Why Have a Big Family? Weighing Opportunity Costs and How to Make it Easier
When someone first referred to my family as "a big family like yours," I only had three kids. And I was surprised! Was my family of five really that big? We have friends with five, or six, or eight kids. Three? That's still on the small side!
When we had our fourth, I figured, okay, we're officially in "big family" territory. Four kids! Six people! Booth seating in restaurants was starting to feel cramped. Those "family deals" for four people (2 adults, 2 kids) were a joke. We bought a second fridge. A van would be all I'd ever drive, but without any space for extra passengers. And so on.
When I was younger, like many of my generation, I didn't have a plan for how many kids I wanted or when I'd have them. Just that I planned on some, sometime. More than one, certainly (gotta have siblings), and probably before I was thirty (given how fertility declines over time and all that). It was a good thing my husband was ready for kids when he was, reminded me we weren't getting younger, and asked me about it when he did, otherwise I might have put it off until—like so many of my generation—I "felt ready".
For us, it all worked out. We had our first at age 27. It felt young compared to all the people around me: ambitious academics, researchers, and entrepreneurs at MIT. Some wondered: "Why aren't you waiting until you have tenure?" (Assumptions: that I was pursuing the tenure-track life. That waiting made sense, at all.) And then I didn't feel done at two, though I had several people asking me if I was done, since I had both a boy and a girl (like, what? Gotta catch em all! Collect the whole set?). Honestly, it's pretty cool that we can just make more new little people who are my favorite people ever!
(Read: Can You Have a Baby in Grad School?)
"Feeling ready" for kids is overrated. People delay, or forsake the endeavor altogether, for reasons they can't always articulate. The reasons they do put forth remind me of the lengthening of adolescence, growing incompetence and uncertainty among youth: "Later." "When I'm ready." "When I find the right partner." "When I'm financially stable." "If the climate weren't such a concern." "Who would want to bring a child into a world like this?" You'll never feel your life is stable enough. You'll always be able to find reasons to delay. You'll never know everything you think you ought to… so why not jump in already and learn as you go?
Opportunity cost
The answer to "why not jump in?" is opportunity cost. I wrote about the opportunity costs inherent in motherhood earlier this year. As Catherine Pakaluk explained in her book Hannah's Children, you can't know in advance what having children is like. It's difficult to weigh the unknown experience of having children (or having more children) against the known quantities in your present life. The things you'd have to give up loom large; the benefits are nebulous and unknown. New parents always go in blind, so to speak. You can't be fully prepared, because you've never had the experience before.
Furthermore, many young people aren't told to have kids! Maybe you get that advice in more traditionally religious households. Maybe it's implicit if you have a bunch of siblings yourself. But so many people are only children, or one of a pair. They have little experience with young children. They may not be given much guidance on choosing a spouse or forming families.
In that earlier post, I also probed how your life changes. There's the common refrain that once you have kids, your life is over, you can't have fun or do your own things. You have to look forward to the day when your kids are bigger and you "get your life back." People talk about the bad parts of having kids: sleepless nights; tantrums; diapers; messes and chaos; lost time; time spent on chores and schooling and "kid stuff", like ferrying kids from activity to activity; dumb kids' show theme songs that gets stuck in your head, etc., etc.
People don't talk enough about how having kids means you get to share the best parts of life with your favorite people. (Key assumption: that the people whose kids aren't some of their favorite people are doing it wrong.) I love my kids. Most activities are more fun with them! Sure, there are plenty of activities I can't do with them yet (like hike a 10-mile trail up a mountain), but we'll get there. And we do other fun things in the meantime.
It's different fun than I may have had pre-children. I get to see them discovering the world for the first time. The first time they see a flamingo, or fireworks, or a balloon on a string. The first taste of ice cream.The wonder on their faces after hiking two miles up to an alpine lake with a waterfall. The love in my two-year-old's voice when he sees I'm mad and comes up to hug me, saying, "I'm making you not grumpy!" I get to share my favorite things with new people. I get to see them learn and discover and explore.
Instead of asking how many child-free years you get before you have kids, ask how many years you'll get with your kids, or your grandkids. How long do you have to know them? How many years might that be? If you have them earlier, and more of them, you have more time.
Plus, you will have time eventually to do kid-less things. As the kids get older, they may want to do their own things; you can leave them home when you go out; they move out eventually, too.
(Read: How Do You Do It? 5 Ways to Be Patient, Calm, and Improve Your Relationship With Your Children)
You can make it easier
I've had friends (each with one or two kids apiece) wonder at how anyone could have enough time for more children! How would a parent give each child enough individual time and attention? How can you manage all the chores? The laundry?
First, realize that you would have to cook, clean, do laundry, and take care of yourself and your home no matter what; adding a few more people doesn't change that part of the equation very much. Sure, there are more people making messes, and food needs to be prepped in larger portions… but there are also more people who can help out.
Plus, there are a lot of ways of making things easier.
You can opt out of some of the "bad parts" of childrearing, like dumb kids shows, some activities, and even some of the specific "kid stuff"—see my reviews of Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff for ideas.
You can outsource stuff you can't do or don't want to do. For instance, we have hired a lovely cleaning lady to come every other week, leaving me free to just do the daily upkeep. I don't have to fit in deep cleaning bathrooms around when I want to be doing activities with the kids or when the littlest is napping. I highly recommend outsourcing cleaning if you can afford it; it's one of the most common activities that women outsource when they can, probably because it's worth it.
