My parents love this movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdsLBupTNcc

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042327/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt

They were married in 1959 in their mid-twenties so this film was a huge influence on their having 10 kids. They tried for 12 but a stillborn child (can't baptism them) between 9 and 10 contributed to their decision to not push into their late 40s continuing to have kids.

My parents see this movie as their ideal. I heard them say it. We watched the later version many times on video in the 80s. Suffice it to say The Sound of Music and Cheaper by The Dozen were the top of cinematic art for my parents and their worship of big family.

And my parents are well educated - both.

There is no doubt in my mind that my parents were inculcated to not use birth control. They both see it as Satan's tool to reduce those spirits coming down. Incidentally, the love that craptastic show "Saturday's Warrior." It advocates their sentiments.

In short, I believe education can help people not to do what my parents did but I think that religion can preserve "spiritually" the mindset that may not see birth control as evil but definitely a tool of the devil. Not many Mormons I know will even talk about birth control. It is a taboo subject still as far as I can tell.

Anyone else notice the demonization of birth control in Mormons and Mormonism? Maybe they have finally seen the light but with a man with a big family at the top I doubt it. And I am only able to type this because my parents wanted a bigger family. I am one of the elders of the youngers in my family.

The funniest thing about both Cheaper by the Dozen and its followup, Belles on their Toes, is that both books are works of fiction. While Frank and Lilian Gilbreth did have twelve children, the antics described in both books are largely made up. In a biography of Lilian Gilbreth I read much later, I learned that many of the methods used to train the kids were begun after Frank's death from a heart attack in the early 1920s (she had all these kids to raise and she became almost instantly the family's breadwinner in a world where women were never expected to work). The two (then grown) children who wrote both books would later say that they fictionalized major parts of their life stories to make those reading the stories feel good about the country they lived in and the kinds of family values in vogue at the time (many of which are still advocated by the LDS church and other religious groups).

The real telling part of all of this is that, according to Wikipedia's entry on the family, none of the Gilbreth children had big families of their own. The most children any one of them had was the oldest daughter who had four.

Thank you for "the rest of the sortie," I mean story. WOW! Like my whole younger life was a scam, sham, and full of lies.

You can console yourself wit the knowledge that what Frank and Lilian Gilbreth did for a living was very real and helped many businesses, particularly those involved in manufacturing. The husband-and-wife team were forerunners of today's business consultants; literally, they broke down manufacturing processes into their individual chores and then taught both business owners and their employees how to perform the same functions using less energy. At the time, what the Gilbreths did was somewhat controversial (using less energy meant greater productivity, fewer employees, and, possibly a lesser role for unionized workers), but many manufacturing businesses today worldwide follow the trail laid out by the Gilbreths.

Wow again!

Gives a whole new meaning to "cheaper by the dozen" processes instead of just throwing people at a problem!

And my parents just through people at their own salvation!!!