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Reply to "7 and 5 year old. Would you have another one in my situation?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As the friend of several families with three children, I'd say don't do it.  It will be an 8-9 year gap between the oldest & youngest making it virtually impossible to find activities that work well for everyone.   For example, (kids are 12, 10, 5) can't even all go to the same movie.  They generally spend the weekends split up, one parent with older kids, one with the younger. [/quote]

That's a pretty limiting view of family life. My two kids are 6 years apart. Are there challenges for us as parents? Yes, but probably no more than if they were 2 years apart (which always struck me as very difficult, at least early on). Will it matter when they're adults? No! My siblings are 3, 7, and 10 years older than I am. As adults, I'm closest to the 2 oldest ones. As children, we had many all-family experiences and many split-into-2-groups experiences. I also loved when my older siblings babysat for us. Think outside the 2-kids-2-years-apart box and do what sounds best for your family, OP.

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I think there are a lot of DCUM parents of 1 or 2 who subconsciously [b]envy families with 3 children[/b]. Whenever someone posts about wanting a third, there are a bunch of naysayers who don’t themselves have 3.[/quote]

I agree to some extent, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s envy. More that there is something evoking a defensiveness about their choice to stop at 1 or 2. It’s the same thing as when people who stay in the city after having kids snark on people moving to the suburbs, or vice versa (people raising the kids in the suburbs lashing out with comments about the city being a horrible place for kids or whatever). People are really sensitive about their life choices, especially if constraints outside their control were a factor, so they interpret other families’ choices that differ from theirs as some sort of referendum on their own lifestyle.

Obviously there are plenty of parents who contentedly stopped at 1 or 2 kids who can provide their personal insights as to why this was the right number for them who don’t have to twist themselves into pretzels about how most families with 3 kids are frazzled, can’t provide enough attention, have the worst age gap, etc. But for the people less confident in their choices, I think their responses are related to a defensiveness about something — maybe they started having kids later than they wanted, are financially stretched, don’t have a big enough house, lack patience, their marriage isn’t in the right place, or whatever.

Funnily enough I don’t see this level of response when anyone mentions having 4 or 5 + kids. I guess it’d be like going into the real estate forum and announcing you’re planning to sell your house to live in a camper van all over the country. It’s just too far out the bounds of the norm to elicit any strong feelings. But going from 2-3 is something many people can do (if they’d like, even if they don’t choose to). So seeing your peers continue having kids while you’re struggling to balance whatever is going on in your life leads to defensiveness. [/quote]

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