Abbreviated as CHCAREP; referenced by 1 other explainer
Children ever born shows the number of live-born children that females aged 15 and over have ever had. It is a lifetime count, not a count of children currently living in the home.
The figures come from Census data. The Australian Bureau of Statistics collects them.
The Census records sex as female or male only. The question is asked of people recorded as female. Some of those people are women, some are non-binary, and some are trans men. The Census does not split them out. Trans women, non-binary people, and intersex people who have had children are not shown as a group in this measure.
This is a lifetime measure of parity (children a woman has ever had). It is not the same as the fertility rate page, which shows period rates for one year at a time. The two measures answer different questions and will not match. It counts each child a woman has ever had, whether or not the child still lives at home, lives elsewhere, or has died. A 70-year-old whose three children moved out decades ago is still counted as having three children here. So this page tells a different story from the Family blending and Household type pages, which both count children currently in the home.
The categories are:
Adoption, fostering, and step-parenting are not counted — only live-born children the female respondent had.
The total is the count of females aged 15 and over at their place of usual residence. This is a place-of-usual-residence count, so each female is counted where she usually lives, not where she was on Census night. It includes residents of non-private dwellings such as hospitals, aged-care homes, hostels, and student housing. It does not count overseas visitors.
This total is smaller than the female population aged 15 and over you will see on the population pages. The number here is an unadjusted Census count. The population pages use ABS Estimated Resident Population (ERP).
The page mixes age cohorts. A young woman aged 20 may not have started having children yet. A woman aged 70 has finished. So the No children group on this page combines women who will go on to have children later in life with women who have completed their family without any. To compare local fertility patterns to other areas, look at the share of older cohorts in each category, not the headline mix.
Parenting and caring vary across communities. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kinship systems share the care of children across many adults. Many CALD households also share child-rearing across grandparents, aunts and uncles, and extended family. The Census records only live-born children the female respondent had. So this page counts those children, not the wider caring relationships.
Place Forecast follows ABS rules to protect small counts. In areas with many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, talk with local community-led groups before reading too much into these figures.
Place Forecast stores children ever born at the mesh block level. The ABS Census publishes it at SA1. We split each SA1 across its mesh blocks by the share of females aged 15 and over from the Estimated Resident Population (ERP). Then we add the mesh blocks back up to the area you see. So the figures for very small areas are an estimate, not a direct ABS count.
Each category at the LGA level matches the ABS figure exactly. See LGA anchoring for how this works, the small gap between the page total and ABS's published LGA total, and how very small groups are handled.
The Compare small areas view shows one stacked bar per small area, with the same eight groups as colour segments. Use the chart's count and 100% toggle to switch between absolute numbers and shares of each area's total. Filter to a single group to swap the stacked bar for a choropleth and cartograms covering only that group.