Hey, it ain’t a choice I made, or would ever make. However…
The key issue here is happiness. If the family struggles but is happy, I am happy for them too, I guess. Baffled, but happy (Caveat: just because the parents and/or some of the kids are happy doesn’t mean that all of the kids are happy; the world’s filled with resentful kids who grew up in large families and turn into hermits as adults after finally getting the privacy they craved). However, if they struggle but are unhappy, then no, I think that they are foolish for the choices that they have made. They should have seen it coming.
I don’t think they should be admired, but a certain amount of grudging respect should be given to someone who can balance a lifestyle like that. It isn’t easy. They did get themselves into it, but then again, anyone who can do that and make it has got more balls than I.
When I was 14 and 15, Dad was the manager of a factory. Then he got fired, was lucky enough to get a job, this job paid about half what his manager job had paid.
We still went to college, but part of my youngest bro’s was paid for with a loan from my aunt (whose three children haven’t wanted to go to college).
Admire someone for doing what they oughta? No. Admire them for getting it right? Yes. Assume that you know how they got there from just a casual meeting in a parking lot? Go get a cold shower, hunny.
Well. Of all the assumptive fallacies, I think the excluded middle is one of my very favorites.
Leaving out for the moment whether I would be likely to reach a conclusion about people I saw in passing in a parking lot, I seems to me there is rather a lot of ground between “heroic” and “self indulgent” unaccounted for here.
Here’s a piece of that ground for you to map out.
I have only two children. Nevertheless, I have never owned a new car and have no plans nor any desire to own one. At this moment, actually, I do not own a car at all, but that has more to do with geography than money. I live in Holland and I find a bike easier so I have not troubled myself to get a Dutch drivier’s license.
I take my kids to the grocery store and to school and such on bicycles – and both my bike and Eldest’s bike were bought second hand. My kids’ clothes are nearly all either hand-me-downs or bought second hand. Indeed, the clothes I am wearing now are hand-me-ups from my youngest sister who is far more fashionable than I am, which is the only thing which saves me from the basic low maintenance look which I also rather favor for trips to the grocery store.
We don’t as a family spend a lot of money on clothes or cars. Whether we have a lot of money or a little. Neither Dearly Beloved nor I value those things and money is (amoung other things) a measure of what you value.
I have to agree with the folks that said you really don’t know their situation. So I’d try not to judge.
There is an exception though: a former co-worker of mine. She had five kids, and would bitch every day about money. They didn’t have enough, it was so hard, and our employers were awful people for not paying us more because, well, she had five kids to feed. (In my opinion, we were probably overpaid for what we did.) Now I can understand occasional venting, certainly. But it was every damn day, and got really old after awhile.
Yep…assuming that I do know enough to judge, its a choice they are making. I neither admire nor pity them - as long as they can afford food and shelter. Their kids may not be well dressed and food may involve more rice and beans than I would choose, but thats a choice they’ve made and no reason to pity them.
I may have pity for the KIDS however, if their parents desire for a large family has translated into kids with fewer opportunities - both for parental attention as well as the material advantages. But that would only be when I know the situation well enough to understand how the choices the parents are making impact the kids.
A close family member has four children and constantly whines about money. I am not sympathetic. In general I do not think it is admirable to have lots of kids if you cannot afford to provide for them. Then again I agree with the consensus that you can’t tell much about a person merely by looking. We have a very old car and tend to wear garage sale finds. But we also have literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings.
I am a member of FreeCycle here in Columbus. I am amazed at the number of “Wanted: baby clothes, diapers, highchair, carseat, changing table, crib, etc.” ads I see. I always thought FreeCycle was a place to give away stuff, but there are a bunch of people on this site who ask for lots of expensive stuff. One I saw today was a woman asking for a PS2 and games!
If you know you can’t afford to buy diapers, don’t get pregnant. The Health Dept. will help you out with that for free.
If everyone in the world had waited until they could buy a new SUV and some clothes from Macy’s before they had kids, there wouldn’t be a lot of kids in the world.
