Is having 4+ kids a status symbol?

[Anonymous]

At my private school in the Midwest, tuition is free after kid 4 if you have 3 kids enrolled (PreK-12th). So that takes some of the financial burden, and you can push out a few more.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At my private school in the Midwest, tuition is free after kid 4 if you have 3 kids enrolled (PreK-12th). So that takes some of the financial burden, and you can push out a few more.

Yeah St Louis Catholic school is 400 bucks for each additional kid after 3. And the 2nd and 3rd are cheap too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, they better be rich. They are going to have to pay over a million dollars in college tuition alone.

Parents should help kids with it if they can, but there’s no law that parents “have to” pay for any college. I wish that were a law; I wouldn’t be drowning in state school loans still!

Yep, several posters here with large families cannot afford to pay for college. Then you read on the money & finance board how hard it is to get ahead, the overwhelming feeling of not being able to afford a house, the envy for those who got a better start because of family resources.

This is national and international research. There is simply not enough attention to go to some many kids and they suffer

Researchers from the University of Houston and the London School of Economics recently evaluated 26 years of data for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank. They found siblings had lowered cognitive abilities and increased behavioral problems with each added child in the family. Girls tended to suffer more cognitive setbacks and have a higher risk of teen pregnancies; boys developed more acting-out behavior.

And, the researchers found, those difficulties persisted into adulthood. Adults from large families tended to have lower levels of education, lower earnings, and more criminal behavior, according to The Washington Post.

But what constitutes larger families? I’m not convinced 4 kids trigger poor outcomes.

I’m one of 4 kids. Everyone got a degree. Nobody is struggling. Two of us make six figures, the other two are SAHPs.

I have 4 kids. My kids have passports and love to travel.

More than 3 is large family. The academic achievement drops significantly with the 3rd. Search pubmed.

More: "Empirical studies have consistently reported a negative correlation between number of children in the family and intelligence test scores (Belmont 8c Marolla, 1973; Dandes 8c Dow, 1969; Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970). Research relating family characteristics to academic performance found the same pattern as with intelligence, with children from smaller families having higher achievement test scores or grades than children from larger families (Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970; Schachter, 1963). "

"Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and 'quality'. Family size might adversely affect the production of child quality within a family. A number of arguments also suggest that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of the resources devoted by parents to their children's education. We construct a composite birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family's educational resources. We find that they are not, and that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Controlling for parental family income, parental age at birth and family level attributes, we find that children from larger families have lower levels of education and that there is in addition a separate negative birth order effect. In contrast to Black, Devereux and Kelvanes (2005), the family size effect does not vanish once we control for birth order. Our findings are robust to a number of specification checks."

Again, I'm the PP who knows a family of 6 successful adults. The answer was hundreds of million of $ trust fund, individual nannies and tutors and Deerfield boarding for all. The drawback was one of the daughters doing so much coke in college, because nannies are not parents. It's impossible to have quality one on one time with more than two. Just some bedtime reading and homework help would get to 1 hour per child, so that's 4 hours daily minimum. Add dinner, jobs, sports, school etc.

This is the only family you know with more than two kids where the kids are doing well?
My mom is one of ten. She grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. All ten kids are more or less successful. 6 are very successful in DCUM terms and are professionals and business owners. The other four are a teacher, bank manager, builder/contractor, and farmer. They all have long lasting marriages and kids are doing well.
My babysitter is one of 10. All of her older siblings have gone to college, and she will go too. The oldest two are married to really nice people and have children of their own.
I can think of a few large families where one or two siblings are messed up, but I can think of a few small families where that’s true as well.

[Anonymous]

You guys must not get out much. Where I live, 4 kids is normal. Having more kids is normal, too. Interestingly, the larger the family, it seems, the more engaged the family is in serving others in the community. Probably because when you come from a big family you learn you can’t have everything you want and you learn to share what you have with others. Signed, father of 4 and one of 11 children. Family is where love comes from. The bigger, the better.

