So, I am someone who falls on one side of your tail (I don't and won't ever have children), however I live in one of the only places in the US that still is at least somewhat (though increasingly less so, year by year) built for large families, ie Utah, and I fully agree with your post.
However, and not to be a downer, but I think this is much more difficult to solve than you indicate. Because for one thing, these changes happened organically as families opted to invest more per child and have less of them in an increasingly competitive world...they were never imposed top down and the structural changes adapted to meet the realities moreso than the other way around. For instance, part of the reason colleges charge so much is because they can. If parents started to refuse to pay, they'd be forced to a drop their prices. But with more small families, and also a lot more RICH families nowadays (at least partly bc of less kids), there are simply enough parents out there willing and able to pay high prices, and wanting to do whatever they can to beat advantage their kids, that there is zero incentive for a university to drop its tuition. They will always charge as much as they can.
That's just one example but it runs to so many things. There are a lot of things in Utah that are clearly different than other places bc people still have, or at least aspire to have, bigger families. But the thing is, they kind of don't work when it's just a minority. It's really hard that way, just on basic economics.
Here's another example: there are a lot more shops and businesses here that are closed on Sundays and closed by 6 pm the other days, than most places in the US, where doing that would be business suicide. It used to be the norm, and now it isn't, and that's bc the vast majority of all adults, or the people who can actually patronize a business and spend money there, are at work M-F til 6. So if you're closed when they're out of work and can actually spend money, you're going to go out of business. This model only works in a place where you still have a critical mass of stay at home parents who can actually shop and buy things during the day. The reason a lot of shop owners want to be closed in the evenings and on Sundays is because they too have big families and they want to go home and be with them. Which makes perfect sense, for the the business owner, if there are enough local customers who can actually patronize your establishment during the weekdays. But if 80% of adults are at work, it doesn't work, and that business being closed in the evenings and on weekends is going to really annoy and piss off the working parents who can't ever go buy something at a shop bc they're always closed when they have actual free time.
There are so, so many little things like that. Kids still run outside and play everywhere here, without adult supervision. But that's bc there are enough kids to do that. Prices for kid-oriented stuff tend to be a lot lower here...again, because the market won't bear higher prices, since parents can't afford it when they have so many kids. If everyone had 1 or 2, and the parents had more cash, those businesses would of course jack their prices up, as they have everywhere else.
A lot of this stuff just ends up being the natural economic outcome of what happens when there are less kids and adults with more disposable cash, at a critical mass. So while I agree with your analysis, I'm not sure what the solution is other than just giving massive subsidies to large families, which would be quite difficult politically.
I suppose one point I'd raise it that it somewhat seems like a silly lost opportunity here, when you also DO have a lot more households with zero children. One would think that childless households would be an obvious source of extra support for parents precisely bc they usually DO have the extra time and money. And yet parents virtually never ask non-parents for help or favors, ever. I think this is bc they often have some distrust of childless people and/or maybe even a little hostility and/or assume they hate or dislike children. I think that's a shame and unnecessary and untrue, and that actually plenty of childless people would be more than willing to pitch in and watch a neighbor's kid or otherwise take a little burden off. They may not want or think they can handle a 24-7, 20-year commitment to kids, but that doesn't mean they aren't happy to help part time or in a pinch. And yet they are virtually never asked and almost assumed to live totally alien and separate lives and I think it's kind of dumb. Like just a silly misallocation where you have one group of people who are overwhelmed and another with excess capacity and no one ever thinks to shift that a bit, as between them, which would be the normal thing to do in most circumstances but it seems like some parents are afraid that non-parents are child hating baby eaters they can't trust or something. To be clear I think that is much more pronounced with men, where people do not want to tolerate the idea of an unrelated non-father ever spending time with a child bc they fear some kind of evil/perverse sexual thing, and is less an issue with women, but even there, I see a lot of excess wasted capacity.
This is a really thoughtful comment, and I think your Utah examples get at something important. Large-family life only really seems possible when there are enough other people around you living that way too. Once housing, businesses, activities, and work life all adapt around smaller families, the whole thing becomes self-reinforcing. In my view, addressing that kind of critical-mass problem starts with a broader cultural acceptance of large families, which may require some pioneering families leading the way and, over time, creating enough momentum for wider social change. But agreed it’s definitely not an issue with a simple overnight fix by any means.