In 90% of the world, and through 99.999999% of history, people have been having kids without a ton of extra cash to spend on impressive consumer goods. It’s not heroric and it’s not irresponsible- it’s the human condition. I am not about to give anyone medals- having kids is a choice. But I’m not about to critisize almost everyone on the globe except upper class first worlders for wanting to fulfill their basic biological drive.
I think this is a complete load of bullshit. Jean Poutine stated that the friend did not ask for money “from time to time” but often. It is no way his responsibility to feed his friend’s kids, nor should he be expected to do so. It may even be possible that he has some financial issues of his own.
When I see a poor couple dragging four or five kids around looking harried, my impulse is to toss 'em a box of condoms, then give them a big grin and wink. I don’t do that, and not just because it’s not my habit to carry boxes of condoms around. It’s because I know the burn of what they’re going through is much more than any mere gratuitous condom-tossing could provide.
I have issues with couples who have children they cannot support. I’m not talking about PlayStations and SUVs, but people who cannot afford food or electricity. I am from a family of six and while my parents could afford food and utilities, there are many, many things we did without (like adequate educations) that I believe parents should be able to provide for their children. My parents would have been able to provide much, much more if they had stuck to two kids.
In the Mormon culture I grew up in, families were pressured to have as many children as possible. We had neighbors with 12, 13, and 14 kids who were living in absolute, third-world squalor that produced all kinds of inter-family social ills like incest and drug use. While having lots of kids was supposed to be honoring God, kids ended up living on welfare peanut butter, sleeping on the garage floor, and becoming parents themselves at age 15.
Dumb is a better word. The odds are that they had the kids because some religion told them to and they blindly, stupidly obeyed the religion. Or because the religion told them birth control is a no-no and they blindly, stupidly obeyed the religion.
They knew that they would have trouble making ends meet after the second one showed up. Having any more after that is just…well, dumb is the most polite word I can come up with.
I’m trying to figure out why I would assume *anything * about them based on this information. I suppose that I might feel a bit of admiration or pity based on the *behavior * of the children, whether they’re helping her load the van, or fighting with each other and generally making her life difficult. But even that tells me nothing other than that they’re having a good or a bad moment.
Kids don’t actually need a recent model SUV or an unlimited clothing budget to thrive. Neither do parents. Those things are nice to have, and I can see why people would choose them over having more children, but I can certainly also see why people would choose having more children over having the SUV. I don’t think that either decision is inherently morally superior.
Neither. I don’t judge other people based on how many kids they have. For all you know they were extremely rich when the kids were born, and fell on hard times, for one. For another, I wonder which of those children the posters who sneer at this would wish to get rid of? They’re not hypotheticals anymore, they’re real human beings, and questioning whether they should have ever been born strikes me as rude at best and kind of sociopathic at worst.
An old minivan and Walmart jeans don’t necessarily indicate poverty. One of my best friends is quite well off, but their “running errands with the kids” car is a seven year old minivan, and all of their girls playclothes come from Walmart or Target, because little kids playclothes take a beating (as does the minivan!). Of course, they also own a beautiful home, have all the creature comforts one could wish for, vacation frequently, and their kids will be able to pursue whatever education they want with no worries.
I’m sure they’d be endlessly amused to realize that someone is clucking at them in the grocery store parking lot for their clearly stupid financial choices.
The more I think about it, the more I think there’s a certain amount of snottiness in the OP. Sorry, astro, but just proposing that having lots of kids makes someone “self indulgent” is … well, it assumes a lot of things I don’t think we have a right to assume. I don’t think it’s at all obvious that they “made a choice.” What if circumstances were foisted on them, circumstances over which they had little or no control? For instance, just because someone’s religion prohibits them from using birth control doesn’t mean they “choose” to have lots of kids. They can no more decide to stop believing any more than I can choose to begin. I understand that a person’s life is, to a large extent, the sum of his or her decisions; I also know that consequences are rarely known until after the decisions are made – and no one can see the future.
I admire anyone who successfully raises a child to adulthood nowadays. And I certainly admire someone who raises their own kids a helluvalot more than someone who fobs them off on a succession of daycare, nannies, private schools and so on.