There’s one sub-theme in the piece I do disagree with, and I want to make sure to note it:
From Catherine:
> Keeping the door open for another child trades on a wisdom offered by the mothers I interviewed: that more people are never a problem for a family, a nation or any one child.
Of course they can be a problem! Kids are always both gift and cross, even in the best of circumstances. Eve Tushnet has written about her experience working at a crisis pregnancy center, and, for the women she served, her kids were definitely people who brought problems: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/why-they-call-us
From Eve:
> Most of our clients believe strongly that they have a moral responsibility to attain financial stability. They feel intense familial and internal pressure to graduate from high school, then college, and then to get a stable job. They want to be, if not homeowners, at least people who live independently from their parents. A baby will never help them do this. A baby (a first or second or third baby) will always make the snakes-and-ladders upward scramble slower and harder and more uncertain. Sometimes the conflict between baby and financial stability is blunt and brutal: last year, two D.C. police officers came forward to say that, when they were cadets, they aborted their pregnancies because a sergeant told them that having a baby would cost them their jobs.
As Eve writes, some of these pressures are deeply unjust. But even in a much more pro-woman, pro-baby world, a baby would still put some plans out of reach.
> We are undeniably seeing fewer people having kids, but conditional on a household having >0 kids, we aren't actually seeing a substantial drop in kids-with-any-siblings
Totally agree with this piece and your caveat! I absolutely think pregnancy and children are such a gift, but I do find sometimes Catholics and religious people in general are too glib about the very real medical and financial challenges having many children can present. Having 5, 6, and more kids is always challenging on the body no matter how healthy you are, and I have seen some young women have pregnancy complications that put their lives (and the lives of their babies) in immediate peril.
Reminds me of how we were told for so many years that NFP was pure gift, without the challenges ever mentioned. It seems to be that we are getting more honest about that.
I appreciate some of Catherine's points, and I really appreciate your caveat here. I would like to add that I felt like Catherine's piece was a bit unfair to only children, though no doubt unintentionally.
I felt like it was unfair to only children because only children (and children with siblings), don't get to choose how many siblings they do or don't have. It's not like choosing friends, dating, or marrying. It's not their decision or "fault" that they're only children. I thought the article implied that only children had been cheated or had bad luck, and like it implicitly had a bad winner attitude or boastful attitude about children with siblings.
As the almost youngest of a large family, I'm really intrigued by how much of the big family discourse, at least in my experience, seems to come from older siblings. I hear a lot of "I came from a big family, so I am really comfortable around kids" or "I've been changing diapers since I was ten" but I almost never hear the perspectives of the younger siblings. I don't know if that's just my experience or if younger siblings don't talk about it as much. My experience of growing up in a big family is not much like the big family discourse I often hear.
As an adult, though, I appreciate having several siblings because we can rally. We live far apart (siblings are 2-12 hours away from me) but when someone has a hard time, we'll rally for door dash or flowers or something. We share the work of figuring out what gifts to get our parents - one of us has an idea and the rest chip in, and then we can get them nicer things, too. We have an active WhatsApp thread and it's good for me to hear from people who are not like me - I love my siblings but I often wonder how (or even if) I would have met them if we didn't grow up together. We've taken different paths in our adult lives and it's good to have constant, loving exposure to different kinds of people.
As the youngest of 8, I agree! I think the replacement is that we get to see our siblings kids close to our age. My oldest nephew is only 8 years younger than me so as it’s not the same as a sibling, I have a different relationship as an aunt closer to his age than my sister who is 20 years older than him.
I think siblings are a gift, and siblings can help each other grow in virtues, talents, and happiness, but I want to add a caveat.
