My TBM neighbor has 7 kids. I am also one of 7 and I can tell you from experience there is never enough love or attention to go around. (side note, now that we are all adults, my parents seem to get a sick pleasure from making us compete with each other for our parent's love and attention...makes me wanna run).

Back to my neighbor. Her kids span from ages 2-14. They are pretty close in age. Last year my husband found their then 1 year old wandering in the street with only a diaper on. He knew which house he belonged to and brought him back...mother was in a tizzy and didn't even know he was missing. Of course that many kids is overwhelming. But I will also add that she makes it appear that she has it all together and that their household runs like a well-oiled machine and everyone's needs are always met. We as their neighbors have seen some of the reality.

The other day on social media this neighbor of mine posted a pic of her holding a new baby nephew and was making comments/hashtags about being done/but not really, we don't want more kids/but maybe we do, etc., while tagging her husband in the comments. I don't know how he feels about it, but he is in his mid-30's and looks TIRED and worn out.

She is literally addicted to babies. I love babies, but once we decided to be done we made it a permanent decision. I can enjoy holding my friend's babies and be content with that. I just find it so incredibly selfish of her to want to keep pumping out more kids just because she loves babies so much. It's like she wants to feed her addiction and then once babyhood wears off they're stuck in the rest of the brood fending for themselves. She is always jetting off on vacations without her family. Imagine being the grandma (in her 70's) that has to come and take care of that many kids by herself because mama is on vacay again. And the husband is a typical post-missionary Mormon salesman who travels a lot for work. It happens so often that I now know when grandma is there by the car she drives.

Anyway, I guess this is more of a vent. I don't know what many other people's experiences are with being from a huge family, but mine are mostly negative. I feel for those poor brainwashed kids whose mother has a baby addiction.

#16 of 16 kids. When I first got to know him and his sister, they seemed really together and great people. They are good people. I will admit that. I adore him still. I worry about him.

BUT they were taught to beg. They went without all their lives. I'm sure that they used LDS welfare to get food, etc. And they all went without, especially attention from their parents.

The mother I was told just loved babies. Her husband finally made her stop. STOP? These kids have been NEGLECTED.

My sister married #1 of 13 (and she had several miscarriages). He's a great guy, but it is obvious that he never got the attention he needed. He said his parents never once read with him. His mother was 17 when he was born and his father was 30. My daughter got him a job driving buses up in Alaska for Princess Cruises for a few summers. She was relieved when he didn't come back this year because she said she had to be his momma the whole summer. He's in his 60s.

I am 1 of 6 and I can say that it was too much for my mother and father. They had a disabled child, too. I took care of my youngest brother and he called me mom and I adore him, and we are still very close. I'm glad my mother had him as he really is the saving grace in my life.

My neighbor has 6 and she really does do well with them. He is very involved. She is not having anymore. She took care of that. Her kids are wonderful.

I've heard two women use the phrase "baby hungry" to describe their desire to have yet more babies. One had eight already, and some of them were already having babies.

I found the phrase appalling and more than a little creepy. They thought it was clever and cute. O_o

Sadly, they all suffered for it.

I learned that my plyg brother had 15 but only told the exmo sibs about 9 of them. I'm sure he had trouble remembering all the names and I'm sure they didn't eat or dress well. The brother connived to get donations and expected others to pitch in and help him with the cost.

My mom was one of eight in a blended family. This was in the depression era, so before reliable birth control. From comments my mom made, I'm not sure if grandma would have wanted so many kids.

One thing mom said really struck me. She said she was close to some siblings but not others. I am very close to my one brother, and I think it's a shame when there are so many kids that the siblings are unable to form close relationships with all of their brothers and sisters. My mom also left home before graduating from high school. There may have been several reasons for that, but her comment was, "Too many mouths to feed."

As a school teacher, I have proof in my classroom every day that more is not always better. One of my parents this past year has struggled mightily to care for the children she already has. By struggle, I mean that the kids are late to school every day, by up to three hours. And yet, she is pregnant again, and happy about it. *sigh*



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/14/2018 04:43PM by summer.

I have nothing to add to this topic from my own perspective because I don't have children, but I came from a family of five children whose parents were completely overwhelmed, so if I had been straight and had children, I am pretty sure I would have limited myself to two.

I have also read two excellent books, both written by men who grew up in super-religious Catholic families, both describing childhoods marked by distant, overburdened parents, older siblings whose youth was confiscated to care for younger children, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and ultimate splintering of families. One is called "Fourteen" and was written by a New Hampshire man named Stephen Zanichkowsky.

