Tim Carney in the Post: The Ideal Number of Kids is Four (at a minimum)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you do it right, one is enough.

I'm not against big families but I do think it's easier to mitigate the negative aspects of having 1 or 2 than to mitigate the negative things about having 4 or more. Like a family with an only child can do things to address stuff like entitlement or loneliness.

I think having a very large family is a bit like roulette. If it hits and everything works out, the bounty is plentiful. But a lot can go wrong. I grew up in a big family where a lot went wrong. I chose to have a small family and am thoughtful about things that might be harder with fewer kids.

Also, all of these arguments assume that a family is an island unto itself. That's not true. How do you compare an only child who lives 20 minutes away from a gaggle of cousins they see all the time, with a child who has 4 siblings but no extended family to speak of or whose extended family are all very far away? Or kids in a family where the parents are social and get together with friends and neighbors (and their kids) frequently versus a family that is insular and rarely spends time with other families? A lot of the arguments about large or small families hinge on this idea that kids are spending all their time with just their immediate family. That's actually not how a lot of families operate.

This is an interesting point. My husband grew up one of four but they were very insulated and had no family around. He enjoyed his childhood but he’s the sort of guy not to complain about anything. They also had no major health issues / special needs.

On the flip side, I was one of two but we had tons of extended family. I grew up in a large immigrant community and we had so many people at our holiday events and it exposed me to all different types of people/ experiences.

I will say the biggest difference as I get older is that extended family doesn’t show up for you the same way sibling will (or feel the need too) but to counter that I feel like my husbands parents are tapped out trying to balance the needs of all their adult children (has this been discussed yet?). I know people talk about the teen years being hard but not there is also an expectation that you show up for your adult kids too. For example, my in laws will have to balance moving one of their kids out of their apartment, trying to launch their youngest and balancing multiple grandkids and helping out. It does create some bad blood if one kid gets more than the other. So something else to consider.

I think this is a fair point. I am one of the posters from a family with four children, and as adults, two are extremely demanding of my parents time and attention. It has always been the case that the “launched” adult children (my sibling and I) are sort of left alone because our other two siblings require a lot of attention. BUT I don’t see that is a lot different from families with two kids…if one is total chaos, the other will likely receive less attention and resources as a result.

There are lots of two kid families like this. My sibling was on her second marriage at 36 and has struggled to maintain relationships (friends and family as well as romantic) and steady employment, the latter despite graduating cum laude from a SLAC and receiving a desirable professional degree. My husband is one of four and his siblings all had struggles in their 20s despite being high achievers but more or less figured things out and are thriving more than my sister is in their 30s. This is probably due in part to the fact that my husband’s parents’ are very wealthy and have unlimited resources and my parents do not. But this is the problem with doing these types of comparisons. Family size is only one factor that might influence a child’s ability to achieve and life course.

The quality of parenting when children are young matters a great deal as does mental health and substance use when it comes to a positive life course. Neurotic and overbearing parents who emphasize achievement over a blend of self-acceptance/personal fulfillment and a good work ethic are going to be more damaging to most kids than someone who takes a more balanced approach to parenting.

I also am struggling to understand how asking an older to child to take some responsibility for a younger sibling, whether it to be driving a younger sibling to a practice or helping them with homework, is going to negatively influence their life course to the extent suggested in the comments I’ve read. My older sister went to boarding school and received her license late because of that. I would occasionally drive her places and pick things up for her when she was home from college and I was in high school and it didn’t scar me for life. I also babysat younger cousins (sometimes for free) and this allowed me to then get paying babysitting jobs outside my extended family. My husband also drove his siblings places (he had two younger siblings) and babysat one of them occasionally and he’s never said anything negative about it.

try being a 9 year old girl holding your screaming baby brother while you set the table. try having summer camp cancelled because you need to be available to babysit at 12.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Poor and stupid people will continue to sh!t out more kids for us to support.

Those kids are more valuable than your worthless, haggard self.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you do it right, one is enough.

