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

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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]I don't know anyone that grew up in a large family as one of the older children that has their own large family. Generally, the older siblings who had to help parent their younger siblings are not happy that they had to do it.

Younger siblings on the other hand...I know a few of these, too, and a lot of them wanted and have large families. Probably because they were the younger siblings and got a lot of attention from a lot of people. They didn't have to do the work.[/quote]

Oh, large families can screw it up in a myriad of ways, it's not always a joy for the younger kids either. In my family with 4 kids, my older sister went on to have 4 kids... but she is now pretty miserable and has a bad relationship with our parents, so I don't know what that says about her experience. She complains a lot about her childhood.

The two youngest (me and my brother) didn't enjoy the experience either. I wound up often being tasked with caring for him even though I'm just 3 years older (getting the "you're a girl so your more mature" bonus) while my parents did stuff with the the older kids, or even when my mom just slowly melted down over the course of several years and fell into a deep depression. I have almost no fond memories of my family having a great time together, and my sibling relationships are all quite strained. I can imagine parents who would do a good job with four, but my parents were totally overwhelmed and didn't parent any of us well, nor did they take great care of themselves. Like a lot of families with a lot of kids, they started very young (too young, they really had no idea what they were doing) and had absolutely no idea what they were getting into, despite coming from big families as well. I think they would have struggled with parenting no matter what, but the problems might have been mitigated had they stopped at one or two. I don't think they were ever in danger of becoming intense helicopter parents.[/quote]

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