24 BULLETIN 1382, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
shaping the desires or the demands of the family on the funds avail- 
able for living. Obviously the number of persons and the different 
ages of the persons composing the family have direct bearings upon 
the amounts, varieties, and qualities of goods used, and consequently 
upon the expenditures for family living purposes. The average 
sizes of household and family and the average ages of different 
members of the family, by tenure, are given in Table 1. For the 
purpose of further analysis all families are grouped in family 
living cycles according to the approximate ages of all sons and 
daughters at home as follows : 
Homes with no children horn. 
Homes with children of ages from : 
to 5 years. 
to 11 years. 
6 to 11 years. 
6 to 18 years. 
12 to 18 years. % 
12 to 24 years. 
19 to 24 years. 
19 years or more. 
Homes from which all children had gone at time of study. 
The larger age groups, to 11 years, 6 to 18 years, 12 to 24 years, 
and 19 years or more accommodate those families, the ages of whose 
children are not covered by the smaller groups to 5 years, 6 to 11 
years, 12 to 18 years, and 19 to 24 years. Even with the extended 
groups, not all families could be classified definitely into any one 
group. The object of this classification is to try to account for 
the influence of increased age as well as numbers of sons and 
daughters included in the farm family. The relation of the size 
of family and the family living cycles, that is, periods of growtli 
and development of the sons and daughters composing the family, 
to expenditures per family and per cost-consumption unit is shown 
in Table 9. 
There is evidence of a distinct, although not a striking, positive 
relation between size of family and expenditures per family, only. 
Roughly, expenditures per family rise from almost $1,200 to over 
$2,000 as the size of family goes up from two to nine individuals. 
Thus, while the expenditures per family increase rather regularly, 
the addition of seven persons per family means on an average an 
increase of only $800, or approximately $114 per person. The rela- 
tion between size of family and the sum of expenditures per cost- 
consumption unit appears to be negative; that is, the expenditures 
tend to decrease with an increase in the number of persons per family. 
This may be interpreted as meaning lower standards of living for 
larger families, in general, or it may be due to the fact that the scales 
used in determining the costs per consumption units did not account 
for all fluctuation in expenditures due to different numbers of indi- 
viduals per family in this case. From the standpoint of the percent- 
age of expenditures per cost-consumption unit devoted to advance- 
ment, fluctuations due to increased size of family seem to have been 
completely eliminated. 
Family living cycles seem to be less closely related than size of 
family to the standard of living except, possibly, as the standard of 
living is measured in terms of the percentage of expenditures per 
cost-consumption unit devoted to advancement. A careful study of 
the average size of family and the average expenditure per family 
