This article is concerned with the statistical modeling of children ever born (CEB) fertility data. It is shown
that in a low fertility population, such as China, the use of linear regression approaches to model CEB is
statistically inappropriate because the distribution of the CEB variable is often heavily skewed with a long
right tail. For five sub-groups of Chinese women, their fertility is modeled using Poisson, negative binomial,
and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. It is shown that in almost all instances there would have
been major errors of statistical inference had the interpretations of the results been based only on the results of
the linear regression models.