hills.

10. Water --preferably rain fall that is over 35 inches annually. (From Devin)


11. A state that has a lower cost of living. Colorado and California are beautiful but everyone wants to live there, so everything is expensive. (From Devin)

Catholic schools are not workable...

...In their current form. Imo.

From Jimmy Akin:

But the cause [for Catholic schools needing to be closed] that Archbishop Chaput names in the interview is certainly a plausible one: the retreat of women and men religious from the Catholic education scene and the consequent effect on the faculty. Women and men religious, living communally and being under vows of poverty and being able to solicit donations for their order and even subsidizing Catholic schools directly, were able to operate for substantially less money than a faculty composed of lay people supporting families and trying to maintain a place in the middle class (i.e., avoid poverty). The exodus of religious from faculty and the consequent influx of ordinary lay people is certainly going to affect how much it costs to educate a student, and as tuition rises it can lead to a decrease in the number of students: a vicious cycle.
I don’t know how the finances of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia are structured or how specifically the schools might be affected by legal settlements, but Archbishop Chaput is certainly right that the change in the composition of the school workforce is going to impact the economics of the situation in a significant way.
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/archbishop-chaput-answers-questions-about-his-stunning-letter/#ixzz1gQ1kOM4H

Archbishop Chaput is spot on. This is so sad, because educating our children is the most important thing in the world. And by "educating" I don't just mean preparing them to be good American consumers. I mean preparing  them to serve God- no small task. And by "most important thing in the world", I mean exactly that.

The Catholic grade school near my town just recently was disbanded as well. By chance I met a young lady at my Church that had taught there. I felt bad for her. Her heart was in the right place, but with people like her as teachers, the situation will never be resolved. It's not her fault that she will probably get married and have a family and require a bigger paycheck, that's great. But that means higher tuition, and that is not just "not great", it is not do-able. Let's do the math together.

Lets take what is probably a typical Catholic family of 8 people with a single income of $45,000. Things are tight but possible on that income. Lets say they desire to send their 6 kids to the local Catholic school. Forget for a moment what the school wants to charge those parents and lets think of the actual cost of educating their kids. I checked out 2 different schools earlier this year and pricing differed, but lets give a low number of *$4000 per kid. Honestly, that seems really low, right? For a 20 kid classroom that would add up to $80,000 to spread out to the teacher, admin, supplies, and facilities. Tight budget.
So like I said, ignore what they charge the parent. Perhaps the parent gets grants and ends up only paying $2000 out of pocket for the whole crew, whatever. The point is, someone is paying. Whether in that parish or in the whole diocese. And for 6 kids at $4,000 a piece, that $24,000 is no small amount. One thing is for certain though, most parents simply can't pay that, and should not be expected to. Paying 24 grand out of a 45 grand a year salary?! Yeah right! That is not to mention if more kids come along. It is not at all impossible for a healthy family to have 8 or 9 kids in grades 2 through 12 at the same time. At that point, are only wealthy people allowed to have their kids in school? (keep in mind that I am not even considering public school an option, as that would be hatred of you children to send them there. A good Catholic would not do it unless forced to)
If a family with 8 in school cant come up with the $32,000 for their kids school that year does the parish pay it? The Archdiocese? Is it reasonable to expect them to? I don't think so.

I find it ironic that of the two schools I looked into sending my oldest daughter to, the close, rural one had to close it's doors by order of the archdiocese, and the really good, wealthy city one (many wealthy parents) was full! Either way I would have been out of luck this year. What sort of impression does this leave on the converts who has been homeshooling for 3 years? The Catholic school system is utterly broken. Thankfully we are very comfortable home schooling. But what about single parents? Are they just out of luck? And for me, what about when high school rolls around and I want my kids to be taking some advanced classes?

The problem here is evident. It is not possible to have a school charge $4000 or more per year. Governments get away with it because they collect their $10,000 per kid, per year at gunpoint (they dont pass a plate for property taxes).

The answer is one or a combination of two things: Get religious communities back in the schools, and  homeschooling. The former is not currently possible, as there are simply not enough of them. The latter is possible for most families.

What I think would be a good preparation for the future is  this:
Put funding currently going to Catholic schools into forming religious orders for teaching. Current teachers could either take vows or leave. The current schools could be turned into half living quarters for the religious/half schools. Restrict admittance for the time being to those who legitimately cannot homeshool (single parents, etc.) and make it free. Make the priority of the school the religious instruction and spiritual formation of the children. This way their instructors vows will have some payoff. After all, no one wants to sacrifice their life so a kid can be a better consumer of western culture and a better capitalist. But they will sacrifice their life for a child to grow up to be a saint.
If this were implemented nationwide, in a generation we could have thriving Catholic schools bursting at the seams with children who know and love their faith, and who are ready to take on the world for Christ.

Or we could just keep following the secular cultures example of treating schools like factories with expensive foremen. Unfortunately this is what will almost certainly happen in my children's lifetime, so homeschool will continue to be the best option for them.