I think part of this issue is that families typically add one kid at a time and so they adapt to having 1 or two kids. I think often they like giving so much material abundance to their kid and it seems like a lot to give up. A lot of the 3rd and 4th kids are surprises - they didn’t plan for it and they deal with it but they didn’t intend it. Some people go into it wanting a big family but more fall into it. A lot of changes would have to happen for this to be more common again - def a vibe shift and more shifts to make it possible and sustainable
I agree that some of this is pretty hard to change without overhauling the economy entirely. But some things I think could be done piece by piece and would actually make a big difference on the economic front (entirely separate from the cultural points I mentioned) without a super radical change. For example:
Housing / zoning:
-- Legalize + normalize compact 4–5 bedroom homes instead of effectively forcing “more bedrooms” to mean huge luxury houses. This would make housing a lot more affordable for large families.
-- Broadly legalize ADUs, duplexes, and multiple homes on one lot so grandparents/siblings can live nearby. These should be for family, not AirBnBs
College / education
-- Restore the FAFSA sibling adjustment for multiple kids in college.
-- Reduce the admissions arms race around extracurriculars, essays, and curated resumes. And as much as I never thought I would say this, at this point I think more weight on testing than anything else, as much as that is now countercultural.
-- High school career fairs that openly advertise and promote trades, entrepreneurship, etc. or other non-college avenues
Childcare / family economics
-- Childcare subsidies (e.g CCDF) expanded to allow for care by parents, grandparents, relatives, co-ops, etc, not just federally subsidized childcare. Maybe even redirecting this towards substantial caregiver allowance for parents of young children, regardless of whether they purchase daycare.
-- Make tax policy much more favorable to 3rd/4th+ children rather than giving roughly the same marginal treatment to every child.
My husband and I have 12 children (yep—all ours together). We basically decided to ignore “the system” and build our own family culture in spite of it. That has meant sometimes living in houses people would consider too small (even when we “only” had five children). I made the decision not to over-schedule our kids but to make sure we had opportunities to get together with other families at church and in the neighborhood to play, eat meals, and socialize. We lived overseas for eight years due to my husband’s work, and the last place we lived for five years was a tiny village in South Africa where the children could freely roam and where dozens of retirees taught classes—everything from piano to pottery to woodworking. It was an absolute boon for a big family—not paradise, but definitely far more supportive than the modern American town. When we returned to the US, we made the decision to move back to my husband’s hometown and buy a “fixer-upper” 1906 house in the oldest section of town…within walking distance of downtown and a local park. We have since finished out the back cottage for our older sons to live in while they continue to work and save, and we just added another small cottage for our oldest daughter. We are sticking to a nearly extinct model of family-building where everyone learns to pitch in and help each other succeed. Our second son married two years ago, and he and his wife chose to buy a house two blocks from us. They have the same vision of sticking together and helping one another—even if it’s just moral support and socialization. The oldest teens put together a business plan for a small coffee shop in 2020, since our downtown didn’t have one. They made it a school project, and Kickstarter raised the funds for it. We have since grown into a farm-to-fork bistro. One son is the chef, two others are baristas, two daughters bake and do clean-up. Large families really have to create their own job opportunities and educational options for their children without a societal support network backing them up. In this age of AI kicking people out of jobs, our children are all very motivated to “AI-proof” their lives and work with their hands and in service to others. I couldn’t be more proud of them. It has been a lot of very hard work, plus a lot of prayer and many sleepless nights, but the end results are so worth it. Kids don’t need iPads and endless entertainment—they need to feel needed. In a big family, we all need each other, and that is a beautiful thing. I am very thankful for parents who gave us the tools to do this…in spite of a massive cultural shift away from large families.
This is amazing, and twelve children is such a rare accomplishment now that I had to read that twice. What really strikes me is the way you describe building a family culture where children are needed, useful, connected, and part of something real rather than just having all their time curated and entertained. That feels like exactly the kind of nearly-lost model I was trying to get at, and it’s really encouraging to hear from someone actually living it.
Reading Cheaper by the Dozen (true story of a NJ family with 12 children in the 1920s) really inspired me as a kid. The 1950s movie with Myrna Loy as the mother is wonderful, but the book is even better.
This article makes some really interesting points that I hadn't considered as one of four children and somebody who would _like_ 4 children but has definitely felt a creeping sense of "can I make that work?" Cost + expectation of college definitely feels like a big factor.
I do wish the post was a bit more concise & contained less AI filler - the good points are getting lost in the fluff.
We have 3 children and never saved or paid for college. We couldn't, because we ran out of money. kids can earn money at that stage of life, and that's exactly how our 2 oldest to date got through college.
