Revisiting New Children of Record Data

I wrote a post last year after April Conference about the new children of record counts that the Church reports every April for the previous calendar year. In that post, I pointed out that, after the marked decline in new children of record the Church reported during COVID, the bounce back the following year was far less than would be expected if it were just a matter of clearing a backlog of children who weren’t recorded during the height of the pandemic. I speculated that perhaps this was evidence of a decline in activity level that wasn’t bouncing back.

Now that we have the 2022 data from the 2023 statistical report, it looks like I was probably too hasty in my interpretation. Here’s a graph with the new data.

The blue line shows the yearly actual counts of new children of record since 2010. You can see the big dip in 2020, where the count, which had been declining a little each year, fell off a cliff. Then it rebounded in 2021. In my post last year, I speculated that if all the COVID backlog had cleared that was going to, then the count would decline again from its 2021 value in 2022. Instead, the 2022 value is almost the same as the 2021 value (89,069 in 2021; 89,059 in 2022).

The red line is an alternative that I arrived at by taking the sum of the counts from 2020 through 2022 and then redistributing them to give a constant yearly rate of decline in each year. So this smoothed version guesses at when new children of record might have been recorded if COVID hadn’t happened. The yearly decline rate for this line is 7.3%. This is quite a bit higher than the average of the five years prior to 2020, which is only 4.1%, but it’s very much in line with 2019, the last pre-COVID year, which had a decline of 7.7% from 2018.

The orange line doesn’t redistribute the actual counts from the last three years like the red line does. To make this line, I just applied the 4.1% average decline from the last five pre-COVID years, and calculated forward. It’s clearly higher (less decline) than the actuals.

So like I said, it looks like I jumped the gun last year in thinking that all the backlog clearing from children of record not recorded in 2020 would have cleared by the end of 2021. Now that it is clearly taking longer than I had expected, I should probably be open to the possibility that it will continue to take even longer. If this is true, then next year’s new child of record count will be closer to its level for the past couple of years, and if I repeat the smoothing exercise like I did for the red line in the graph, the constant decline rate will be less than 7.3%. Needless to say, a consistent decline in new children of record isn’t good news for the future health of the Church, but it does seem like it’s still unclear what the year-to-year changes will be as we move further into the post-COVID era.