[Anonymous]

We have four kids.
I do bedtime reading with all of them together. We roll out sleeping bags on the floor, and I sit in the poang chair in my oldest son’s room. After that, the younger two go to bed, and DH and I talk for a while with the older two, sometimes all together. Sometimes 1:1.

I usually make dinner and help with homework simultaneously. Kids don’t need you hovering over them while they do their homework, but they need you to be available if they have questions.

They do have to be more independent than some of their peers. We taught them to ride bikes early and showed them how to get places they want to go. They have to be responsible for a lot of their own things. They have to help out around the house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have four kids.
I do bedtime reading with all of them together. We roll out sleeping bags on the floor, and I sit in the poang chair in my oldest son’s room. After that, the younger two go to bed, and DH and I talk for a while with the older two, sometimes all together. Sometimes 1:1.

I usually make dinner and help with homework simultaneously. Kids don’t need you hovering over them while they do their homework, but they need you to be available if they have questions.

They do have to be more independent than some of their peers. We taught them to ride bikes early and showed them how to get places they want to go. They have to be responsible for a lot of their own things. They have to help out around the house.

Hence my point that you cannot spend quality time one-to-one. Research from different countries points to the fact that they will be less successful, due to less individual attention and resources, than their peers from smaller families. I absolutely agree with you that they have to be more independent, regardless of their personalities. It's a survival skill; even my second child is more independent than my first.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, they better be rich. They are going to have to pay over a million dollars in college tuition alone.

Parents should help kids with it if they can, but there’s no law that parents “have to” pay for any college. I wish that were a law; I wouldn’t be drowning in state school loans still!

Yep, several posters here with large families cannot afford to pay for college. Then you read on the money & finance board how hard it is to get ahead, the overwhelming feeling of not being able to afford a house, the envy for those who got a better start because of family resources.

This is national and international research. There is simply not enough attention to go to some many kids and they suffer

Researchers from the University of Houston and the London School of Economics recently evaluated 26 years of data for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank. They found siblings had lowered cognitive abilities and increased behavioral problems with each added child in the family. Girls tended to suffer more cognitive setbacks and have a higher risk of teen pregnancies; boys developed more acting-out behavior.

And, the researchers found, those difficulties persisted into adulthood. Adults from large families tended to have lower levels of education, lower earnings, and more criminal behavior, according to The Washington Post.

But what constitutes larger families? I’m not convinced 4 kids trigger poor outcomes.

I’m one of 4 kids. Everyone got a degree. Nobody is struggling. Two of us make six figures, the other two are SAHPs.

I have 4 kids. My kids have passports and love to travel.

More than 3 is large family. The academic achievement drops significantly with the 3rd. Search pubmed.

More: "Empirical studies have consistently reported a negative correlation between number of children in the family and intelligence test scores (Belmont 8c Marolla, 1973; Dandes 8c Dow, 1969; Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970). Research relating family characteristics to academic performance found the same pattern as with intelligence, with children from smaller families having higher achievement test scores or grades than children from larger families (Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970; Schachter, 1963). "

"Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and 'quality'. Family size might adversely affect the production of child quality within a family. A number of arguments also suggest that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of the resources devoted by parents to their children's education. We construct a composite birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family's educational resources. We find that they are not, and that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Controlling for parental family income, parental age at birth and family level attributes, we find that children from larger families have lower levels of education and that there is in addition a separate negative birth order effect. In contrast to Black, Devereux and Kelvanes (2005), the family size effect does not vanish once we control for birth order. Our findings are robust to a number of specification checks."

Again, I'm the PP who knows a family of 6 successful adults. The answer was hundreds of million of $ trust fund, individual nannies and tutors and Deerfield boarding for all. The drawback was one of the daughters doing so much coke in college, because nannies are not parents. It's impossible to have quality one on one time with more than two. Just some bedtime reading and homework help would get to 1 hour per child, so that's 4 hours daily minimum. Add dinner, jobs, sports, school etc.