I feel like my parents took advantage of me because I'm the first of 7 siblings and because I'm a girl. They made me do a lot of babysitting and parenting for them without saying please or thank you, they expected more of me than was reasonable to expect from a kid, and they were harder on me for any mistakes I made taking care of my siblings than they ever were on themselves. I doubt they would have done any of that if I was a boy because then they would have assumed that I was too immature or testosterone-soaked to babysit or that babysitting would have emasculated me. The lesson they ended up teaching me is that parenting apparently sucks and that parents can and will exploit older children (especially daughters) to relieve the terrible burden of parenting. I hate to say it, but I haven't yet forgiven them for behaving in ways that seem tyrannical, selfish, lazy, exploitative, and ungrateful.
“If you have kids, what are the least age-segregated spaces you go?”
Homeschool co ops are some of the least age-segregated spaces that we visit. This has been one of the best things about homeschooling. It is not something that everyone can or should do – I myself have doubts about it. But mitigating the strict age segregation of our society has been one of the biggest rewards I’ve found doing it. I feel like this could be recreated in schools to some degree. I mean, you wouldn’t have to make everything a one-room schoolhouse, but there could be more intentional effort to mix the ages.
Church is another place where the kids can often interact with a variety of ages. But this is hit or miss because a lot of churches themselves are very age segregated. We happen to go to a small church where there’s a lot of interaction with adults just because there aren’t that many other kids.
We are very lucky that we live in a neighborhood with a lot of kids. One of our neighbors started kickball at the local park on Friday nights. There’s a decent-sized group, and there are mixed ages from high school down to elementary. I don’t know how common something like this is- it’s very informal, and the kids are mostly in charge. Sometimes adults do come and play as well. But mostly it’s the group of kids playing and working things out. To me, this seems like something from a bygone era, but I’m really grateful that our kids get to experience it.
I’m looking forward to what other commenters have to say because as my kids age – there are four of them, ages 9 through 16- I find that we’re spending less and less time with babies and toddlers. But I think it’s so important for people to spend time with ages across the lifespan, so I really hope to continue to mitigate age segregation, and I look forward to seeing what your other readers say.
I am the oldest of four. My youngest sibling is seven years younger than me, so I do have memories of her as a baby and little girl, but I realized that even expanding to cousins I almost never interacted with babies from about age 9 until my mid twenties, when I had my oldest. If the baby I'm currently expecting is my last (#8, very possible), we'll have a 16 year spread. My oldest is now a busy high schooler and needs some regular activities driving. I often help out with the carpooling because it's a method of volunteering I can actually do, and it is honestly so sweet to have a big van full of teenage boys making faces or playing games with the current youngest who's along for the ride.
We regularly hang out with other big families with large age spreads. I do like giving them occasional breaks to hang out with the kids from those families who are closer to their own ages, but they get lots of time with other kids. To them four kids is a "small" family. It's not meant as a judgment, but I think it's very good for them to think of families like ours as normal, instead of freakish (I sometimes felt that way being one of four, though we knew a couple of others and one with five growing up. This was in a secular environment.)
I think you're right that the large family life is not problem free and I think it's OK to say so even if I think it's overall good. I have had difficult pregnancies and often suffer from fatigue. There are things we've had to postpone or give up on. I think the tradeoff is overall worth it, but I'm not going to pretend we didn't have to do it. I am actually looking forward to being "done" sometime soonish and having more energy to do things with my kids that I have only infrequently been able to over the past years. I hope they don't resent me for it, because we've also had a lot of fun and never had to worry about food or housing or the necessary costs of life. But the younger ones will probably get to do more things their older siblings didn't. But they'll also spend less time with us.
I was blessed in childhood to have a church and school community (largely overlapping) that was relatively small, and therefore not age-segregated. When I was in grade one, it was common for older kids to help us (e.g. by helping us put our mitts on at recess in the winter), and there were a lot of games or projects that the teachers orchestrated that involved the whole school. My husband and I recently moved back to that area, and I've been delighted to see that while the church has grown, that same mentality exists. After church, I can chat with other parents knowing that there is likely one or two (or more) older kids and teens keeping an eye on my three-year-old as he plays outside. I hope my kids do the same for other families when they're older.
