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Originally Posted by VanimaEdhel
That is a curious question - obviously by the Third Age, the Elves began to leave off having children, but you would have thought that, even given that Elves only had a few children each, it would have gotten more crowded than it did. The average Elf seemed to have two or three children. Since most parents did not die, that leaves the children and the adults. After just a few generations - even giving, say, a few hundred years of a gap between birth and eventual procreation of the children themselves - it starts to get a bit crowded.
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Who knows what it was like in Valinor or Eressea (but they had plenty of room there, I wager), but in Middle-earth there was no net growth, I think, only net loss.
The number of Elves being born was probably only slightly ahead of or equal to the number of Elves dying. After all, the Elves of Lindon and Rivendell kept getting embroiled in the Angmar/Arnor wars- even the Lorien folk joined in a couple times. The Elves of Lorien and Mirkwood, especially the Mirkwood ones, were constantly quarrelling with Dul Guldor. Lothlorien was severely endangered at the time of the Balrog's awakening, and the time of the Dwarves fleeing from Moria.
That's just deaths. On top of that one has to remember the steady, constant trickle of Elves to the West.
I have no idea what the situation was like there, but in Middle-earth it was not one of an Elvish population boom.