Most of the large families I’ve known over my lifetime were catholic, but not all the catholic families I know had large families. Our neighborhood was overwhelmingly catholic, and most of them had the standard 1960s “three kids and a quarter acre lot”. However, there were a bunch of families in the hood who had 7, 8, even 9 kids. The 9-kid family was not catholic.
Most of the people I know stopped at 2 or 3. I can’t think of anyone I know right now with more than 3 kids. Oh, wait, one woman has 5.
My mom does home visits for the board of health (SW Ontario) and she runs into large familes (8 or 10 kids and sometimes more) on a reasonably regular basis.
The largest families were usually (but not always) Mexican Mennonites. (I hope this isn’t a derogatory term, I don’t really know much about them)
I have a coworker who is, I believe, the second oldest of 8. But they’re devout Mormons, so no surprise there. (Yes, I know not all Mormons have a pile of kids, but a lot of them do!) And she’s really wonderful, I think her parents must be doing a good job.
I have no problem with people having big families if they want them and can take good care of the kids, but I can’t imagine having more than a couple myself.
I’m the youngest of six. We were Methodist and birth control was just not that reliable (I was born in 1966). I like to think the my parents were aiming for the standard four kids and got one booby prize (my sister) and one bonus (me). 
FTR, I have no children and plan to keep it that way. Two of my siblings have three children each, one has two, and two have one each.
I used to work with a young woman who was the youngest of 19. We all thought that was amazing enough (this was in the late 1980s, as I recall), but then one day she mentioned that her folks had gotten divorced. She explained that her dad had a lot of affairs (!!) and her mom just got sick of it and threw him out.
That’s a man who could benefit from something to inhibit his libido, seems to me.
My great-grandmother was one of 13 children by her father’s first wife, who then died (in childbirth, one presumes), and he remarried and had another 13 or 14 children by his second wife. That’s the kind of thing that makes me very, very grateful for today’s birth control options. Most women won’t have that many children even without birth control, but for the more fertile, it certainly does prevent a lifetime revolving around pregnancy/childbirth/childraising for those who would prefer alternatives. For those who love having kids, can afford them, and do a good job raising them? More power to them. For me? Two was more than enough, and I like to say that if my son had come first, he’d be an only child!
I’m curious, maybe dangermom can answer this… for those evangelical “quiver full” families who believe that God will hand them as many babies as he deems fit, would they be likely to continue to put their trust in God and get pregnant again afterwards? Or would they feel the need for surgical intervention to birth them is akin to fertility treatments and thus is subverting God’s will?
There’s a Mormon family from Utah with a little girl in my girls’ pre-k class that has five kids. On the upper east side of Manhattan. Back during the first few weeks when they’d let the parents hang out she’d bring her newborn in, breastfeed it, and they’d both sack out until class was over. Either that or she’d pull out a kit and make earrings.
I’m always kind of puzzled when families with four kids get called big or large families. There are four kids in my family (two girls, two boys), and it never, ever felt like too many kids or too few parents. I mean, it would have been nice to have my own room in middle school or not have to wait for the bathroom in the morning, but it wasn’t all that much of trial.
I was watching Dateline or 60 Minutes or something like that with my mom when I was in high school, and the program was about the quiver-full movement. The “reporter” said something to the effect that “four kids was two kids too many,” and Mom made this little outraged noise, and said, “Well, I don’t think anyone who would say that has ever had kids, because I love each and every one of you.” So she apparently didn’t feel that four kids were too many to handle.
I think four kids sounds like a lot sometimes, but once you actually have them, you can’t imagine not having them anymore. I know that if one of my brothers or my sister suddenly disappeared, it would be inexpressibly terrible.
Sorry, I haven’t the faintest idea. I’m sure quiver-full families have c-sections–I can’t see that as being a problem–but I don’t know what happens when your body wears out. Most LDS families would say “OK, that’s it then”–and adopt if they felt a desire for more children (which is quite common actually, and it’s equally common to just stop there; it all depends on what you feel is best for your own family). But I’m not really close enough friends with most evangelical quiver folks to have asked that question in person.
My one closer friend has some kind of a degenerative disease and had two kids. Her comment about the quiver-full philosophy is that it’s fine for folks who can do it. So I gather that it’s kind of an optional idea? Oh, and my old neighbor has 3 biochildren and 2 foster–>adopted kids; she had trouble getting pregnant in the first place and after the second pregnancy turned out twins, she was done. So the oldest kid and the baby are adopted, with the biokids in the middle. She promotes foster care a lot. But I don’t know if she was a quiver-full person in the first place.