I'm not against big families but I do think it's easier to mitigate the negative aspects of having 1 or 2 than to mitigate the negative things about having 4 or more. Like a family with an only child can do things to address stuff like entitlement or loneliness.

I think having a very large family is a bit like roulette. If it hits and everything works out, the bounty is plentiful. But a lot can go wrong. I grew up in a big family where a lot went wrong. I chose to have a small family and am thoughtful about things that might be harder with fewer kids.

Also, all of these arguments assume that a family is an island unto itself. That's not true. How do you compare an only child who lives 20 minutes away from a gaggle of cousins they see all the time, with a child who has 4 siblings but no extended family to speak of or whose extended family are all very far away? Or kids in a family where the parents are social and get together with friends and neighbors (and their kids) frequently versus a family that is insular and rarely spends time with other families? A lot of the arguments about large or small families hinge on this idea that kids are spending all their time with just their immediate family. That's actually not how a lot of families operate.

This is an interesting point. My husband grew up one of four but they were very insulated and had no family around. He enjoyed his childhood but he’s the sort of guy not to complain about anything. They also had no major health issues / special needs.

On the flip side, I was one of two but we had tons of extended family. I grew up in a large immigrant community and we had so many people at our holiday events and it exposed me to all different types of people/ experiences.

I will say the biggest difference as I get older is that extended family doesn’t show up for you the same way sibling will (or feel the need too) but to counter that I feel like my husbands parents are tapped out trying to balance the needs of all their adult children (has this been discussed yet?). I know people talk about the teen years being hard but not there is also an expectation that you show up for your adult kids too. For example, my in laws will have to balance moving one of their kids out of their apartment, trying to launch their youngest and balancing multiple grandkids and helping out. It does create some bad blood if one kid gets more than the other. So something else to consider.

I think this is a fair point. I am one of the posters from a family with four children, and as adults, two are extremely demanding of my parents time and attention. It has always been the case that the “launched” adult children (my sibling and I) are sort of left alone because our other two siblings require a lot of attention. BUT I don’t see that is a lot different from families with two kids…if one is total chaos, the other will likely receive less attention and resources as a result.

2 adult kids vs 4-5 adult kids needs are very different. Most people can handle two adult kid needs even if one has alot of needs.

+1

My DH is one of two with a sibling who is "failure to launch" (still lives when the parents in 40s) and has a lot of mental health problems. My DH sometimes does feel resentful of this dying, but his parents are still in our lives, remember our kids' birthdays, call regularly, and seem to care about our lives, even though much of there energy (and money) goes to my BIL.

I am one of four with no failure to launch siblings, but two siblings with some major issues (one divorced, the other has mental health/substance abuse issues) and a third sibling who has a good life but has very high expectations from our parents in terms of attention (and financial support) and a ton of resentment towards the two wayward siblings for not being able to get it together.

It is almost like I don't have a family. My parents don't visit, don't call. Nor do my siblings. When we visit them, they simply complain to us about one another or try to get us to pay for things. My kids barely know them, have almost no relationship with their cousins on my side. My parents mostly use me as moral support for dealing with my siblings (something I've started backing away from, thanks to therapy).

Two kids with one troubled kid can be hard, but is manageable. 4+ with multiple high needs kids? If you aren't one of the high needs kids, good luck. You're on your own.

[Anonymous]

Listening to guys talk about how happy their wives are as SAHM's reminds me of listening to guys in the foreign service talk about how happy their wives were to tag along and support their careers. In both cases, you should probabl ask the people actually making the sacrifices.
Often the same with military wives -- my wife just loves the fact that we live abroad in Germany and she's getting to see Europe, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

This resonates with me, as #5 of 6 kids. My parent-pleasing superpower was never needing anything from them. It worked out beautifully for them, but not so much for me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have to have a DCUM thread on this one, even though we all know how it's going to go. I think it might be legally required. Anyway, here's the opinion piece from Tim Carney of the American Enterprise Institute, about how having four or more kids is actually ideal and easier for parents and better for kids: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/30/family-size-big-families/

Key points for people to jump all over:

