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

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I go to a conservative Catholic Church with many families that have 5-10 kids. The moms are … way better than you think and are for the most part wonderful. They do not keep an eagle eye on their kids at all times, but did your mom? This kind of “attention” leads to really anxious and entitled kids. The hardcore catholic moms don’t do screens, that’s for sure.

What matters more than raw number is birth spacing. After the first kid or two, it’s important to slow down so that everybody has a chance to be the baby for a few years. I know a family (not at the church, actually — a doctor and a part time lawyer) that is expecting number 5; the oldest might not be seven yet. That looks rough on everybody to me.[/quote]

You know families with 10 kids where none of the kids are being neglected? Babe, no. Anyone with 10 kids is 100% neglecting some kids.

And the trend with large families is to have them as close together as possible, btw. I do not know why, but every family I know with 4 or more kids has them all within like 7-8 years. Even the 3 kid families seem very big on small gaps which I just do not get. Maybe it's this idea that if you have them all at once, you will move through the phases more in lock step (ie not have a HS and a kindergartener at the same time)? I guess that makes sense for 2 kids but the idea of having 5 kids under age 10 sounds like hell on earth. And then imagine having 5 teenagers... at once. I just cannot.[/quote]

Smaller spacing is happening due to waiting longer to have kids. 5 teenagers sounds fun for the teens imo[/quote]

We're talking about Catholics and people who are extremely family-oriented who marry early. They aren't clustering the kids because they waited too long to have kids. They are clustering them because they are trying to fit in 5-10 kids before the age of 35. If you believe you have some kind of divine dictate to have as many kids as possible, then even if you get married right out of college, you need to start cranking out a kid every other year.

Especially because the people who think like this also often buy into a lot of myths about female fertility (some of them are terrified about "having" to have kids over the age of 35, and are shocked by people like me who have all their kids past 35). They think older moms are gross and that their kids all have genetic disorders. Which is why people like Tim Carney and his wife magically stop having children (meaning, discover birth control for the first time) in they mid-30s. But they think it's immoral for a 20-something woman to use BC to avoid having children until her 30s because she wants to focus on career or doesn't personally feel ready to be a mom.

It's an entire lifestyle centered on biblical dictates and has little or nothing to do with doing what is best for kids or mothers. It's about religion and politics, not people.[/quote]

This is so weirdly backward. People don't have kids because religion says so. Religion says to have kids because there are no children of people who don't have kids. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics