I wanted to replied to this thread but it was closed by the time I got to the bottom. http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1680382

My dad is the oldest of 7 kids born to my grandparents who were farmers in Kansas. My grandpa also work as a mechanic to help suppliment the family income during the times there wasn't much going on at the farm.

Lets see, there is was couple from one of the churches I attended several years ago who had 7-8 kids. They were a very nice family and the older kids were all very nice and polite and probabily end up going places. The dad was a contractor who did well for himself and was also in the ministry part time as well. They were not mormons by any means so I know that the girls have a fighting chance to make something of themselves before they get married.

Are you talking about head count or sheer TONNAGE?

LMAO

There was a family in my hometown with 16 or 18 kids -- can't remember now. When the youngest graduated from high school, the parents were given honorary diplomas for having all their kids finish HS.

Non-Mormon, BTW.

I had a friend in college that was the middle of 15 kids. She had a lot of issues related to her being from such a large family. She was ALWAYS going to the doctor and she would admit that it was because she received 1-on-1 attention that she never received growing up! She was also a neat freak....like REALLY neat freak and said it was because she grew up in such clutter and messiness as a child. She also had relationship issues...The entire family (which I met a few times at Weddings) would openly talk about how they were not wanted or the result of a love match, but instead were the result of their mother's "once a week duty!" Not Mormon...Catholic

My husband's parents both come from large families...his dad came from a family of 15 and his mom a family of 12. The first few siblings on both sides had 12-15 children each. His dad had a smaller family of 6! We jokingly say that he comes from a small Mexican family of 500...but it is true...he has A LOT of cousins! Also Catholic, not Mormon.

My mother once told me of a Roman Catholic family she knew in her youth that had 24 children! She said the poor woman was always pregnant and holding one child in her arms and another by the hand. The family included several sets of twins.

Wow, that is crazy. I thought having more than 6-7 was a little much.

+1

I have a male cousin who has 14 children. All biological, single births. 2 with special needs.

He and his wife are fundamentalist Christians.

They do well, and are well grounded.

I have a relative who had 13 children. They are all adults now.

GodLedMeOut asked whether we were counting children or tonnage. At the risk of being offensive, my relative was in danger of scoring very high on the tonnage scale as well as the numerical one. What I mean is that a few of the middle children in that family had horrible eating disorders.

The cause was always perfectly clear. These were children who were lost in the shuffle, who did not get a lot of parental attention and who tried to fill the void inside with food. Another sibling did it with drugs. They have not outgrown these problems as adults, and they have serious relationship problems.

Given how hard it is to rear children the right way, to give each as much attention as he or she needs and deserves, I consider very large families a sort of child abuse. Some parents are skillful enough to handle a few or even several, but 13?

I should add that my parents had five kids and did not rear us well. My mother was a limited woman, perhaps should not have had any children but certainly not five. The other complicating factor was that my father was extremely busy as a rising star in the church. He was never around except when he came home, tired and angry, late at night.

Decades later I discussed my father's absence with him, telling him that he really should have been present for his kids. He replied that he hadn't had time; he actually said, "I was too busy being successful." Almost before he finished that sentence his face clouded up because he realized how directly that contradicted everything the church was supposed to value.

He is old now, has seen the church hurt his family, and understands things somewhat better. My mother still does not. Once a political moderate, she has retreated into the verities of Glenn Beck and Donald Trump. When Trump loses favor, she'll find some other prophet to follow. Her feelings about the church remain strong but not fervent, so she has turned to politics for her emotional sustenance and for protection against the need for self-reflection.

Returning to the topic, I feel that the church worsens the problems inherent in large families. It takes resources from families when kids are little, harming those children in ways that make them more susceptible to the emotional appeal of Mormonism, thereby passing the dynamic on to the next generation.

I am the very last one who should be talking about tonnage, being a little larger than the svelte me of olden times, but many large families are in danger of poor diets--and emotionally feeding the hungry heart.

When my grandkids (six of em) go to their other grandparents' house, they steal food and hide it in the guest room. Their parents seem to feed them well enough; but still, there is some strange need there.

I'm not going to be featured on the cover of GQ anytime soon, either.

I eat emotionally sometimes, and I recognize the pattern. In my relative's case, four of the children have obvious psychological problems of a compensatory sort--three are very large, one has been in drug rehab a few times. Of the three, two are women, now approaching middle age, who would have liked to have families but never had a single date. Part of that was due to their physical size, presumably more was due to their lack of self-confidence.

I remember their teenaged years: there was so much pain, so many hours alone in their rooms. They and their siblings needed love, hugs, and parents who had the time and interest to listen. They, especially the ones in the middle, never got those things.

The notion that people should have as many kids as possible is postively dangerous, as is the idea that God will bless those kids if their parents are fully engaged in church activity. The truth is as Sydney Poirtier says in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: parents who bring a child into the world owe that child everything just as that child will one day owe his son everything. Considerations besides the needs of one's children should be completely irrelevant.

In my neighborhood growing up, one TBM family had 12 children, and other neighbors had 6 children.

I met another mom at my midwife's office. At the time I had only 3, was expecting my 4th. The mom was expecting her 14th. I asked if she was Mormon or Catholic. She replied, "Nope, Baptist!"

I felt to be about an inch tall. But she assured me that it was O.K. because most large families came from Mormonism or Catholicism.

