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As it was in my village when I was growing up. More than 3 kids was very rare - the only case I recall was of a family which had triplets and an older sibling. Being an Only Child was a thing of note, and the stereotype was that only children would be socially awkward and probably spoilt by their parents. About 10% of child-bearing families have just one child. It was very typical to share a room with your siblings, at least until one of you was a teenager, but once your parents had a little money, it was easy to have a house with plenty of room for 2 or 3 children.
Almost all of the houses on my street had families with 2-3 children of school-age or younger. There was one mini-house with an unfriendly old couple (I assume they had grown-up children, but they kept very much to themselves and nobody knew much about them) and another little cottage with a sweet old granny. If I walked down the street on a summer's day, I would almost always hear other children playing in gardens and I only had to climb over a wall to spend time with one of my best friends. The children also formed interconnections between parents, and so almost everyone knew everyone else on the street, even if people didn't go to church or other social events. Child-centred holidays like Halloween also meant that e.g. the sweet old granny were brought into the community. Babysitting, Scouting etc. meant that even families with teenagers were brought into the network of social relations.
Now the demographics are reversed: there are only about two families with young children and most of the houses are occupied by older couples/single people. On a summer's day, one hears no children, and the youngest people one generally sees are the gardeners who commute in from the city to do manual labour in the old people's gardens. This is not due to depopulation: the problem is that young couples can't compete with older people's wealth when it comes to buying houses, and older people can comfortably retire without selling their big family-sized homes. In contrast, my grandparents generation generally either moved into care homes or into places in the city soon after they retired. They reasoned: why live in a five room house with a big garden? Pensions were much less generous back then and poverty among the old was widespread, so selling a house was a good way to have liquid assets in your retirement.
This is an extreme case, but the demographic transition is really visible in some places. I hate it, and as it happens, the older people in the street with whom I've talked about it also hate it. I do know people my age who have a child and sometimes two, but they generally live in cities in cramped apartments that are unsuitable for having 2-3 children. Ironically, their homes remind me of the type of places that my grandparents' generation would live in, if they lived independently.
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