As Loudoun Grows, So Do Its Families

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 21, 2006

On a bright Thursday afternoon in the planned community of South Riding, parents lounged at the edges of a field watching Little Leaguers. Nancy Caruso had one kid at bat, twins in a stroller and another running around someplace. Katie Hall bounced her fourth on her hip -- "I could always have another one!" she said -- and Diane Nielsen belted out, "Good job, Peter!" to one of her three.

Amid coolers and balls and emptied bags of chips on the damp, green grass, Lisa Adams screamed, "Run it in, baby!" to her fourth while Chris Hoyt stood up, shaded his eyes and searched an adjacent playground full of tottering, bouncing children.

"I'll be in trouble if I don't bring home at least two," he joked. He also has four children, a number he described as "not out of the ordinary here."

If suburbia has always been for child rearing, to enter the quaint and shaded 10-year-old neighborhood off Route 50 is to find the fertile epicenter of a county with one of the highest birthrates in the nation. Loudoun County rivals parts of suburban Utah, where the Mormon faith encourages large families, and areas such as Hidalgo, Tex., and Manassas Park, where large numbers of recent immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries account for the growth.

After decades of decline, birthrates in the United States, unlike those of most industrialized nations, have in recent years begun to tick up slightly, driven largely by immigration and to a lesser degree by people, including immigrants, who have followed the building boom into such counties as Loudoun and have produced, it seems, a mini baby boom of their own.

They are for the most part middle-class professionals and stay-at-home moms, people including Catholics and Mormons who might have had large families wherever they wound up living, and others who had one or two, moved out to Loudoun and then decided to have another one, or two, or three.

The average fertility rate in the nation peaked at 3.71 in the late 1950s, bottomed out at 1.79 in the '70s and has inched up to 2.04, according to United Nations estimates.

In recent years, Loudoun's child population has grown by 31 percent to nearly 60,000, faster than any metropolitan county in the nation. Between 2000 and 2004, the county of about 242,000 residents added 14,000 children younger than 15, according to an analysis by William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.

For various reasons, people have sought out places such as Ashburn and Lansdowne and South Riding, where the proliferation of children has transformed rituals such as the annual Easter egg hunt into events of epic proportions. This year, 14,000 eggs were scattered across a field. The change has spawned dinner co-ops and baby-sitting co-ops and support groups such as Stroller Moms and Share Parenting, and more generally, it has created a place whose central, even communal, purpose is raising children.

"We talked about this," said Katie Hall's husband, David, who works for AOL while she stays home. "You start wondering whether, because South Riding is so family-oriented, you moved there because that's what you want, that you're like those people? Or whether, once you're there, you end up being like those people. It's a chicken and egg question. . . . Maybe we were inclined to have more kids because we live here."

The Halls moved several years ago from a townhouse without a yard into a four-bedroom home with plenty of grass. They had two kids when they came, then had two more, not exactly by design but more because it somehow felt right, they said.

"It's not so much a number as the way the family feels in the house," said David Hall, noting that on his block, at least five houses have four kids each and several have three.

Not every block, of course, is teeming with children. Plenty of families have one child. But they say they feel somewhat exceptional. "People look at me funny when I say I have one," Michelle Able said. "Everyone has three or four."

Among such women as Nancy Caruso, there was a sense of relief in finding South Riding, a feeling that whatever pressures existed to have a career and a perfect family drifted away out on the suburban frontier, that if you were inclined to have a big family, you were free to unleash that impulse.

"Before, there was this notion that we were going to screw up the kids if we didn't have this perfect little family," said Caruso, who sidelined her career in law enforcement to stay at home and raise her four kids. "Somewhere along the line, people started to step outside that box. It's common nature to find where you fit in, and I think here you find . . . it's okay to have more kids. Everyone around here does. Everyone supports it."

There's little solid evidence, but some people wonder whether multiple births by women using fertility drugs to have children later in life are helping families grow larger.

Caruso has plenty of friends with four. And she has another, Bethany Narzissenfeld, who stays home with five. She reads romance novels in her downtime and likes to say that she probably belongs in her vision of the 1950s -- maybe back in Waukegan, Ill., where she grew up going to church five times a week.

"I never fell in with the give-women-all-the-same-rights-as-men thing," she said. "I wanted to be a homemaker. I intended not to work. I really get upset when I watch TV, when some liberal woman gets up and talks about what women want. Because she doesn't speak for all women."

Narzissenfeld was folding laundry in her living room, explaining that she had Jacob, Ben, Jared, Rachel and Sam because that's what God gave her, although after Sam, she and her husband decided that they had all the gifts they could handle.

"My husband started thinking about vacations and having so much stuff to haul," she said. "So after Sam, we knew we'd have to stop."

Along the cul-de-sacs and lanes of South Riding, there are self-described conservatives with big families, probably fewer liberals with big families and many in-betweens, people loosely threaded together by their love of kids, Costco, minivans and a buoyant optimism about the trajectory of their lives.

And so, about 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, a pregnant woman power-walked past a pond, a dad led his three girls biking down a sidewalk, and over on Hagen Court, a group of boys played basketball in a driveway in front of the Campbells', where life whisked along. A kid from down the street, Ryan, bounded into the kitchen.

"My clothes?" he asked Lori Campbell, looking for his uniform.

"Your clothes are there," she said, pointing to a pile on the granite countertop. "What do you feel like? Egg and cheese? Bagel? Waffle?"

"Bagel," Ryan said, then bounded out.

Lori and her husband, Chris, have four kids, but on any given day they are fielding five, six or seven if friends are around. They are so deep into kid athletics that Chris Campbell identifies houses by sport.

"We have soccer, soccer, a single couple," he said, referring to his neighbors without kids, "soccer, swimming, lacrosse, swimming, cheerleading, taekwondo. We have 28 kids within 150 yards here."

They had two when they moved into their five-bedroom house eight years ago.

"And it was, 'Hey, this is pretty cool,' " Chris Campbell said. " 'We have one of each. Life is going along nicely.' Then it was, 'Let's go for the third!' And we got twins."

The Campbells are breezy conservatives who talk about "family values" with the caveat that "we know liberals have family values, too." They both grew up in big, churchgoing families in Fairfax County.

Lori went to college in Indiana, married Chris, worked at Lady Foot Locker, then spent several years with Pitney Bowes, selling mailing equipment. Her life would have been "equally fine," she said, if she'd continued on the career path, but she didn't really have a plan, and that's not how it went.

She noted a talk with her dad on drive to a wedding years ago. He told her he thought she should stay home with her two kids. She asked him why he sent her to college.

"He said it was more for the life experience," she recalled without any resentment.

Eventually, she started staying home, as her mother did. The family moved to Hagen Court, she started wanting to have more kids and now they have a full house, just as they both had when they were growing up.

"Now," she said, packing up uniforms, "I need to call my husband because he has to stay with some of them while I go to soccer. We have to coordinate on some days."

With her husband home, she filled the water bottles and headed off with two kids.

Chris Campbell said he wasn't sure what prompted them to have four, although he was sure his past had something to do with it, his optimism, the neighborhood.

"Being in this community, it would be unusual not to follow suit," he said, and he figures his kids will probably do the same.