Extended family relationships have been a blessing in this way too. My older nephews and niece often play with and take some responsibility for the littler cousins when we have family get-togethers.
As an eldest child with 8 younger siblings, I think Pakaluk is completely right! I especially liked the note about children drawing their elder siblings back to the home.
To expand on the point of there always being a last child, however, I would argue that's an issue mainly because of the unique way we modern Americans live. Most people historically don't live, as we do, away from extended family. If we lived in the same home or neighborhood as our cousins and uncles and aunts, the youngest child would almost always have nieces and nephews to bring out and train the instincts of parental responsibility in him. Same with the only child caveat; it doesn't have to be unfair to them, as even they could be around baby nieces and nephews, or even just the children of neighbors and friends, if only he lived in a proper community. Today, a person like me, who grew up with many little children around to love, to require care, and to keep me attached to my home, is one of a very privileged few. That is truly an injustice. But in a healthy society, this would be the norm for most everyone.
As a parent of young kids, I naturally interact with many people my age (my own friends) and my kids' age (their friends, and our friends' kids), but it's only because I also serve in my church's youth ministry that I get to interact with those in between.
And it's great. The youth often love helping to take care of our kids, whether on Sundays, when we get together with their families for meals, or at church retreats. Teenaged babysitting isn't part of the culture here in Singapore -- the focus on exams and academics in general precludes that -- but many of the teens like to spend time watching, playing with, and taking care of our kids in more informal settings. Some people are surprised that we continued to serve in youth after having kids, but honestly, the youth make it easier in some ways.
We call the teens "big friends", and my kids are blessed to have met and gotten to know many big friends. We pray that those relationships will continue until when our own kids are teens, and the current teens are 20-somethings who can hopefully help guide our kids into maturity.
Our life is spent at a Catholic Worker women's shelter, so there's always a baby. Our choice was a smaller family-- 3 kids and a constant rotation of single moms with toddlers. As such, my kids take on child care all the time, often unpaid, and are often adored... But also learning how to draw boundaries and enforce discipline. We took a big group of older kids on a field trip yesterday and my teenage daughter noticed they were getting bored and immediately broke out her repertoire of camp songs. My middle kid finds the introverts and takes them aside, knowing that was once him. My youngest will never be the youngest. So much to love about a life of faith and action, but this post highlighted the large family we have that keeps getting larger.
Oldest is school-age and youngest is a baby, so I like to think we help desegregate the places we go for oldest. Older kids are fascinated by the baby! It's fun to ask if they know any other babies or explain what the baby's up to.
My daughter is my youngest (of 3) and she has adored our neighborhood babies. She only has one set of first cousins, and they live far away. But she has had two neighborhood babies - both are younger siblings of her buddies. The first was when she was 8/9 years old and this latest one she is 11/12 years old. She absolutely delights in these kids and notices that while the members of their families tire of holding or catering to them, she does not. The baby is always happy to see her because she provides adoration. :-) It's been so good for her to really become comfortable with babies and feel confident with babies. One of the delights of community and neighborhood life. (BTW, both of these babies are 4th children.)
I dont' have a perspective on big families, but my son's teacher had a baby and upon her return to work, brought that baby into her age 3-6 primary class for the better part of a year. The students *adored* him, were so careful and tender with him, and the mama/teacher got to keep her baby in sight for an extra ~7 months or so before he graduated to an infant care room on the campus. It was such a win-win, and that teacher was so brave! to trust her masterpiece to a classroom full of preschoolers.
I think reading this is making me realize how much disability changes things.
Like, my kids have relatively moderate disabilities--both deaf, with varying degrees of machine assisted hearing. But teaching a kid (and myself!) ASL, providing social connections to a Deaf kid, and so on--it just plays holy havoc with the conceptual category of lassiez-faire parenting.