Later, as cracks were appearing in my spiritual armor, I 'met' Michelle Duggar. At the time, she only had 13, and was expecting #14. I talked a LOT to her and asked a lot of questions. I had one big concern, because someone at our elementary school, not knowing I was in the room, or maybe not realizing how many kids I had, said the same thing that Inspired Stupidity said - that having that many kids was abusive to the kids! At that point in time, I was a frustrated mom of 7! I was reading every night to my kids. We made cookies together on Wednesdays - nothing, not even church activities were allowed to get in the way of making cookies. I always felt like I wasn't giving enough time to someone! My goal was to spend at least a 1/2 hour a week of total uninterrupted time to each child (1/2 hour, because there were some that 'needed' more time, and the baby wouldn't take a bottle... and with public school, one-on-one time was 'special' anyway!)

I was also really lucky at that time, because we were going to a charter school that encouraged parents to take their children 'out' for a day, as long as it was to go on an educational 'trip'. So, there were many days that one of my kidlets would go to school in the morning, make it past the 3rd hour, and then, Surprise! Mom was there to take them... to a ball game, to visit a museum, run to the senator's office (I had some things I was involved in so got to have face time with our senator), go to a movie (let's see, we're critiquing the production?), or just out to lunch (and talk to the owner of the restaurant about how busy it is and how you decide what to serve), and once in a while, get a head start on those cookies! But those types of activities always involved having the baby, and most times the pre-schoolers as well. BTW, when you do those types of activities, it's actually pretty easy to arrange for field trips for public school classes!

Oh, writing this, I remember meeting another family with a van very similar to ours. I accidentally tried to get into their van at the grocery store, then realized, there's had stickers on the bumper... mine had a trailer hitch.

Anyway, they were here only for a little while, and said they didn't fit in here. They had 17 kids - one already out of the nest. Everywhere they went, the normally had to take 2 cars! I only met 8 of their kids. Don't know their religion, but they were NOT Mormon.

TBM daughter being engaged to #16 of 16 children. I forgot to mention, my sister is married to the oldest of 13 children. Lack of attention, YES! He is closer to my family than his own and was very close to my dad. He said nobody ever read with him as a child when he was learning to read.

The #16 of 16 I still have a lot to learn about.

I've known two families with 10 children each. One family suffered a tragedy after the woman delivered her 10th child; she was pulling her car backward out of the driveway and was struck and killed by another driver. I am not sure how the husband coped with 10 stair-step kids, one a brand new baby.

Two families-- of 11 and 8. The spouses had former marriages end in death, and when they married, they had 19 kids between them. 21 total people in that one house, at first.

Not all at home at the same time for too long after the marriage and not all of them little kids, thank goodness! 3-4 were off to community college or the military within a year or two of one another, but still--their house only had 4 bedrooms, and no garage, attic or basement to expand into.

They were a 9 days wonder to the rest of us on our street, then and now.

40 years later, I ran into my former neighbor from that street: first question she asked of me was, whatever became of the X family? The answer was not much. And ironically, not one of those kids had more than 3 kids of their own!

I personally knew of a family that had 12 kids. My dad told stories about a family he knew that had 22. There were a few sets of twins according to him and maybe even one set of triplets.

There was this Roman Catholic family that lived about 1 mile from my humble abode in suburban Long Island back in the 1960's. IIRC, there were 13 children. I knew the father and one of the sons because they were involved in the non-Mormon boy scout troop I was affiliated with (until I discovered Star Trek).

my grandfather was one of 12 children to survive past infancy..... I kinda feel lucky that I am alive, guess I picked the right one. haaa

My late father-in-law was the youngest of 14. His father had remarried after the first wife died after the birth of the seventh one.

Lovely man. The family was jack mormon. :-)

My Roman Catholic mom comes from a family of ten kids (two additional children were stillborn). When I was young, she didn't talk to me much about it, but as I've gotten older, my mom has lifted the veil somewhat. She said that basically the older kids still at home raised the younger ones, and that she, being the fourth child, was often either ignored or savagely beaten by her mother (Part of that may well have been because my mom was her father's favorite child).

When the kids grew up, three didn't have any kids at all, one had one, another had one and a stillborn, one had two, three had three, and one had five. In the end, I think that all of the kids in the family learned, regardless of how they felt about their religion, that having a lot of kids was a lot more trouble than it was worth.

I went out with two different guys a couple of times who came from families of 14 kids. Weirdly, this was after I graduated from BYU and when I was living back in CA. Neither friendship/dateship/whatever came to anything because the idea of marrying someone from such a big family scared me - simply because I only wanted 3 kids myself.

I have a cousin who has at least 10 kids; I lost count in the 90's. She started having them when I was a young teen. I avoided them like the plague at family gatherings because my cousin was always asking me to change the poopy diapers. And there was always at least one kid with a poopy diaper. I learned to get a whiff of that and head out for a walk, a grocery store run, a look at the garden.

Don't even get me started on the runny noses!

I have 2 kids almost 8 years apart because one-on-one time with them was important to me.

My husband worked for a
couple who had 20 living children but had lost a couple along the way. My husband hated his job as many of the kids worked there also. Not LDS.

To me, that is the most disgusting part of large families that rarely gets talked about: at the end of a "quiverfull", there are the stillborn. I said to a friend once: they should change the name of the show "19 kids and counting" because if they are still counting...it's the stillborn. Why didn't they count #20 the stillborn? Especially if they are in favor of the idea that life begins at conception?

More importantly, why give birth to the point of birthing dead babies because your womb can't do it any more?

Sorry, but it's true for mares and other mammals too. Just freakin' stop it!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2015 10:14PM by mswhinny.

I guess there you have it in a nutshell, IMHO, big families = dirty diapers. snotty noses and eventually, dead babies. Plus I forgot to mention, bladder control. Yup, women with lots of babies don't have it. Please don't make them laugh or cough. And forgive the wet sofa when they sneeze.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2015 10:41PM by mswhinny.