This is the only family you know with more than two kids where the kids are doing well?
My mom is one of ten. She grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. All ten kids are more or less successful. 6 are very successful in DCUM terms and are professionals and business owners. The other four are a teacher, bank manager, builder/contractor, and farmer. They all have long lasting marriages and kids are doing well.
My babysitter is one of 10. All of her older siblings have gone to college, and she will go too. The oldest two are married to really nice people and have children of their own.
I can think of a few large families where one or two siblings are messed up, but I can think of a few small families where that’s true as well.

Yes, but I'm younger. The wealth gap has increased significantly since the 1970s and the college costs are out of control. What worked in the 1970s - 1990s is no longer sustainable now.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/price-of-college-increasing-almost-8-times-faster-than-wages/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have four kids.
I do bedtime reading with all of them together. We roll out sleeping bags on the floor, and I sit in the poang chair in my oldest son’s room. After that, the younger two go to bed, and DH and I talk for a while with the older two, sometimes all together. Sometimes 1:1.

I usually make dinner and help with homework simultaneously. Kids don’t need you hovering over them while they do their homework, but they need you to be available if they have questions.

They do have to be more independent than some of their peers. We taught them to ride bikes early and showed them how to get places they want to go. They have to be responsible for a lot of their own things. They have to help out around the house.

Hence my point that you cannot spend quality time one-to-one. Research from different countries points to the fact that they will be less successful, due to less individual attention and resources, than their peers from smaller families. I absolutely agree with you that they have to be more independent, regardless of their personalities. It's a survival skill; even my second child is more independent than my first.

So why didn’t you stick with one then? You’ve just given us all the research showing why you should have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have four kids.
I do bedtime reading with all of them together. We roll out sleeping bags on the floor, and I sit in the poang chair in my oldest son’s room. After that, the younger two go to bed, and DH and I talk for a while with the older two, sometimes all together. Sometimes 1:1.

I usually make dinner and help with homework simultaneously. Kids don’t need you hovering over them while they do their homework, but they need you to be available if they have questions.

They do have to be more independent than some of their peers. We taught them to ride bikes early and showed them how to get places they want to go. They have to be responsible for a lot of their own things. They have to help out around the house.

Hence my point that you cannot spend quality time one-to-one. Research from different countries points to the fact that they will be less successful, due to less individual attention and resources, than their peers from smaller families. I absolutely agree with you that they have to be more independent, regardless of their personalities. It's a survival skill; even my second child is more independent than my first.

So why didn’t you stick with one then? You’ve just given us all the research showing why you should have.

I'm one of 4 and I have 2. All my other siblings have 1. My H has only one sibling. We're successful in part because my H had no student loans and my ILs gifted us $ for our first home. My kids have $ for college. We both come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds but my ILs saved more. I'm very close to one of my siblings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have four kids.
I do bedtime reading with all of them together. We roll out sleeping bags on the floor, and I sit in the poang chair in my oldest son’s room. After that, the younger two go to bed, and DH and I talk for a while with the older two, sometimes all together. Sometimes 1:1.

I usually make dinner and help with homework simultaneously. Kids don’t need you hovering over them while they do their homework, but they need you to be available if they have questions.

They do have to be more independent than some of their peers. We taught them to ride bikes early and showed them how to get places they want to go. They have to be responsible for a lot of their own things. They have to help out around the house.

Hence my point that you cannot spend quality time one-to-one. Research from different countries points to the fact that they will be less successful, due to less individual attention and resources, than their peers from smaller families. I absolutely agree with you that they have to be more independent, regardless of their personalities. It's a survival skill; even my second child is more independent than my first.

Sure you can spend quality time one on one. It comes down to priorities.

Additionally: too much one on one time isn’t necessarily a good thing. Ask any singleton.

