There could be many reasons for this:

1)  The haphazard way the @#$% muster was done.  I've wanted to travel back
in time and strangle some of those awful recorders.  They seem to note many
things--structures, livestock, etc.--almost completely randomly.  It seems
that each person recorded what he felt like and what he thoguht was
important rather than following a standard!  Children likely wouldn't have
been considered important enough to record by all of them.  They might not
have seemed a "unit of production" yet.

2)  The massacre of 1622, followed by the fever of 1622-23, as has already
been mentioned.  Though a number of women (and children, too?) were
ransomed, it would be unsurprising that infants and young children died as
a result of the traauma.  Others would have been very likely to have been
adopted into Indian society--the younger, the more likely.

3)  The lack of women.  Though there were some women after 1611, there
still really weren't many.  And their husbands seemed to keep dying right
and left--many of the women seemed to go from one husband to another very
rapidly.

4)  Infant mortality is a possibility, but I don't think I can buy that
one.  Women didn't dies in the same droves as men in VA (hence the women-
and-pigs jokes), and really, the babies who weren't in an malaria-infested
area had, if anything, a better living environment than their counterparts
in an English village.  The isolation of groups of settlers would actually
be beneficial for them, reducing the possibility of the spread of usual
infant diseases.  If you look at average family size from a slightly later
time, when there's more info, this just doesn't make sense.

5)  Forget stress and malnutrition--just plain hard work can interrupt
menses.  During track season, it wasn't unusual for athlete's periods to
half, and low fat percentage (from lots of hard work) can do the same.


Say a woman came over in 1611 and married.  Her first child was born, say,
in 1612.  She nursed it for 2 years, meaning no more possible babies until
1615, when she had a stillborn child.  Hubby died that year, and she
doesn't marry again until 1616.  Baby #3 born fine in 1618.  By 1622, she
has 3 kids but loses the oldest and hubby #2 to the fever (they fled to
Jamestown before the massacre).  In 1624, she marries again, and when the
guy with the census comes around, she has a four-year-old and a six-year-
old, neither of whom he bothers to record!

I have 2 ancestors who were born between 1611 and 1620 in VA, and one of my
ancestresses had already borne 3 healthy children by 1623.

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