I found myself yelling at a friend online who posted an article about how nonverbal kids were "just as good at communicating." I was like, "no, they aren't! They are just as worthy of dignity, just as rooted in the Image of God, just as capable of love--but they aren't just as good at communicating! Linguistic deprivation is a thing, and it isn't good!"
So, like, a kid within a couple of standard deviations of normal, who will learn from peers and gain words in the expected manner and so on--that's one thing. But when you have to change the way you read books, when you have to force-feed language to your kid (without fluency yourself), when you have to be hyper-aware at the playground that everyone assumes your kid has a capability that he doesn't--and all when living within a society built around the separation of families from each other--well, intensive parenting is almost the default. And when you see your 4yo process his emotions through film (he weeps any time an animal is isolated and friendless), and just can't train him to understand the emotional language to talk about this fast enough--the pressure for more/more/better/better parenting becomes so much stronger.
It is, as Yul Brenner from The King and I puts it, "a perplexity."
And I think that, in a better world, things would be quite different. If we'd known what church we would join, and lived in the same small neighborhood with the core of the church, and had a tight-nit community of parents and kids--even that would be better. And living in close community with one other family, for all its tension, has also been I believe a net blessing. But man, having fallen asleep driving home once already, I can't imagine what a nightmare life would be if I had another young child to care for.
If you had a larger family, with many siblings, where did you benefit from the demands they made on you?
I am the eldest of six. While growing up had a lot of chaos, I am so grateful for the responsibilities I learned, the education about littles, and (most importantly) the relationships I have with each and every one of the other five now.
Where (when growing up or as an adult) do you spend the most time with people of a very different age than yourself?
I volunteer holding babies in the NICU. In addition to the babies, I have the chance to chat with the nurses, who are generally about 30 years younger. I also spend time with many different ages at church. The choir I sing in is generally 20-30 years older than I, and the parents I volunteer with in Faith Formation are 20 years younger (I'm in my early 50's).
If you have kids, what are the least age-segregated spaces you go?
My kids are now grown, but as lifelong homeschoolers they spent most of their days outside of age segregation.
Do you have near peers, five to ten years older than you, with whom you have deep friendships and look to as examples? How did you find them?
I have good friends that are both five to ten years older and five to ten years younger. The younger friend is from my parish, and the older ones are parents of my kids' friends.
It kind of feels like playing 4D-Chess, trying to make the adjusted-risk-calculation about adding another child. Is there a NET benefit? How do you know? You can't. Will the benefit of having a younger sibling and the potential for closeness and character formation and how-to-live-in-a-social-unit skills outweigh the consequences and real suffering of being further removed from that snakes-and-ladders financial 'stability'? Which, therein lies the rub: our current system forces poor people (and even not-poor-but-not-cushioned) people to make utilitarian risk calculations about the value of their lives and decisions, and to compare apples to oranges. There is a misalignment of values and practice: They SHOULD NOT have to make those kinds of calculations in the first place. Until we stop prizing individualism above a common good, and see-in-practice new children as actually being a common good (social security! not having a demographic cliff!), we will continue to foist all risk and consequences on the individual.
I was the oldest of twelve and my mother was often sick, so I spent much of my teen years raising my siblings, caring for the house, cooking the meals, doing the laundry, sewing and mending our clothes, etc. A lot of people thought I'd grow up to resent my siblings and never want children, however, while the situation was far from ideal, I only needed a year or so on my own before I missed having children. Yes, there had been years where I was terrified that if my mother died I'd never be free from my siblings, but mostly because I thought it might prevent me from getting married and having my own babies -- who would want to marry a woman who comes with eleven dependents!! Those years taught me much about sacrifice and love, and I don't regret them at all even though they were some of the toughest years. I especially loved my littlest siblings, who still feel like my first babies ... and now having one baby feels like easy mode.
There’s one sub-theme in the piece I do disagree with, and I want to make sure to note it:
From Catherine:
> Keeping the door open for another child trades on a wisdom offered by the mothers I interviewed: that more people are never a problem for a family, a nation or any one child.