- Carney claims raising 4+ kids is easier than raising fewer because his older kids do a lot of the parenting

- Carney cites some stats about how kids who get more intensive parenting (he assumes only kids and kids with just one sibling get more intensive parenting as a rule) are more anxious and unhappy

- He also cites a study that claims the happiness of mothers, specifically, declines with each subsequent child up until 3 (these moms are the least happy, according to the study) but then mothers of 4 are happier than all the others. He argues this is because of the efficiency of older kids helping with parenting and a gaggle of kids being able to entertain each other, and also that having more kids forces parents to do less because they can't do intensive parenting with that many kids

And some stuff Carney does not address:

- The financial costs of raising kids

- The impact on mothers' financial well being and career prospects

- Whether more kids ever results in neglect

- How special needs kids or other unexpected family stressors might play into this dynamic

Have at it, folks.

He doesn't consider finances or impact on parents' careers? That's pretty worthless analysis then.

His underlying assumption is that the mother is at home caring for the kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you do it right, one is enough.

I'm not against big families but I do think it's easier to mitigate the negative aspects of having 1 or 2 than to mitigate the negative things about having 4 or more. Like a family with an only child can do things to address stuff like entitlement or loneliness.

I think having a very large family is a bit like roulette. If it hits and everything works out, the bounty is plentiful. But a lot can go wrong. I grew up in a big family where a lot went wrong. I chose to have a small family and am thoughtful about things that might be harder with fewer kids.

Also, all of these arguments assume that a family is an island unto itself. That's not true. How do you compare an only child who lives 20 minutes away from a gaggle of cousins they see all the time, with a child who has 4 siblings but no extended family to speak of or whose extended family are all very far away? Or kids in a family where the parents are social and get together with friends and neighbors (and their kids) frequently versus a family that is insular and rarely spends time with other families? A lot of the arguments about large or small families hinge on this idea that kids are spending all their time with just their immediate family. That's actually not how a lot of families operate.

This is an interesting point. My husband grew up one of four but they were very insulated and had no family around. He enjoyed his childhood but he’s the sort of guy not to complain about anything. They also had no major health issues / special needs.

On the flip side, I was one of two but we had tons of extended family. I grew up in a large immigrant community and we had so many people at our holiday events and it exposed me to all different types of people/ experiences.

I will say the biggest difference as I get older is that extended family doesn’t show up for you the same way sibling will (or feel the need too) but to counter that I feel like my husbands parents are tapped out trying to balance the needs of all their adult children (has this been discussed yet?). I know people talk about the teen years being hard but not there is also an expectation that you show up for your adult kids too. For example, my in laws will have to balance moving one of their kids out of their apartment, trying to launch their youngest and balancing multiple grandkids and helping out. It does create some bad blood if one kid gets more than the other. So something else to consider.

I think this is a fair point. I am one of the posters from a family with four children, and as adults, two are extremely demanding of my parents time and attention. It has always been the case that the “launched” adult children (my sibling and I) are sort of left alone because our other two siblings require a lot of attention. BUT I don’t see that is a lot different from families with two kids…if one is total chaos, the other will likely receive less attention and resources as a result.

2 adult kids vs 4-5 adult kids needs are very different. Most people can handle two adult kid needs even if one has alot of needs.

+1

My DH is one of two with a sibling who is "failure to launch" (still lives when the parents in 40s) and has a lot of mental health problems. My DH sometimes does feel resentful of this dying, but his parents are still in our lives, remember our kids' birthdays, call regularly, and seem to care about our lives, even though much of there energy (and money) goes to my BIL.

I am one of four with no failure to launch siblings, but two siblings with some major issues (one divorced, the other has mental health/substance abuse issues) and a third sibling who has a good life but has very high expectations from our parents in terms of attention (and financial support) and a ton of resentment towards the two wayward siblings for not being able to get it together.

It is almost like I don't have a family. My parents don't visit, don't call. Nor do my siblings. When we visit them, they simply complain to us about one another or try to get us to pay for things. My kids barely know them, have almost no relationship with their cousins on my side. My parents mostly use me as moral support for dealing with my siblings (something I've started backing away from, thanks to therapy).

