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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was the second oldest of 5. My older sibling has 3 kids, I have 4, the third sibling has 4 and the two youngest aren’t married yet. Seems like the people who are thinking large families are bad had bad parents, which can occur in any size family. Was I responsible for helping watch my siblings? Sure. Was it overwhelming? No. It was expected that we helped out in our family. I will say, when my parents wanted to do fun things they would pay us for babysitting (think- if my mom needed to take a younger sibling to the doctors office, I was expected to babysit other kids. If my parents were doing date night I would get paid to babysit)

My folks weren’t rich either. My mom stayed home and my dad was in education. We didn’t take lavish vacations. We were able to do all the basic activities though (sports, music) though I guess not insane levels of travel sports. It never occurred to me to think me being able to play more travel sports and maybe getting to go to a third tier university to play sports should have been prioritized over my siblings existence.

My own (4) kids are 6 to newborn and while we do have financial resources we obviously will need to ration time. That means our kids will not be able to do all sorts of activities. If they show talent or inclination in a specific area we will obviously try to develop that but within reason. My kids are highly unlikely to be professional athletes based on the genetics they received so it’s weird to prioritize the insanely intense parenting culture in the DC to them having siblings.

Will they be required to help out around the house? Of course. Will they have responsibilities to each other? Again, of course. I enjoyed and was proud growing up with a family identity that we were the “X’s” and this is how we did things. [/quote]

I don’t think the fact that you all have lots of kids proves that you had a happy childhood. How religious are you?[/quote]

Well, there’s a constant refrain that older kids don’t have lots of kids cause being an older child in a big family is miserable. At least in my family the older children have had decent sized families.

But can I ‘prove’ my other siblings had happy childhoods? No. I know I did. I’ve never heard much grumbling from my siblings so I assume they did as well, or at least non-miserable childhoods.

Again, I think this is much more about the parents rather than the number of kids. I get that there are parents of two who don’t have the capability to have more than two. I don’t know why they project that on others. And I’m sure some who have more than 2 share that incompetence and their children are miserable. It’s just not my experience having grown up in a big family.[/quote]

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