I’m a working mom of 4. DH and I spend waaaay more quality time with our kids than most of the families with only 2 kids we know. We’re hanging out as a family while they’re galavanting around town for girls night out, golfing all flipping day with the guys, multiple date nights each week, etc. These smaller families aren’t necessarily closer either. Many stopped at two because they didn’t want the added cost or inconvenience. Interestingly, all of these families have nannies and housekeepers and lawn services.

I know more than one family with just two perfectly catered to kids who needed to quickly teach them how to cook and do their own laundry before sending them off to college. That doesn’t happen in a family of 4. Having life skills isn’t the same thing as developing survival skills due to neglect.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At my private school in the Midwest, tuition is free after kid 4 if you have 3 kids enrolled (PreK-12th). So that takes some of the financial burden, and you can push out a few more.

Yeah St Louis Catholic school is 400 bucks for each additional kid after 3. And the 2nd and 3rd are cheap too.

At the Catholic school I attended, if one of the parents works at the school as a teacher or secretary or admin, tuition is free.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, they better be rich. They are going to have to pay over a million dollars in college tuition alone.

Parents should help kids with it if they can, but there’s no law that parents “have to” pay for any college. I wish that were a law; I wouldn’t be drowning in state school loans still!

Yep, several posters here with large families cannot afford to pay for college. Then you read on the money & finance board how hard it is to get ahead, the overwhelming feeling of not being able to afford a house, the envy for those who got a better start because of family resources.

This is national and international research. There is simply not enough attention to go to some many kids and they suffer

Researchers from the University of Houston and the London School of Economics recently evaluated 26 years of data for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank. They found siblings had lowered cognitive abilities and increased behavioral problems with each added child in the family. Girls tended to suffer more cognitive setbacks and have a higher risk of teen pregnancies; boys developed more acting-out behavior.

And, the researchers found, those difficulties persisted into adulthood. Adults from large families tended to have lower levels of education, lower earnings, and more criminal behavior, according to The Washington Post.

But what constitutes larger families? I’m not convinced 4 kids trigger poor outcomes.

I’m one of 4 kids. Everyone got a degree. Nobody is struggling. Two of us make six figures, the other two are SAHPs.

I have 4 kids. My kids have passports and love to travel.

More than 3 is large family. The academic achievement drops significantly with the 3rd. Search pubmed.

More: "Empirical studies have consistently reported a negative correlation between number of children in the family and intelligence test scores (Belmont 8c Marolla, 1973; Dandes 8c Dow, 1969; Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970). Research relating family characteristics to academic performance found the same pattern as with intelligence, with children from smaller families having higher achievement test scores or grades than children from larger families (Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970; Schachter, 1963). "

"Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and 'quality'. Family size might adversely affect the production of child quality within a family. A number of arguments also suggest that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of the resources devoted by parents to their children's education. We construct a composite birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family's educational resources. We find that they are not, and that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Controlling for parental family income, parental age at birth and family level attributes, we find that children from larger families have lower levels of education and that there is in addition a separate negative birth order effect. In contrast to Black, Devereux and Kelvanes (2005), the family size effect does not vanish once we control for birth order. Our findings are robust to a number of specification checks."

Again, I'm the PP who knows a family of 6 successful adults. The answer was hundreds of million of $ trust fund, individual nannies and tutors and Deerfield boarding for all. The drawback was one of the daughters doing so much coke in college, because nannies are not parents. It's impossible to have quality one on one time with more than two. Just some bedtime reading and homework help would get to 1 hour per child, so that's 4 hours daily minimum. Add dinner, jobs, sports, school etc.

This is the only family you know with more than two kids where the kids are doing well?
My mom is one of ten. She grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. All ten kids are more or less successful. 6 are very successful in DCUM terms and are professionals and business owners. The other four are a teacher, bank manager, builder/contractor, and farmer. They all have long lasting marriages and kids are doing well.
My babysitter is one of 10. All of her older siblings have gone to college, and she will go too. The oldest two are married to really nice people and have children of their own.
I can think of a few large families where one or two siblings are messed up, but I can think of a few small families where that’s true as well.

