Reply to I hate hosting families with 3 or more kids

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have 3 kids and there hasn't been a single time my kids have broken something or drawn on a wall at someone's house.

Is there a big age difference in these families or something? [/quote]

No it's just that you taught your kids to behave.

Some parents are just lax and have not taught their kids how to behave. It's not just big families -- [b]there are of course families with 1 or 2 kids where the kids are really ill behaved[/b]. But the difference is that if you host a family with an only child who is poorly behaved over, you just have to keep an eye on the one kid. My own kids are well behaved and even more so when hosting guests, so they even help me with this and will steer that kid away from places they might cause trouble. I've watched my children quietly move objects to higher shelves to avoid any disasters with a whirling dervish child.

Even with two kids, they have to be *really* bad for the adults not to be able to rein them in. I've seen it, but it's less common. Plus with two you often get dichotomies where one kid is an angel and the other is a mess (it can switch back and forth even, with two kids they frequently play off each other).

With three kids, good luck. That's the point where you hit critical mass and it simply isn't possible to keep an eye on all of them. It also means it's more likely that the kids will domino. So instead of one kid behaving poorly and this leading their sibling to act more responsible to counterbalance (or vice versa), if one of the three starts acting up, the other two will follow suit (maybe this is an attention thing?). They also outnumber their parents at this point, so at this point their family is a liability because they are imbalancing the kid to adult ratio.

So it's not that being one of three somehow makes kids behave badly. Any kid from any size family can be difficult, either because they were not taught to behave better or because of inherent issues or a combination of the above. But the number of kids greatly impacts your ability to manage the bad behavior. That's what is stressful.[/quote]

+1  Obviously the "I love watching my kids cause blood pressure problems because they're so chaotic lol" #boymom in this thread is a crap parent, but the worst-behaved child that I personally know is an only child who is always accompanied by BOTH of her parents to every event and party, neither of whom do anything to correct her behavior on any level.  It's parenting, not family size.[/quote]

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