Two kids with one troubled kid can be hard, but is manageable. 4+ with multiple high needs kids? If you aren't one of the high needs kids, good luck. You're on your own.

PP- I think that because of how expensive and hard it is to launch into adulthood, parents are being asked to continue parenting and supporting their kids into adulthood. That expectation was likely not there before but with the way things are now, I feel bad for parents of 4 or more adult kids who are trying to navigate these expectations. It’s hard to juggle the needs of adult kids without resentment. My in laws try their best but there is always an unevenness. For example, they watched my nephew when he was born for a year but then quickly realized they would have to offer the same to the rest of their likely *many* future grandkid and stopped. But that meant we never had that benefit and kinda resent that one sibling had free child care while we had to pay out of our nose for daycare.

[Anonymous]

Parentification Exhibit A:
Duggar Family Official

This #tbt shows how Jana always wanted to help Mom out! Can you guess who she is feeding? Hint: Look at the date on picture. As a new aunt, I bet she'll have a chance to feed another sweet baby soon!





What Is Parentification?
Parentification occurs when a child takes on developmentally inappropriate levels of responsibility for their family’s emotional, physical, and/or mental well-being. This reverse parenting results in them becoming caregivers before they’re physically, mentally, or emotionally ready for such responsibility.  

When it comes to teenagers, it’s not unusual for a teen to clean the bathroom, hold down a job, or occasionally watch out for younger siblings. When these tasks teach them new skills or how to shoulder responsibility or give them encouragement, they can grow because their parents are the ones who bear final responsibility for the family’s well-being. When teenagers experience a complete role reversal and becomes responsible for the parents’ or younger children’s well-being, however, it can lead to them being parentified, which may lead to trauma.

https://www.embarkbh.com/blog/parenting/parentification/#h-what-is-parentification-nbsp

[Anonymous]

I am the oldest of four and have six kids. I think I was parentified and my oldest doesn't even know how to hold the baby.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mom of five here. It is 100 percent easier to have 5 kids than 3. I found 3 the absolute hardest. Now my older kids entertain and help with the younger kids. The year my third was born was the least happy year of my life. I am now the happiest I have ever been since becoming a mom with my fifth almost turning one. I am way more relaxed and it is 100 percent true that older kids help so much. For example on Saturday mornings I will wake up and my 12 year old has changed my toddler's diaper, turned on his cartoon, and gotten him a bowl of cheerios while I lounge in bed with DH.

What I am looking forward to is parents of 2-3 kids trying to explain why those of us with 4+ don't actually know what we are talking about when we say it's easier and we are happier than you all.

Oh and PS my career is on fire.

Your post made me feel really bad for your older kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you do it right, one is enough.

I'm not against big families but I do think it's easier to mitigate the negative aspects of having 1 or 2 than to mitigate the negative things about having 4 or more. Like a family with an only child can do things to address stuff like entitlement or loneliness.

I think having a very large family is a bit like roulette. If it hits and everything works out, the bounty is plentiful. But a lot can go wrong. I grew up in a big family where a lot went wrong. I chose to have a small family and am thoughtful about things that might be harder with fewer kids.

Also, all of these arguments assume that a family is an island unto itself. That's not true. How do you compare an only child who lives 20 minutes away from a gaggle of cousins they see all the time, with a child who has 4 siblings but no extended family to speak of or whose extended family are all very far away? Or kids in a family where the parents are social and get together with friends and neighbors (and their kids) frequently versus a family that is insular and rarely spends time with other families? A lot of the arguments about large or small families hinge on this idea that kids are spending all their time with just their immediate family. That's actually not how a lot of families operate.

This is an interesting point. My husband grew up one of four but they were very insulated and had no family around. He enjoyed his childhood but he’s the sort of guy not to complain about anything. They also had no major health issues / special needs.

On the flip side, I was one of two but we had tons of extended family. I grew up in a large immigrant community and we had so many people at our holiday events and it exposed me to all different types of people/ experiences.