I wish more people felt this way. I know a lot of parents who feel like they are failing if they do not pay most of their kids’ college costs.
I get it because nobody wants their kids buried in debt. But college probably needs to be less of an automatic default life decision and more of a real choice among several possible paths, and if you do choose it then it may involve some sacrifices like working to help pay for it.
Interestingly, my husband and I were recently talking about our large family (9 children) and the economies of scale we enjoy as parents of so many children. Specifically, school books, toys, clothing, gear… you really get your bang for your buck when you end up using them for child after child. Buying food in bulk saves on cost per serving, etc. Obviously these aren’t the only expenses related to child-rearing, but it’s nice to count the wins where you find them!
In the general scheme of things, yes, I would agree that the world is at best not designed for large families and at worst openly hostile to them. As a large family, you kind of write your own rules and don’t really care what other people think about them. I stay home with our children and my husband is an entrepreneur so he can be in the home most days, as well as scale his income to our family’s various needs. The children do have more responsibilities than they might if we were a smaller family, but we all share the extra work. I also have more work than the mom of a smaller family does, so it’s not like I’m passing stuff along because I don’t feel like doing it.
I noticed that the job of mothering switched to more of a management role after 6 kids - now I realize that sounds utilitarian, which in practice it really is not. There are just a lot of details to handle when there are so many people under one roof! We still have great relationships with our kids and are very hands-on (a necessary luxury with both parents home nearly 24/7).
The external community is the largest piece missing in our life and definitely the hardest thing to try and replicate. Our children’s grandparents aren’t especially interested in being involved and none are local. Neighbors are friendly enough but certainly don’t have an interest in getting too close. We have a wonderful group of friends, many of whom also have larger families, but of course we are all in the trenches at the same time. So the practicality of being there for some of those traditionally family-filled needs is less than if we had some kind of multi-generational situation. We hope to be able to provide our children with some of the support that we wish we could have as we navigate our own parenting journey.
I’m 1of8 young millennial. We had a 5 bedroom house so it was big but in the middle of nowhere. We all were limited to one activity at a time starting in middle school (no elementary activities). Older kids helped a lot with younger kids. My parents both worked full time too and we had no extended family around. We rode the bus to & from school. We had chore lists, a house landline, and no one babysat our schoolwork. We had a ton of freedom to roam around our 3acres of land. I think the modern expectations and living in heavy traffic areas makes it really hard. And yeah car seat laws my parents definitely didn’t follow those laws perfectly.
Super interesting to hear this. I truly don’t hear about this sort of childhood very often anymore, and I’m curious: with both parents working and no extended family nearby, did your parents seem like they were barely holding it together, or did the freedom/chore/older-kids-helping model actually make the whole thing pretty manageable?
My dad was calm and seemed content but my mom was very stressed out. She also still is the breadwinner and works in healthcare management whereas my dad is a highschool history teacher. I don’t recommend being far away from family and both parents working non flexible jobs while raising a lot of kids. They definitely needed more support. As we got older and could drive things got easier.
I couldn't agree more. One of the things that strikes me is how often conversations about family size focus on culture, values, or personal preference while ignoring the economics of family life.
When the federal government says childcare should cost no more than 7% of household income, but many families pay far more than that, it becomes difficult to separate family decisions from financial reality. Add housing, healthcare, transportation, and the general cost of raising children, and it's not surprising that many families stop at one or two children even if they might have preferred more.
I suspect affordability and family stress deserve a much larger place in this conversation than they usually receive.
Declining numbers of children per woman happens everywhere where women have economic and educational opportunities and opportunities for contraceptives. I think part of this is that pregnancy and childbirth is incredibly difficult and dangerous, even with modern medicine. When women have the choice, regardless of attitudes toward parenting and family systems, few are willing to take on the long term physical consequences of 4+ children.
That’s a fair point. Pregnancy and childbirth are physically serious, and there are many women who simply do not want a larger family because of the physical risks, toll, difficult births, etc, as you say.
The article is focused on a different group of women and families who might actually want another child, but feel practical limitations of life makes it impossible. Housing, childcare, work, lack of nearby help, and modern parenting expectations all push in the same direction towards smaller families, often against the personal desires of many mothers and families.
This also can be seen in the data in the currently increasing gap between desired fertility and actual fertility. My read, from the data and from people I know personally, is that for many families in that gap, the limiting factor is not mainly “I never want to go through pregnancy and birth again", but is more like “I don’t think our life could practically support another child.”