*Update:
After writing I learned the real costs. Elementary was less than my estimate, secondary was way more. I think my points are still valid though.

"The average cost of tuition per pupil in a catholic elementary school is $3,383 while secondary education costs $8,182. Parents who choose to send their children to Catholic school still pay for a public school education with their state and local taxes. In 2010, the public education system spent approximately $10,614 per pupil."
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/02/08/educating-children-catholic-schools-doing/#ixzz1gQQHgQI3

Classical Liberal Arts Academy

St. Thomas Aquinas Following a tip from Tim Troutman on his blog, I decided to enroll my school age children in this school. It is the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. It is only a year old, but looks great. After much searching for some great Catholic homeschool place, My wife and I hope this is it! Bridget and I are excited to try it out. It is rigorous, ubber classical and hey, I found out the creator of the program is a convert who used to write the Omnibus program for Veritas Press (We were using Veritas previously). Anyone into homeschooling (and you should be unless you have an amaaaaazing Catholic school near you) might want to check this place out. There are some great articles on the homepage to listen to or read. Pray for our homeschooling efforts that the arrows in our quiver would be sharp!

What about the tares in Catholicism?

The following is a reply to a guy that wants to convert but the nominalism he sees in Catholic parishes worries him. Particularly in how the children are being raised. I post my reply here because my wife and I homeschool 4 daughters and I have this same concern, perhaps someone else can give advise in the comments to the both of us? As far as the lack of faith you mentioned, don't worry about that. If you are convinced of the Catholic church is the one, true church, I doubt anything will stop you from coming to her! If you are not convinced, give it more time and study. But know you will never have epistemic certainty, and will have to make a judgement call eventually based on evidence from all your faculties. Your concern for your family must enter in to every decision. But if this is the MAIN thing holding you back, then I would suggest you work through it soon. Once I was convinced of the truth of Catholicism (4 months ago!), I came to understand that it would become a mortal sin for me to remain outside of the church! So ironically, the closer I came to the church, the more desperate my situation. If you are not fully convinced, then that does not apply to you. Just like the anathemas at Trent are only for Catholics. I'm glad to help if I can. Boy did you ask the right question to me! For me this was THE first "side issue" I was worried about. It is a "side issue" for me because I was not including it into the greater issue of "is sola scriptura workable?" and the next question: "is it possible the Catholic church is true?" After those questions were answered for me, the next was this issue of nominalism and faithless Catholics. Will we be going to a place that is filled with tares!? Who will my children marry!? This is the biggest issue for my wife actually! She is not very theologically interested and just wants a solid church with solid people like our PCA church was. We have 4 daughters and are really committed homeschoolers. My wife had been using a bunch of Veritas Press homeschool curriculum which is Reformed when it comes to history and Bible, and she had everything planned out! I felt so bad to have to make her change all of that. Also our PCA church was VERY conservative. As in not a single kid in public school, and the majority of families homeschoolers! Seriously committed believers every one. So I will give you the bad news and then the good news. BAD NEWS: You (we) are unlikely to find the kind of parish that could compare to a single PCA church in terms of percentage of super conservative, committed believers. But here is my theory why. The PCA as a denomination is a "parish". By that I mean, the PCA is a conservative splinter of a huge, unfaithful group of Reformed churches. It is tiny! It is a very exclusive group that has segregated itself from the rest of Reformed Christianity, let alone the rest of Evangelicalism. So of course the pews are filled with wheat and not tares! How convenient. That makes our job as fathers easier, right? In a way it does, but this is not realistic. We cannot just make the church. We need to go to it. It is our job to raise our children, and to do it in an incubator where every person in the pew must be an uber conservative just like us is not healthy for us I think. It becomes more of a cafeteria that way. There is a comment you should read on CTC, it is more about superstitions, but the drift of it speaks towards what I am getting at here: that our local churches can be a "here comes everybody" place, while we can still remain conservatives. The third paragraph is great: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/03/doug-wilsons-authority-and-apostolic-succession/#comment-7322 GOOD NEWS: The Catholic church is HUGE! As homeschoolers my family will have perhaps few or no homeschoolers in our home parish, but I have already looked into it and in my area there are LOTS of Catholic homeschoolers in our area. Way MORE than the amount of Reformed ones. As far as your concern about children in general in Catholic churches being trained properly, I really think we need to be fair in comparing. The PCA needs to first join up with the PCUSA, then we can compare. We both know what that would look like. Same amount of tares on both sides. And no matter where you go, you will have to be the one to train your children (I know you know this) and that is hard in any environment. This is why I think homeschooling should be almost considered required for christians in our society. I would have no trouble with the Catholic church forbidding government school attendance, (at least for young children). If we want the next generation to keep the faith and spread the faith, they need intensive training. That intensive training should be so overpowering that a teen with a lip ring in the pew in front of you will want to be like YOUR kid. We can no longer be content in our bunkers and incubators, lets start breathing on these dry bones that surround us and the Lord will make an army! Come on brother, these Catholics are wainting for us conservatives to join up and renew them! Peace, David Meyer