I will say the biggest difference as I get older is that extended family doesn’t show up for you the same way sibling will (or feel the need too) but to counter that I feel like my husbands parents are tapped out trying to balance the needs of all their adult children (has this been discussed yet?). I know people talk about the teen years being hard but not there is also an expectation that you show up for your adult kids too. For example, my in laws will have to balance moving one of their kids out of their apartment, trying to launch their youngest and balancing multiple grandkids and helping out. It does create some bad blood if one kid gets more than the other. So something else to consider.

I think this is a fair point. I am one of the posters from a family with four children, and as adults, two are extremely demanding of my parents time and attention. It has always been the case that the “launched” adult children (my sibling and I) are sort of left alone because our other two siblings require a lot of attention. BUT I don’t see that is a lot different from families with two kids…if one is total chaos, the other will likely receive less attention and resources as a result.

There are lots of two kid families like this. My sibling was on her second marriage at 36 and has struggled to maintain relationships (friends and family as well as romantic) and steady employment, the latter despite graduating cum laude from a SLAC and receiving a desirable professional degree. My husband is one of four and his siblings all had struggles in their 20s despite being high achievers but more or less figured things out and are thriving more than my sister is in their 30s. This is probably due in part to the fact that my husband’s parents’ are very wealthy and have unlimited resources and my parents do not. But this is the problem with doing these types of comparisons. Family size is only one factor that might influence a child’s ability to achieve and life course.

The quality of parenting when children are young matters a great deal as does mental health and substance use when it comes to a positive life course. Neurotic and overbearing parents who emphasize achievement over a blend of self-acceptance/personal fulfillment and a good work ethic are going to be more damaging to most kids than someone who takes a more balanced approach to parenting.

I also am struggling to understand how asking an older to child to take some responsibility for a younger sibling, whether it to be driving a younger sibling to a practice or helping them with homework, is going to negatively influence their life course to the extent suggested in the comments I’ve read. My older sister went to boarding school and received her license late because of that. I would occasionally drive her places and pick things up for her when she was home from college and I was in high school and it didn’t scar me for life. I also babysat younger cousins (sometimes for free) and this allowed me to then get paying babysitting jobs outside my extended family. My husband also drove his siblings places (he had two younger siblings) and babysat one of them occasionally and he’s never said anything negative about it.

try being a 9 year old girl holding your screaming baby brother while you set the table. try having summer camp cancelled because you need to be available to babysit at 12.

+1

We’re not talking about helping out and doing random things like driving a sibling or doing a few extra chores on busy days, we’re describing the experience of being expected to act as a third parent in our household at the cost of not getting to live our own childhoods. We were not protected from the logistics and the stress that our parents had, but instead were expected to continuously prioritize alleviating their structural stress when we were still children.

For example, I took the SATs at school in 7th grade and got accepted to an academic camp that I would have loved to attend. There were also local options at the local university. Instead of going to a camp that summer, my parents sent me to another state to take care of my aunt and uncle’s older 3 children, my cousins, for a month when their youngest child was born. The justification was because I was “good” at helping out with my own younger siblings, so I was pawned off (not asked and unpaid) as live in help as a middle schooler. My male cousin was only 3 years younger than me, but instead of watching his own siblings-he got to do his own extracurriculars and it was expected that I, the “responsible daughter”, would do the cleaning and childcare for his own family.

As another example, it was my job to keep the entire house clean. I couldn’t go out with my friends unless every room was clean. So I was a middle schooler and high schooler trying to pick up all of my younger siblings’ toddler and preschooler mess just to go hang out with my friends.

Unsurprisingly, throughout my entire childhood, I would wake up from a reoccurring nightmare that my younger siblings needed me to drive them to the hospital and since I couldn’t drive, something terrible would happen to them.