Of course they can be a problem! Kids are always both gift and cross, even in the best of circumstances. Eve Tushnet has written about her experience working at a crisis pregnancy center, and, for the women she served, her kids were definitely people who brought problems: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/why-they-call-us
From Eve:
> Most of our clients believe strongly that they have a moral responsibility to attain financial stability. They feel intense familial and internal pressure to graduate from high school, then college, and then to get a stable job. They want to be, if not homeowners, at least people who live independently from their parents. A baby will never help them do this. A baby (a first or second or third baby) will always make the snakes-and-ladders upward scramble slower and harder and more uncertain. Sometimes the conflict between baby and financial stability is blunt and brutal: last year, two D.C. police officers came forward to say that, when they were cadets, they aborted their pregnancies because a sergeant told them that having a baby would cost them their jobs.
As Eve writes, some of these pressures are deeply unjust. But even in a much more pro-woman, pro-baby world, a baby would still put some plans out of reach.
Also appreciated this data note from Elliot Haspel: https://x.com/ehaspel/status/2072088335947018268
> We are undeniably seeing fewer people having kids, but conditional on a household having >0 kids, we aren't actually seeing a substantial drop in kids-with-any-siblings
Totally agree with this piece and your caveat! I absolutely think pregnancy and children are such a gift, but I do find sometimes Catholics and religious people in general are too glib about the very real medical and financial challenges having many children can present. Having 5, 6, and more kids is always challenging on the body no matter how healthy you are, and I have seen some young women have pregnancy complications that put their lives (and the lives of their babies) in immediate peril.
Reminds me of how we were told for so many years that NFP was pure gift, without the challenges ever mentioned. It seems to be that we are getting more honest about that.
Amen!
Hi, Leah!
I appreciate some of Catherine's points, and I really appreciate your caveat here. I would like to add that I felt like Catherine's piece was a bit unfair to only children, though no doubt unintentionally.
I felt like it was unfair to only children because only children (and children with siblings), don't get to choose how many siblings they do or don't have. It's not like choosing friends, dating, or marrying. It's not their decision or "fault" that they're only children. I thought the article implied that only children had been cheated or had bad luck, and like it implicitly had a bad winner attitude or boastful attitude about children with siblings.
As the almost youngest of a large family, I'm really intrigued by how much of the big family discourse, at least in my experience, seems to come from older siblings. I hear a lot of "I came from a big family, so I am really comfortable around kids" or "I've been changing diapers since I was ten" but I almost never hear the perspectives of the younger siblings. I don't know if that's just my experience or if younger siblings don't talk about it as much. My experience of growing up in a big family is not much like the big family discourse I often hear.
As an adult, though, I appreciate having several siblings because we can rally. We live far apart (siblings are 2-12 hours away from me) but when someone has a hard time, we'll rally for door dash or flowers or something. We share the work of figuring out what gifts to get our parents - one of us has an idea and the rest chip in, and then we can get them nicer things, too. We have an active WhatsApp thread and it's good for me to hear from people who are not like me - I love my siblings but I often wonder how (or even if) I would have met them if we didn't grow up together. We've taken different paths in our adult lives and it's good to have constant, loving exposure to different kinds of people.
I agree that I mostly hear from bigger sibs on this!
As the youngest of 8, I agree! I think the replacement is that we get to see our siblings kids close to our age. My oldest nephew is only 8 years younger than me so as it’s not the same as a sibling, I have a different relationship as an aunt closer to his age than my sister who is 20 years older than him.
I think siblings are a gift, and siblings can help each other grow in virtues, talents, and happiness, but I want to add a caveat.
