Oh, yes, I was also going to say that of course they know their siblings’ names. My daughter is 3, and she pretty much knows the name of every kid in her preschool, including those in her classroom, the ones in the other three classrooms, and all the teachers. So, yes, I think these kids can manage to learn their siblings’ names.
My problem with such a large family (in this day of birth control) is that I feel it’s incredibly selfish. If you are willing and have the resources to take care of 18 children, do they all have to be your biological children? I’m sure there are lots of needy children in this country who would love to have a “buddy” help them get dressed and off to school every morning.
Actually, there kind’a is:
I’m not saying it would make the kids happier, necessarily…I just don’t think it makes them unhappier. My husband’s brother might have been happier if my husband hadn’t been born…I think he had it pretty darn good there for a while, and I’m sure it was an adjustment. But does that mean my husband should never have been born? Should that decision have been based on what would make the older kid happier?
I think they want to have a large family. Whatever their reason is, doesn’t matter to me.
Why do any of us have to have our own biological children? We could all adopt. And I’m all for that…I’m adopted myself. But I’m not going to tell someone they don’t have the right to have kids if they want to.
Successive pregnancies:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/4079.php
if you can’t read that one, here is an excerpt from the abstract:
These findings provide evidence that levels of pregnancy estradiol are significantly and strongly correlated in successive pregnancies of the same woman. This phenomenon can provide an explanation for the higher concordance of breast cancer incidence between two sisters than between a mother and daughter in the familial pattern of breast cancer.
Pregnancy over 35:
http://www.pregnancy-info.net/pregnancy_35_40.html
And I quickly Googled that, someone else can find more and better cites if they try.
I didn’t mean to imply they couldn’t have any of their own children or that I want to mandate how many children anyone could have. I’m just thinking that at some point they might have thought to themselves, “yeah, a lot more kids would be nice since we already have X number of kids of our own - maybe we can adopt.”
There’s a huge difference in one or two siblings and 20. As said upthread what if one (seriously) want to beat off in private? What if one is sore from chores and wants to soak in a hot tub for an hour? What if one has a headache and wants to sit in a dark room and rest for a while? With a sibling or two, its feasible, with 20, impossible. They should have the sense to know that even if you believe in the Bible or the teachings of some goofball sect, that much of the stuff is archaic and not sensible in today’s society. When are they going to start selling their daughters into sex slavery as per the Bible?
Be fruitful and multiply means have kids, not have as many kids as humanly possible. Populating the earth may have been a necessity back then, last I checked thats no longer a problem.
Oh, I know you didn’t. Sorry about that. It’s just that, how do you decide when enough is enough? Some people still have 3, 4 or 5 kids…should they have cut it off after 1 or 2, and adopted the rest? I don’t know, it’s a tough question.
I knew several families when I was growing up who had 10 kids in 3 bedroom houses. I really don’t think that any of them thought it was that big of a deal.
If you have an actual cite, let’s see it.
So show us the evidence if you’ve got it.
Because there is a school of thought that women were never intended by nature to go through life having period after period, year after year. Not the way nature designed the machine. A woman who has a large family of say 10 - 12 children, and nurses them, has considerably fewer periods over the course of her life. There are people who believe that those women enjoyed less endomitriosis, fibroid cysts, and cervical cancer because of it. That’s why you are beginning to see birth control now being introduced to the market that ceases periods altogether for months at a time, mimicking, in some ways, the number of periods a fertile woman with not birth control might experience.
Witty comebacks, also not a cite, sorry.
How long ago was this? There’s a reason for the huge dropoff in number of kids per family since condoms and the pill and sex ed- its not that people like kids less, its that people now have options for limiting pregnancy.
You think Joe Sixpack living in a two room flat in Brooklyn in 1940 would’ve had six kids if birth control and condoms were common?
It is a tough question, and a very personal one. I guess for this family, they haven’t reached their limit (obviously).
Let’s take this one step at a time. Do you agree there is a nonzero risk of death associated with each birth?
I’m 41, so it was the 70s, not the dark ages before condoms or the pill. They had options, but I’m from a Catholic neighborhood, and people had large families. It wasn’t that big of a deal.
Probably some would and some wouldn’t. Seriously, if your argument is that no one just wants to have large families, you are wrong.
I don’t know religion, what was the Catholic churches stance on birth control back then? My guess is it was considered a sin.
Average number of children per family in the US has been dropping for decades, but is still highest in poor families, which is to be expected.
Still is. But a lot of this is cultural…people come from large families, they live in neighborhoods with large families, and they likewise have large families.
I’m guessing the number of families with both parents around age 40 or lower, that have more than six kids, that aren’t devoutly religious or extremely poor, is infinitely small.
Did you even read your own cite?
34 women, studied between 1959 and 1965. Seriously?
And the other two cites, well, they don’t even identify an author. Any Joe Schmo could have written them.
I thought asking for a cite, demanded actual evidence to satisfy, not a foolish discussion of the odds or direction to a couple of unattributed web sites, and an almost 50 yr old study. Hmm, guess I was mistaken.
If you agree that every birth has a risk, then 20 births is much more likely to result in a problem, either death or something that leads to death down the road, than 2 births, right?