I am pro any size family, since I’ve seen great childhoods come from all sizes between 1 child and 8 children. And parentification can occur even in one to two child families, particularly if a parent has mental health or addiction issues. I also personally have a larger than average family, since while I sound bitter here I ultimately love my siblings and my parents and I am grateful that I have my siblings as built in best friends for life; but, as a result of my childhood experiences, I am very deliberate in what I ask my older children to do and I intentionally try to protect their childhood and development. However it’s just the reality that parents are susceptible to leaning on their oldest as their families get to 5+ kids, especially if those parents weren’t parentified themselves. I’d also add that parentification is driven by only one parent sometimes, and oftentimes it’s the father—which makes it even more frustrating and insiduous, at least from my experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mom of five here. It is 100 percent easier to have 5 kids than 3. I found 3 the absolute hardest. Now my older kids entertain and help with the younger kids. The year my third was born was the least happy year of my life. I am now the happiest I have ever been since becoming a mom with my fifth almost turning one. I am way more relaxed and it is 100 percent true that older kids help so much. For example on Saturday mornings I will wake up and my 12 year old has changed my toddler's diaper, turned on his cartoon, and gotten him a bowl of cheerios while I lounge in bed with DH.

What I am looking forward to is parents of 2-3 kids trying to explain why those of us with 4+ don't actually know what we are talking about when we say it's easier and we are happier than you all.

Oh and PS my career is on fire.

Your post made me feel really bad for your older kids.

Agreed. Lounging In Bed mom’s unashamed bragging about outsourcing her job as a parent to her 12 year old daughter so that her mom can be lazy on Saturday mornings may be the worst possible justification for having children that I’ve ever read on the internet.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mom of five here. It is 100 percent easier to have 5 kids than 3. I found 3 the absolute hardest. Now my older kids entertain and help with the younger kids. The year my third was born was the least happy year of my life. I am now the happiest I have ever been since becoming a mom with my fifth almost turning one. I am way more relaxed and it is 100 percent true that older kids help so much. For example on Saturday mornings I will wake up and my 12 year old has changed my toddler's diaper, turned on his cartoon, and gotten him a bowl of cheerios while I lounge in bed with DH.

What I am looking forward to is parents of 2-3 kids trying to explain why those of us with 4+ don't actually know what we are talking about when we say it's easier and we are happier than you all.

Oh and PS my career is on fire.

Your post made me feel really bad for your older kids.

Agreed. Lounging In Bed mom’s unashamed bragging about outsourcing her job as a parent to her 12 year old daughter so that her mom can be lazy on Saturday mornings may be the worst possible justification for having children that I’ve ever read on the internet.

Pretty bad. The smug, "you don't like to lounge?" Poor kids. 5 of them and a mom that's lazy AF.

[Anonymous]

I wasn't parentified but I was forgotten a lot as a middle child in a big family.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mom of five here. It is 100 percent easier to have 5 kids than 3. I found 3 the absolute hardest. Now my older kids entertain and help with the younger kids. The year my third was born was the least happy year of my life. I am now the happiest I have ever been since becoming a mom with my fifth almost turning one. I am way more relaxed and it is 100 percent true that older kids help so much. For example on Saturday mornings I will wake up and my 12 year old has changed my toddler's diaper, turned on his cartoon, and gotten him a bowl of cheerios while I lounge in bed with DH.

What I am looking forward to is parents of 2-3 kids trying to explain why those of us with 4+ don't actually know what we are talking about when we say it's easier and we are happier than you all.

Oh and PS my career is on fire.

Your post made me feel really bad for your older kids.

Agreed. Lounging In Bed mom’s unashamed bragging about outsourcing her job as a parent to her 12 year old daughter so that her mom can be lazy on Saturday mornings may be the worst possible justification for having children that I’ve ever read on the internet.

Pretty bad. The smug, "you don't like to lounge?" Poor kids. 5 of them and a mom that's lazy AF.

There were only 2 of us-me and my sister- and my lazy AF mom pulled the same crap…didn’t bother to feed us healthy food most of the time and mostly ignored us. I was responsible for my younger sister and as an adult, I was informed by my parents that I’m basically a surrogate parent for my sister since she has some issues and failed to launch.