Tim Carney in the Post: The Ideal Number of Kids is Four (at a minimum)
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Anonymous
That's nice, but the posters who responded spoke of knowing many large families and noticing that none of the oldest siblings who were forced to parent their little brothers and sisters have no kids of their own... or if they do, it's a smaller number than their family of origin. I have observed this myself. The burden of parentification is real. I'm so happy for your sister that she liked taking care of you, but for many older siblings, it ends up being a heavy responsibility, and something that impacts their own desire for children down the road. |
Anonymous
Well I was an older sister and I never wanted to be the “little mother.” Not much fun. it’s great if the older girls enjoy it, not so great if they are forced to be free childcare. |
Anonymous
| I’m the eldest girl in a big family (5 kids) and I think my parents tried hard not to force me to raise my younger siblings. I loved having a younger sister in particular and enjoyed taking care of her. What I did not enjoy was never ever getting any focused attention from my dad and very little from my mom. One sibling had significant issues and any bandwidth went to dealing with him (and it wasn’t enough). I wanted a different experience for my own kids, which is why I only have 2. |
Anonymous
Is that you, Amy Coney Barrett? |
Anonymous
Let's ask her in 20 years and she's a girl. This labor is not forced on valued boys. |
Anonymous
loove u |
Anonymous
yeah; this was me. Cut mom off when I was 35 b/c I realized she's a selfish lazy mentally ill narcisist. |
Anonymous
This was my experience in a big family. I was one of the kids kind of lost in the middle -- not the youngest or the oldest, a "good" kid who got good grades and didn't complain. I had several experiences early on where it was made clear to me that needing any extra attention -- to deal with recurrent nightmares, to help with social adjustment to school, etc. -- would be seen as an annoying distraction from all the other kids. So I learned to have no problems. Ever. In some ways this did make me resilient and independent, just like Carney suggest. It also means that as an adult, I am allergic to asking for help or even just telling someone when something is going on. I apologize for myself compulsively and have very low self esteem, something that has made both relationships and my career difficult. A few years ago I realized that I just carry around this longing to be seen and hear and understood, and I don't think anyone will ever be able to satisfy it because what I really want is to be a child and to be loved and seen in the way kids all want to be loved and seen. But I'm not a child and I'll never be one again so I just have to live with that feeling of absence. I don't think all kids from big families feel that way, but I do. And I happen to know that another of my siblings feels the same. So I'm skeptical that large families can really meet the needs of every single kid. And it might seem like no big deal if 1 out of 6, or 2 out of 8, have this feeling of loss. But if you are the one experiencing it, it's deeply painful, a wound that will never heal. |
Anonymous
| Parentification, really? I ask my 13 year old to play with my three year old (youngest of four) on a regular basis…maybe 20 mins at a time. None of my kids have to do the 1980s-era chores I did as I kid, like dusting the house and seeding the front lawn and babysitting the neighbors kids for spending money/nothing. For the most part the older kids like playing with their little sister and, on the days they don’t…enduring occasional unpleasantness and family obligations is an important part of childhood. My four all attend fancy private schools and their peers seem to really struggle with this concept. |
Anonymous
How in the world do you pay for college for 4 kids?! Or extracurriculars like travel sports, music classes, etc. We have a comfortable income, and its hard enough saving for college and paying for these things for just the two of them. |
Anonymous
| Yeh when a guy is telling us about the happiness of a mother I tend to roll my eyes. Let Mother speak. |
Anonymous
AEI? |
Anonymous
| The whole article and 6 pages of comments and still no discussion of the cost of raising 6 kids. In dc? That’s at least $24k/year for daycare. No. |
Anonymous
American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank and where Tim Carney, the author of this piece, works. |
Anonymous
Several people have mentioned this! It's an obvious issue Carney doesn't even mention except to say there are certain activities like travel sports his family doesn't do because of the size of the family. Though I will note that no family with 6 kids is going to do daycare. They either have a SAHM or a nanny (potentially both). Still expensive and in a high COL area like DC, not accessible to the vast majority of families. But it is at least efficient -- none of these families are putting 6 kids in daycare. To me the cost issues aren't even about the early childhood childcare costs, but more the compounding costs of having this many kids that will just add up and up and up. Yes, you will be able to get some efficiencies out of it with handmedowns and toys the kids share. You can have kids share bedrooms too, this was very normal up until only recently so I really don't have an issue with that. But what about other costs that cannot be split among kids. I hope your kids have good teeth because 6 sets of braces is going to be expensive and time consuming. Heck, even just having kids with cavities is going to really add up with that many. Your food costs are going to be high and just go waaaaay up as those kids become teens, even if you never eat out (which is also no prohibitively expensive -- you aren't getting out of a Chipotley for less than $150 with a family of 8). Even if you eschew more expensive activities like travel sports, are any of your kids going to do very normal things like learn an instrument? Participate in model UN? Girl Scouts? These are not bespoke activities only embraced by progressive helicopter parents, many people view these as formative experiences. How do you allocate college costs among all these kids? Sometimes parents have to have tough conversations with kids about what they can afford in terms of college, but the degree to which individuals in a family like this are going to have to sacrifice for the "greater good" is extreme. And how do you balance the fact that kids are different, have different goals, different willingness to work, different abilities. What if you have a kid who works incredibly hard to earn a spot at a pricier school, and you know they would do great there, but if you send them you will have too little for younger kids to have that opportunity? How do you decide? How do you explain that? What if you have a kid who needs special therapy or treatment, and those costs or the time dedicated to those needs mean other kids have to go without in other areas, as well as without extra time with their parents? Huge families made sense when it was common for families to lose children to childhood illness, when no one went to college, when families needed all the hands they could get to take care of the house and the land. They made sense when there was a good likelihood that your oldest kids would be heading off to war and might not come back. Now, they really don't make sense unless you have a lot of resources that most people don't have, and an unusual will to live a different sort of life than most people live these days. I don't begrudge people who want and have large families, but to advocate for it as though it's desirable or even possible for most people? You just sound stupid. |