The other was written by Tom North, one of the eight children born to Richard North and Helen North, who later was widowed and became Helen Beardsley after marrying widower Francis Beardsley, who had ten children, and went on to have two more for a total of twenty. The 1968 movie "Yours, Mine & Ours" starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda was based on Helen Beardsley's book, "Who Gets the Drumstick?" Tom North blows the lid off his mom's book and relates what growing up in that household was really like and it ain't pretty, trust me. His account is disputed by some of his stepsiblings, not surprisingly, but I think I he convinced me.

Also, if you've never read Betty Friedan's classic "The Feminine Mystique," one chapter describes a woman Friedan interviewed who had what seemed to be a charmed life in her 1950s suburban household, but who tearfully admitted that she was envious of women who had careers and knew what they wanted to do with their lives, because she realized she couldn't just keep having babies, and once the babies grew she wasn't needed as much.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/14/2018 09:06PM by formerrlds.

Fifteen year old Mormon boy. One of 10 kids, Now in deep trouble as he made and took a bomb to school and lit it near the lunch room. Fortunately it burned itself out. Shows no remorse at being caught. Psychologists says he was/is looking for attention. Gee... I wonder why.

I can think of worse things to be addicted to.

Large families used to be the norm. Not anymore.

Amyjo Wrote:
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> Large families used to be the norm. Not anymore.

Mostly, they were the "norm" when infant mortality rates were sky-high. So in order to have 1 or 2 survive into adulthood, you had to have 7 or 8.

Not anymore.

I think a lot of the current massive-family mothers (and sometimes the fathers) have no lives of their own, and derive their only "joy" in life from giving birth (sadly, though, often not from caring for them properly afterwards). Mormon culture perpetuates that situation. If they had their own interests, their own goals, etc. they might get some personal satisfaction from their own lives rather than from their kids' lives.

Your first paragraph is me too. Maybe I should hashtag oversize families. My upbringing sucked, and my parents also created resource competition. I had one sister so desperate that she married in the temple just to get Mom and Dad's attention.

I was once told I was selfish for planning on not having any children.

Meh. Babies are ok.

In one of the bestsellers (of a few decades ago) by the psychotherapist M. Scott Peck--I don't recall which of his books it was--he directly addressed the phenomenon of women who are addicted to babies, and I recall he said that around the time such women's babies turn two years old, in other words as soon as they begin to assert even a tiny bit of independence, their mothers lose interest. They are only interested in children--babies--who are utterly dependent on them and who need to be held all the time. He described what a cruel blow it is for the young toddlers of such women when their mothers suddenly, inexplicably to the children, lose interest in them. I read the book when I was only a young teenager and had no interest in having kids, yet that passage in the text really stuck with me for whatever reason.

This thread also reminds me of something a TBM friend of mine said once that I found bleakly humorous: She is the youngest of eight kids, and she was saying how "wonderful" it was growing up in a big family. She then added, "For some reason my two oldest sister really resent my mom and have a lot of anger toward her, though. I don't get it." Obviously I do not know all of my friend's family history, but I immediately thought, "Ha! Yeah, I wonder why the two oldest girls in a family of eight kids have resentment toward their mom--they probably had to be surrogate mothers before they were six."

Very insightful. You understand it.

One of my sisters has 8 kids, which isn't a huge family but is too large a number of kids for my sister to have raised. Her oldest says she will never have kids because she's already raised her youngest 5 siblings. This young lady barely made it through high school because she didn't have time to do her homework; running her mother's home took up all her time. School sports or other activities weren't even a possibility for her.

Her parents wanted her to live at home during college so she could continue raising their kids and running their home. They would have paid for her to attend UVU. Her GPA was too low for BYU. My parents paid her way to a California State University. Because she had time to study, she did reasonably well in undergrad, and is now in her second year of dental school. We'll never know what she might have done if she had been allowed to study and do homework in high school.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/16/2018 12:38AM by scmd1.

I think eight is a lot, scmd. These days I think anything over 4 or 5 kids is a lot of children. If an older sibling is taking over child-rearing duties, then IMO there are too many kids. Children should not be raising children. I'm glad that things are turning out well for your niece, however.

Q: How do you tell if you are at a mormon wedding ?

A: Both mother-in-laws are pregnant.

My mom came from a TBM family of 12, 10 of whom made it to adulthood. This was late 19th early 20th century, when child mortality was still fairly high.

Of the ten, one had 5 children, one had 4, all the rest had 3 or fewer.

Somehow I don't think being part of a herd was a very good experience for them.