But really, I’m not someone who knows a lot about evangelical thinking. It’s kind of opaque to me. Sorry.
Quiver-full families who have four children are probably at the low end of the spectrum; at the upper end, you have people like the Duggars, who crank them out every 15 months. There’s a lot of cynical speculation about her attention-whoring manifesting itself through her babies since it appears that the moment a child is 3 months old, she passes it off to an older child to raise and starts in on having the next one. Honest quiver-fulls aren’t probably as anxious for attention, thank heaven.
i prefer to see families with more children be ones where the parents are actually parents and raise their children to succeed in the world, not just to crank out babies for monetary support, or to avoid working, or just sheer laziness when it comes to birth control. But that reporter who said four children is two too many? Is an idiot. It’s not just about the number of children you have; it’s how you bring them up that truly matters, IMO.
As one of five, I agree with you, but standards have changed and it’s quite common for three kids to be considered a “large” family. That’s gone along with the changing standard for parenting, so I wonder if it’s partly because the intensive parenting we now consider normal is too difficult to do with more than three. It’s now standard for kids to be in a lot of lessons starting at a young age, for example, which my parents would have considered insane. So my theory is that we tend to put more investment into fewer children and thus stop earlier than our parents would have.
My husband’s late father was one of 25 - product of one marriage, and no multiple births. I think his grandmother was in her very early teens when she got married. This was fairly standard for a rural Catholic family in the Dominican Republic in the first half of the 20th century. What is not so usual is that there were no children outside wedlock in this case.
My husband (born in 1959) was the second of six children who survived out of 12 pregnancies, and this present generation has not exceeded three children per couple. My mother-in-law said that in her day, one was expected to have “all the children that God sends”.
These days it seems that some of the evangelical churches are more forceful with this message compared to the Catholics.
In 10th Grade theology class I asked, “Well, if God can part the Red Sea, can’t he handle a quarter* inch of latex?” [NOTE: The answer is yes.]
My mother has often remarked the way the family sizes have shrunk in succeeding generations as well. She would also point out that her grandfather spent his teens in an orphanage, although he was not an orphan.
*When I asked this, I had never seen a condom.
My older sister is eight years older than I am, but I was born in 1984, and my youngest brother was born in 1988, so I think we were just old enough to escape the first wave of the super-intensive parenting that’s common nowadays. It’s still not prevalent around here, in rural Wisconsin. You see a lot of little kids running around outside and in the park without an adult hovering over them, and there aren’t all that many opportunities for lessons outside of school. There’s a ballet studio about half an hour away, but it’s very small.
I agree that the reporter who said that four kids is two too many was a moron. I remember wonder which one of use he would get rid of. I mean, we’re already here, and two of us were extra kids, so which one had to go?
I’m #5 out of 6, and my best friend has six (really great) kids.
I only made replacements for DH and myself, though! The second one was so difficult (that’s my million dollar baby), I just didn’t dare or care to try again.
My father was one of seven. There were six boys and one girl. They were religious, but it was some weird sect out in Iowa. They called themselves Plymouth Brothers #4. I think it was similar to the Amish, but not quite so strict. His father ran a feed store, but no radio, no newspapers, no college.
My father married outside the “sect” and was disowned. The girl and at least one other brother were also disowned. Personally, I can’t be a part of any religion that would tell me to turn my back on my child because they fell in love, but go figure. I never knew my paternal grandparents, and my father found out about the death of his mother through the other disowned brother, who lived nearby and would have heard the news.
The Duggars are amazing, in a train-wreck sort of way. As long as they can care for the children, I guess it’s live and let live, but I shudder to think of the state of her reproductive organs. :eek:
We’re Catholic.
My twin brother and I are the oldest of 13.
That’s about as stereotypical as we get…
If that’s what both parents wanted, they have the time and energy to do a decent job raising six kids, and they can afford what they consider to be a reasonable standard of living without welfare or mooching off relatives, bully for them. Not something I’d want to do, but it takes all kinds to make a world.
My high school best friend has 9 kids. No multiples. Very catholic.
My cousin and his wife have 8 boys. 19 years old down to under one year. She homeschools.
My best friend in elementary school was the youngest of 15. 7 boys, 8 girls.
We have two and that is all we are going to have. It’s not the money issue we have none., it is the logistics of who has to be where and at what time.