I feel like my parents took advantage of me because I'm the first of 7 siblings and because I'm a girl. They made me do a lot of babysitting and parenting for them without saying please or thank you, they expected more of me than was reasonable to expect from a kid, and they were harder on me for any mistakes I made taking care of my siblings than they ever were on themselves. I doubt they would have done any of that if I was a boy because then they would have assumed that I was too immature or testosterone-soaked to babysit or that babysitting would have emasculated me. The lesson they ended up teaching me is that parenting apparently sucks and that parents can and will exploit older children (especially daughters) to relieve the terrible burden of parenting. I hate to say it, but I haven't yet forgiven them for behaving in ways that seem tyrannical, selfish, lazy, exploitative, and ungrateful.
“If you have kids, what are the least age-segregated spaces you go?”
Homeschool co ops are some of the least age-segregated spaces that we visit. This has been one of the best things about homeschooling. It is not something that everyone can or should do – I myself have doubts about it. But mitigating the strict age segregation of our society has been one of the biggest rewards I’ve found doing it. I feel like this could be recreated in schools to some degree. I mean, you wouldn’t have to make everything a one-room schoolhouse, but there could be more intentional effort to mix the ages.
Church is another place where the kids can often interact with a variety of ages. But this is hit or miss because a lot of churches themselves are very age segregated. We happen to go to a small church where there’s a lot of interaction with adults just because there aren’t that many other kids.
We are very lucky that we live in a neighborhood with a lot of kids. One of our neighbors started kickball at the local park on Friday nights. There’s a decent-sized group, and there are mixed ages from high school down to elementary. I don’t know how common something like this is- it’s very informal, and the kids are mostly in charge. Sometimes adults do come and play as well. But mostly it’s the group of kids playing and working things out. To me, this seems like something from a bygone era, but I’m really grateful that our kids get to experience it.
I’m looking forward to what other commenters have to say because as my kids age – there are four of them, ages 9 through 16- I find that we’re spending less and less time with babies and toddlers. But I think it’s so important for people to spend time with ages across the lifespan, so I really hope to continue to mitigate age segregation, and I look forward to seeing what your other readers say.
I am the oldest of four. My youngest sibling is seven years younger than me, so I do have memories of her as a baby and little girl, but I realized that even expanding to cousins I almost never interacted with babies from about age 9 until my mid twenties, when I had my oldest. If the baby I'm currently expecting is my last (#8, very possible), we'll have a 16 year spread. My oldest is now a busy high schooler and needs some regular activities driving. I often help out with the carpooling because it's a method of volunteering I can actually do, and it is honestly so sweet to have a big van full of teenage boys making faces or playing games with the current youngest who's along for the ride.
We regularly hang out with other big families with large age spreads. I do like giving them occasional breaks to hang out with the kids from those families who are closer to their own ages, but they get lots of time with other kids. To them four kids is a "small" family. It's not meant as a judgment, but I think it's very good for them to think of families like ours as normal, instead of freakish (I sometimes felt that way being one of four, though we knew a couple of others and one with five growing up. This was in a secular environment.)
I think you're right that the large family life is not problem free and I think it's OK to say so even if I think it's overall good. I have had difficult pregnancies and often suffer from fatigue. There are things we've had to postpone or give up on. I think the tradeoff is overall worth it, but I'm not going to pretend we didn't have to do it. I am actually looking forward to being "done" sometime soonish and having more energy to do things with my kids that I have only infrequently been able to over the past years. I hope they don't resent me for it, because we've also had a lot of fun and never had to worry about food or housing or the necessary costs of life. But the younger ones will probably get to do more things their older siblings didn't. But they'll also spend less time with us.
I was blessed in childhood to have a church and school community (largely overlapping) that was relatively small, and therefore not age-segregated. When I was in grade one, it was common for older kids to help us (e.g. by helping us put our mitts on at recess in the winter), and there were a lot of games or projects that the teachers orchestrated that involved the whole school. My husband and I recently moved back to that area, and I've been delighted to see that while the church has grown, that same mentality exists. After church, I can chat with other parents knowing that there is likely one or two (or more) older kids and teens keeping an eye on my three-year-old as he plays outside. I hope my kids do the same for other families when they're older.