Yes, but I'm younger. The wealth gap has increased significantly since the 1970s and the college costs are out of control. What worked in the 1970s - 1990s is no longer sustainable now.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/price-of-college-increasing-almost-8-times-faster-than-wages/

Yep. A lot of parents posting here had kids from 1996-2005ish, and that’s a different generation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, they better be rich. They are going to have to pay over a million dollars in college tuition alone.

Parents should help kids with it if they can, but there’s no law that parents “have to” pay for any college. I wish that were a law; I wouldn’t be drowning in state school loans still!

Yep, several posters here with large families cannot afford to pay for college. Then you read on the money & finance board how hard it is to get ahead, the overwhelming feeling of not being able to afford a house, the envy for those who got a better start because of family resources.

This is national and international research. There is simply not enough attention to go to some many kids and they suffer

Researchers from the University of Houston and the London School of Economics recently evaluated 26 years of data for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank. They found siblings had lowered cognitive abilities and increased behavioral problems with each added child in the family. Girls tended to suffer more cognitive setbacks and have a higher risk of teen pregnancies; boys developed more acting-out behavior.

And, the researchers found, those difficulties persisted into adulthood. Adults from large families tended to have lower levels of education, lower earnings, and more criminal behavior, according to The Washington Post.

But what constitutes larger families? I’m not convinced 4 kids trigger poor outcomes.

I’m one of 4 kids. Everyone got a degree. Nobody is struggling. Two of us make six figures, the other two are SAHPs.

I have 4 kids. My kids have passports and love to travel.

More than 3 is large family. The academic achievement drops significantly with the 3rd. Search pubmed.

More: "Empirical studies have consistently reported a negative correlation between number of children in the family and intelligence test scores (Belmont 8c Marolla, 1973; Dandes 8c Dow, 1969; Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970). Research relating family characteristics to academic performance found the same pattern as with intelligence, with children from smaller families having higher achievement test scores or grades than children from larger families (Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970; Schachter, 1963). "

"Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and 'quality'. Family size might adversely affect the production of child quality within a family. A number of arguments also suggest that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of the resources devoted by parents to their children's education. We construct a composite birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family's educational resources. We find that they are not, and that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Controlling for parental family income, parental age at birth and family level attributes, we find that children from larger families have lower levels of education and that there is in addition a separate negative birth order effect. In contrast to Black, Devereux and Kelvanes (2005), the family size effect does not vanish once we control for birth order. Our findings are robust to a number of specification checks."

Again, I'm the PP who knows a family of 6 successful adults. The answer was hundreds of million of $ trust fund, individual nannies and tutors and Deerfield boarding for all. The drawback was one of the daughters doing so much coke in college, because nannies are not parents. It's impossible to have quality one on one time with more than two. Just some bedtime reading and homework help would get to 1 hour per child, so that's 4 hours daily minimum. Add dinner, jobs, sports, school etc.

This is the only family you know with more than two kids where the kids are doing well?
My mom is one of ten. She grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. All ten kids are more or less successful. 6 are very successful in DCUM terms and are professionals and business owners. The other four are a teacher, bank manager, builder/contractor, and farmer. They all have long lasting marriages and kids are doing well.
My babysitter is one of 10. All of her older siblings have gone to college, and she will go too. The oldest two are married to really nice people and have children of their own.
I can think of a few large families where one or two siblings are messed up, but I can think of a few small families where that’s true as well.

Yes, but I'm younger. The wealth gap has increased significantly since the 1970s and the college costs are out of control. What worked in the 1970s - 1990s is no longer sustainable now.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/price-of-college-increasing-almost-8-times-faster-than-wages/

Yep. A lot of parents posting here had kids from 1996-2005ish, and that’s a different generation.

Shrug.