I know other moms with many kids who employ mothers helpers, tutors, and other people to help them out. For example, if you homeschool and upper level math really isn't your thing, yes, you can outsource it! People forget that we're not supposed to do everything. We're also not supposed to do everything all alone. Having a large family is manageable when you remember that you don't have to do everything yourself.
In addition, kids don't actually need tons of your time, especially as they get older. The older they get, the more they want to be doing their own things and the less you have to follow them around making sure they're not sticking their fingers in outlets or eating rocks. They want independent play time, occasional input, and intermittent long conversations. They don't need you all day all the time.
For example, my 8-year-old will happily spend hours building with Lego or K'nex. He will spend ten minutes explaining what he built to me. Maybe he will come get me for five minutes here and there to help troubleshoot an engineering issue. But he doesn't need nor want me there for the four hours he spent building! That means those four hours I can spend on my own projects, or with the other kids, if they're not also engrossed in building and playing.
Even if you're homeschooling—yes, you can lead activities, read aloud, talk to each child about their interests, and so on at every age… and as the kids get older, they can also do a lot of work independently. Plus, some activities might involve everyone (like reading aloud), so the quality time is shared. Homeschooling tends to be more efficient than public schooling, so there are still plenty of hours in the day for free play time (i.e., possible project time for you!).
Sure, sometimes every child will want attention at the same time. That can be difficult, but it's also an opportunity for everyone to learn patience. (Life skills, anyone?)
Lean into flexibility
Another way to make the most of your time is to lean into flexibility. Be opportunistic about when you take time for you. Lean into what's happening around you at home, or when you are out—the rhythms of your day. Figure out when schedules and rigidity work, and when they don't (temperaments, seasons, etc can all change the balance). Figure out when you can have your time.
For example, if I have the goal of reading to myself 20 minutes a day, and also the goal of reading a few books or chapters with my kids every day, I have to find the right moments, or it will be frustrating for everyone. I can't do my reading when everyone needs help getting breakfast or when they're tired and fighting with each other. I can't do their reading when the littlest ones are too tired to sit still or too energetic to pay attention or too interested in wrestling to let the rest of us sit while they play nearby. I don't want to interrupt a good imaginative play session (at least not without good reason), because that's valuable, too; and besides, if they're all engaged in playing, that's a better time for me to pick up my own book or some other task I need to do than to interrupt to read to them. Instead, I can read to them when they need a break, when they're starting to get restless with each other and clearly need a change of activity, or even during snacktime.
Some people do well with schedules and time limits. And we use those tools, too. When kids haven't learned yet to read clocks, I make use of visual timers so they can get a sense of how long they have before, say, we need to get in the car to go somewhere. Or we'll set a timer for a fast five minute cleaning/toy pickup session. We're not currently in a stage where we schedule in what time we start lessons every schoolday, because instead, we're in a stage with very little kids who aren't consistent with their wakeup times, so sometimes I want to sleep until 8 like the littlest one, not start on the days activities. Flexibility is key.
Parentification, or responsibility and love?
Large family life may look intimidating when you try extrapolating your current one or two kid life onto it, but things change. Tasks you had to do yourself are easier with help, even imperfect help. Older kids help with chores and with younger kids. (Chores that younger children do may not actually be done faster or better than you could do yourself, but they need to learn to do them, so let them take longer and learn the skills. It'll get better, I promise.)
Everyone has to help out to make the house livable. Responsibility is good. As Michaeleen Doucleff wrote in Hunt, Gather, Parent, and William Stixrud and Ned Johnson wrote in The Self-Driven Child, kids often want responsibility and do better when you give it to them. Requiring kids to do chores and help with the household teaches life skills and responsibility, and builds the family community; it's not an instance of parentification. (Some recent social media debates questioned that stance; parentification is a term properly applied to what happens when parents check out entirely and leave kids to raise themselves.)
And when it comes to siblings… same thing. Older kids want to help with their younger siblings. They love their younger siblings and want to spend time with them! My older kids (e.g., 8 or 6 years old) will take the 18-month-old on adventures in the backyard or on the tire swing. They'll fight over who gets to hold him in their lap.
True, they do not always want to help, and they don't necessarily want to play with the little one when I think it would be helpful. And that's fine! I rarely insist that the older ones watch the littlest; instead, I take advantage of the times when they volunteer to do so. Flexibility again! The times I do insist are usually for situations like "the 18-month-old just knocked a glass off a table, keep him in the playroom with you until I get the broken glass cleaned up", or "let me put these cookies in the oven for you, and then I'll come watch him" (and they're happy to watch him for cookies, haha).
I will, as a way of helping the older kids learn responsibility, remind them that if they take the younger ones outside, to keep an eye on the younger ones and shout if they need help. Or tell them, "keep an eye on the younger ones, and if you get tired of keeping an eye out or don't want to, bring them back to me and I'll watch them." They get to practice responsibly keeping an eye on siblings and younger kids, but they're not required to beyond their limits or interest. I'm not going to make them parent, but they will learn skills necessary for keeping an eye on a younger child, which can come in handy later. Plenty of kids choose babysitting as a first job!
Overall… having a large family is doable. The key is realizing that it doesn't have to be as hard as you think.