Extended family relationships have been a blessing in this way too. My older nephews and niece often play with and take some responsibility for the littler cousins when we have family get-togethers.
As an eldest child with 8 younger siblings, I think Pakaluk is completely right! I especially liked the note about children drawing their elder siblings back to the home.
To expand on the point of there always being a last child, however, I would argue that's an issue mainly because of the unique way we modern Americans live. Most people historically don't live, as we do, away from extended family. If we lived in the same home or neighborhood as our cousins and uncles and aunts, the youngest child would almost always have nieces and nephews to bring out and train the instincts of parental responsibility in him. Same with the only child caveat; it doesn't have to be unfair to them, as even they could be around baby nieces and nephews, or even just the children of neighbors and friends, if only he lived in a proper community. Today, a person like me, who grew up with many little children around to love, to require care, and to keep me attached to my home, is one of a very privileged few. That is truly an injustice. But in a healthy society, this would be the norm for most everyone.
I love this about Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins.
As a parent of young kids, I naturally interact with many people my age (my own friends) and my kids' age (their friends, and our friends' kids), but it's only because I also serve in my church's youth ministry that I get to interact with those in between.
And it's great. The youth often love helping to take care of our kids, whether on Sundays, when we get together with their families for meals, or at church retreats. Teenaged babysitting isn't part of the culture here in Singapore -- the focus on exams and academics in general precludes that -- but many of the teens like to spend time watching, playing with, and taking care of our kids in more informal settings. Some people are surprised that we continued to serve in youth after having kids, but honestly, the youth make it easier in some ways.
We call the teens "big friends", and my kids are blessed to have met and gotten to know many big friends. We pray that those relationships will continue until when our own kids are teens, and the current teens are 20-somethings who can hopefully help guide our kids into maturity.
Having a husband who teaches high school gives us some of these "missing middle" connections!
Our life is spent at a Catholic Worker women's shelter, so there's always a baby. Our choice was a smaller family-- 3 kids and a constant rotation of single moms with toddlers. As such, my kids take on child care all the time, often unpaid, and are often adored... But also learning how to draw boundaries and enforce discipline. We took a big group of older kids on a field trip yesterday and my teenage daughter noticed they were getting bored and immediately broke out her repertoire of camp songs. My middle kid finds the introverts and takes them aside, knowing that was once him. My youngest will never be the youngest. So much to love about a life of faith and action, but this post highlighted the large family we have that keeps getting larger.
Oldest is school-age and youngest is a baby, so I like to think we help desegregate the places we go for oldest. Older kids are fascinated by the baby! It's fun to ask if they know any other babies or explain what the baby's up to.
My daughter is my youngest (of 3) and she has adored our neighborhood babies. She only has one set of first cousins, and they live far away. But she has had two neighborhood babies - both are younger siblings of her buddies. The first was when she was 8/9 years old and this latest one she is 11/12 years old. She absolutely delights in these kids and notices that while the members of their families tire of holding or catering to them, she does not. The baby is always happy to see her because she provides adoration. :-) It's been so good for her to really become comfortable with babies and feel confident with babies. One of the delights of community and neighborhood life. (BTW, both of these babies are 4th children.)
I dont' have a perspective on big families, but my son's teacher had a baby and upon her return to work, brought that baby into her age 3-6 primary class for the better part of a year. The students *adored* him, were so careful and tender with him, and the mama/teacher got to keep her baby in sight for an extra ~7 months or so before he graduated to an infant care room on the campus. It was such a win-win, and that teacher was so brave! to trust her masterpiece to a classroom full of preschoolers.
I think reading this is making me realize how much disability changes things.
Like, my kids have relatively moderate disabilities--both deaf, with varying degrees of machine assisted hearing. But teaching a kid (and myself!) ASL, providing social connections to a Deaf kid, and so on--it just plays holy havoc with the conceptual category of lassiez-faire parenting.