I had my 4 kids between 2004 and 2012.

In-state tuition is still affordable.

I honestly think the silver spoon approach to parenting two kids can be detrimental. Kids won’t learn to hustle if you helicopter and placate their whims.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, they better be rich. They are going to have to pay over a million dollars in college tuition alone.

Parents should help kids with it if they can, but there’s no law that parents “have to” pay for any college. I wish that were a law; I wouldn’t be drowning in state school loans still!

Yep, several posters here with large families cannot afford to pay for college. Then you read on the money & finance board how hard it is to get ahead, the overwhelming feeling of not being able to afford a house, the envy for those who got a better start because of family resources.

This is national and international research. There is simply not enough attention to go to some many kids and they suffer

Researchers from the University of Houston and the London School of Economics recently evaluated 26 years of data for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank. They found siblings had lowered cognitive abilities and increased behavioral problems with each added child in the family. Girls tended to suffer more cognitive setbacks and have a higher risk of teen pregnancies; boys developed more acting-out behavior.

And, the researchers found, those difficulties persisted into adulthood. Adults from large families tended to have lower levels of education, lower earnings, and more criminal behavior, according to The Washington Post.

But what constitutes larger families? I’m not convinced 4 kids trigger poor outcomes.

I’m one of 4 kids. Everyone got a degree. Nobody is struggling. Two of us make six figures, the other two are SAHPs.

I have 4 kids. My kids have passports and love to travel.

More than 3 is large family. The academic achievement drops significantly with the 3rd. Search pubmed.

More: "Empirical studies have consistently reported a negative correlation between number of children in the family and intelligence test scores (Belmont 8c Marolla, 1973; Dandes 8c Dow, 1969; Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970). Research relating family characteristics to academic performance found the same pattern as with intelligence, with children from smaller families having higher achievement test scores or grades than children from larger families (Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970; Schachter, 1963). "

"Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and 'quality'. Family size might adversely affect the production of child quality within a family. A number of arguments also suggest that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of the resources devoted by parents to their children's education. We construct a composite birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family's educational resources. We find that they are not, and that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Controlling for parental family income, parental age at birth and family level attributes, we find that children from larger families have lower levels of education and that there is in addition a separate negative birth order effect. In contrast to Black, Devereux and Kelvanes (2005), the family size effect does not vanish once we control for birth order. Our findings are robust to a number of specification checks."

Again, I'm the PP who knows a family of 6 successful adults. The answer was hundreds of million of $ trust fund, individual nannies and tutors and Deerfield boarding for all. The drawback was one of the daughters doing so much coke in college, because nannies are not parents. It's impossible to have quality one on one time with more than two. Just some bedtime reading and homework help would get to 1 hour per child, so that's 4 hours daily minimum. Add dinner, jobs, sports, school etc.

This is the only family you know with more than two kids where the kids are doing well?
My mom is one of ten. She grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. All ten kids are more or less successful. 6 are very successful in DCUM terms and are professionals and business owners. The other four are a teacher, bank manager, builder/contractor, and farmer. They all have long lasting marriages and kids are doing well.
My babysitter is one of 10. All of her older siblings have gone to college, and she will go too. The oldest two are married to really nice people and have children of their own.
I can think of a few large families where one or two siblings are messed up, but I can think of a few small families where that’s true as well.

Yes, but I'm younger. The wealth gap has increased significantly since the 1970s and the college costs are out of control. What worked in the 1970s - 1990s is no longer sustainable now.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/price-of-college-increasing-almost-8-times-faster-than-wages/

Yep. A lot of parents posting here had kids from 1996-2005ish, and that’s a different generation.

Shrug.

I had my 4 kids between 2004 and 2012.

In-state tuition is still affordable.

I honestly think the silver spoon approach to parenting two kids can be detrimental. Kids won’t learn to hustle if you helicopter and placate their whims.