I found myself yelling at a friend online who posted an article about how nonverbal kids were "just as good at communicating." I was like, "no, they aren't! They are just as worthy of dignity, just as rooted in the Image of God, just as capable of love--but they aren't just as good at communicating! Linguistic deprivation is a thing, and it isn't good!"
So, like, a kid within a couple of standard deviations of normal, who will learn from peers and gain words in the expected manner and so on--that's one thing. But when you have to change the way you read books, when you have to force-feed language to your kid (without fluency yourself), when you have to be hyper-aware at the playground that everyone assumes your kid has a capability that he doesn't--and all when living within a society built around the separation of families from each other--well, intensive parenting is almost the default. And when you see your 4yo process his emotions through film (he weeps any time an animal is isolated and friendless), and just can't train him to understand the emotional language to talk about this fast enough--the pressure for more/more/better/better parenting becomes so much stronger.
It is, as Yul Brenner from The King and I puts it, "a perplexity."
And I think that, in a better world, things would be quite different. If we'd known what church we would join, and lived in the same small neighborhood with the core of the church, and had a tight-nit community of parents and kids--even that would be better. And living in close community with one other family, for all its tension, has also been I believe a net blessing. But man, having fallen asleep driving home once already, I can't imagine what a nightmare life would be if I had another young child to care for.
If you had a larger family, with many siblings, where did you benefit from the demands they made on you?
I am the eldest of six. While growing up had a lot of chaos, I am so grateful for the responsibilities I learned, the education about littles, and (most importantly) the relationships I have with each and every one of the other five now.
Where (when growing up or as an adult) do you spend the most time with people of a very different age than yourself?
I volunteer holding babies in the NICU. In addition to the babies, I have the chance to chat with the nurses, who are generally about 30 years younger. I also spend time with many different ages at church. The choir I sing in is generally 20-30 years older than I, and the parents I volunteer with in Faith Formation are 20 years younger (I'm in my early 50's).
If you have kids, what are the least age-segregated spaces you go?
My kids are now grown, but as lifelong homeschoolers they spent most of their days outside of age segregation.
Do you have near peers, five to ten years older than you, with whom you have deep friendships and look to as examples? How did you find them?
I have good friends that are both five to ten years older and five to ten years younger. The younger friend is from my parish, and the older ones are parents of my kids' friends.
It kind of feels like playing 4D-Chess, trying to make the adjusted-risk-calculation about adding another child. Is there a NET benefit? How do you know? You can't. Will the benefit of having a younger sibling and the potential for closeness and character formation and how-to-live-in-a-social-unit skills outweigh the consequences and real suffering of being further removed from that snakes-and-ladders financial 'stability'? Which, therein lies the rub: our current system forces poor people (and even not-poor-but-not-cushioned) people to make utilitarian risk calculations about the value of their lives and decisions, and to compare apples to oranges. There is a misalignment of values and practice: They SHOULD NOT have to make those kinds of calculations in the first place. Until we stop prizing individualism above a common good, and see-in-practice new children as actually being a common good (social security! not having a demographic cliff!), we will continue to foist all risk and consequences on the individual.
I was the oldest of twelve and my mother was often sick, so I spent much of my teen years raising my siblings, caring for the house, cooking the meals, doing the laundry, sewing and mending our clothes, etc. A lot of people thought I'd grow up to resent my siblings and never want children, however, while the situation was far from ideal, I only needed a year or so on my own before I missed having children. Yes, there had been years where I was terrified that if my mother died I'd never be free from my siblings, but mostly because I thought it might prevent me from getting married and having my own babies -- who would want to marry a woman who comes with eleven dependents!! Those years taught me much about sacrifice and love, and I don't regret them at all even though they were some of the toughest years. I especially loved my littlest siblings, who still feel like my first babies ... and now having one baby feels like easy mode.