It's kind of disheartening equating quality time spent with a child on an individual basis as detrimental; again, I was one of 4 and you are absolutely wrong. For most people, 80K for college is a lot, hence why the student loan debt is out of control.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, they better be rich. They are going to have to pay over a million dollars in college tuition alone.

Parents should help kids with it if they can, but there’s no law that parents “have to” pay for any college. I wish that were a law; I wouldn’t be drowning in state school loans still!

Yep, several posters here with large families cannot afford to pay for college. Then you read on the money & finance board how hard it is to get ahead, the overwhelming feeling of not being able to afford a house, the envy for those who got a better start because of family resources.

This is national and international research. There is simply not enough attention to go to some many kids and they suffer

Researchers from the University of Houston and the London School of Economics recently evaluated 26 years of data for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank. They found siblings had lowered cognitive abilities and increased behavioral problems with each added child in the family. Girls tended to suffer more cognitive setbacks and have a higher risk of teen pregnancies; boys developed more acting-out behavior.

And, the researchers found, those difficulties persisted into adulthood. Adults from large families tended to have lower levels of education, lower earnings, and more criminal behavior, according to The Washington Post.

But what constitutes larger families? I’m not convinced 4 kids trigger poor outcomes.

I’m one of 4 kids. Everyone got a degree. Nobody is struggling. Two of us make six figures, the other two are SAHPs.

I have 4 kids. My kids have passports and love to travel.

More than 3 is large family. The academic achievement drops significantly with the 3rd. Search pubmed.

More: "Empirical studies have consistently reported a negative correlation between number of children in the family and intelligence test scores (Belmont 8c Marolla, 1973; Dandes 8c Dow, 1969; Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970). Research relating family characteristics to academic performance found the same pattern as with intelligence, with children from smaller families having higher achievement test scores or grades than children from larger families (Eysenck 8c Cookson, 1970; Schachter, 1963). "

"Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and 'quality'. Family size might adversely affect the production of child quality within a family. A number of arguments also suggest that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of the resources devoted by parents to their children's education. We construct a composite birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family's educational resources. We find that they are not, and that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Controlling for parental family income, parental age at birth and family level attributes, we find that children from larger families have lower levels of education and that there is in addition a separate negative birth order effect. In contrast to Black, Devereux and Kelvanes (2005), the family size effect does not vanish once we control for birth order. Our findings are robust to a number of specification checks."

Again, I'm the PP who knows a family of 6 successful adults. The answer was hundreds of million of $ trust fund, individual nannies and tutors and Deerfield boarding for all. The drawback was one of the daughters doing so much coke in college, because nannies are not parents. It's impossible to have quality one on one time with more than two. Just some bedtime reading and homework help would get to 1 hour per child, so that's 4 hours daily minimum. Add dinner, jobs, sports, school etc.

This is the only family you know with more than two kids where the kids are doing well?
My mom is one of ten. She grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. All ten kids are more or less successful. 6 are very successful in DCUM terms and are professionals and business owners. The other four are a teacher, bank manager, builder/contractor, and farmer. They all have long lasting marriages and kids are doing well.
My babysitter is one of 10. All of her older siblings have gone to college, and she will go too. The oldest two are married to really nice people and have children of their own.
I can think of a few large families where one or two siblings are messed up, but I can think of a few small families where that’s true as well.

Yes, but I'm younger. The wealth gap has increased significantly since the 1970s and the college costs are out of control. What worked in the 1970s - 1990s is no longer sustainable now.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/price-of-college-increasing-almost-8-times-faster-than-wages/

Yep. A lot of parents posting here had kids from 1996-2005ish, and that’s a different generation.

Shrug.

I had my 4 kids between 2004 and 2012.

In-state tuition is still affordable.

I honestly think the silver spoon approach to parenting two kids can be detrimental. Kids won’t learn to hustle if you helicopter and placate their whims.

$35k/yr for most people, especially x4 kids and 4 years each is not affordable for most people and means loans. Bless your heart.