I appreciate your response (I somehow missed it until now). I support part of my point is that there are very few women who would choose to have four or more children (that they birth, perhaps adoptions make this different). Your reference for the purposes of this piece shouldn’t be all women and the number of children they have, but all women who want four or more children. I think if you looked at that smaller referent, very many of those who want a large family have it.
Yes and no. I feel like this point makes more sense if the demographic decline truly represented many more women having no children. But you can see that over 35% have 2 children, and about 18% have 3 children (another 18% have 1 child), so that’s around 72% of women. Add in the 12 or 13% with 4+ children, and it’s nearly 85% of women. I think the article accurately assesses that many parents WOULD have more children if they could afford it and had the social support to do so.
On a cultural/standard-of-living front in the United States, I'm constantly surprised by how often people ask, "Where will they fit?" when they learn we have a second child on the way. We live in a 1200' spft home with four bedrooms. I tend to take the economics and the post-Great Recession crash for these trends the most seriously, but anecdotally, there seems to be a near-unattainable housing-space standard to "fit" a modern family.
Yes, great example. The standard for what counts as “enough space” has changed a lot in recent decades.
A 1200 sq ft house with 4 bedrooms would have been totally normal for a growing family not that long ago. My wife's mother group up with 8 siblings in a 1500 square foot farmhouse! Now people hear 2 kids and wonder if their 1600 sq. ft house is big enough.
Along side this there's also a supply/housing design issue too. For example, I don’t see many modest 4-bedroom houses like what you have anymore. At least near me (and maybe this is regional), a 4-bed house often means 2000+ sq ft, which puts it in a totally different price range.
My assumption is that these folks making these comments grew up in larger homes and are now living in much smaller homes in our urban area. For me, I kind of am signing up my kids to have a "lower standard" than I did in terms of space. There are times when I feel guilty about not being able to match or exceed what I had, but we gain a lot of quality-of-life improvements based on where we live that more than make up for it for me. American Dream expectations of giving your kids more than you had must top out at some point, where living space is concerned.
I feel this. We just had our fourth. And we sold our “big house” and are downsizing to a townhouse that’s walkable to parks, splash pads, and a million restaurants!
Everyone thinks we’re crazy, but after spending 3 months in Europe we’re done. The time we have to work to pay for all these frivolous things don’t matter.
What matters is being present and having time for your children.
If my kids had to pick between us being gone all day and having the big house to maintain vs the small townhouse and the travel and time that comes with it, hopefully they like our decision 😂
Kids are no longer allowed to go outside unsupervised. that’s why space is required now. Kids go crazy indoors without enough space and gross motor toys. That or they have to be put on iPads. Both very suboptimal situations.
Agree on your point about more bedrooms correlating to a large jump in square footage. We currently live in a 4 bed 1800 sq ft house (in which we homeschool, I run a business from, and we often have houseguests so we use every inch of it.) We’re expecting our 5th and would love a tiny bit more room and another bedroom, but 5-6 bedroom houses where we live suddenly become these behemoth 3800-4000 sq ft homes. There’s really no in-between that we’ve seen.
We have 6 kids and live on 65% of my electrician husband's salary, giving and saving the rest. I feel incredibly blessed that we are able to march to our own beat and have a life that is rich, full, and fun, with the people we love the most all under one roof!
It's all about trade-offs, and what we've chosen isn't usually what others choose: we read aloud, play games, cook, and hike together and have no TV or social media. We share one $3500 van. We eat out maybe twice a year. For three years, when we only had 3-4 kids, we lived for free (without housing expenses) in a tiny house we built ourselves, in exchange for farm chores. So now, the lovely 3 bedroom home we rent feels like a mansion:) It's all perspective. The Lord has blessed us with an adventurous life and many children; what is there to be afraid of?
I really appreciate that you value big families enough to write this essay—perhaps I missed it, but it makes me wonder if you came from one! I’m the oldest of five (born 2000-2009) and my husband is the second-youngest of five (born 1990-2000). His brother (30) has five kids already, and his dad was one of six! My mother was one of four. We aren’t Amish, Mormon, or embedded in a culture that normalizes it either. Although both our families are Christian, we were always the biggest families we knew. I’m from North Carolina and my husband’s family is in Minnesota. Our parents’ educational philosophies had a lot in common—both homeschooled and neither paid for their kids’ college or ever planned to. Despite this, all their adult children are financially independent, several have college degrees, and almost all are married, some with kids. Although their educational philosophies were similar, I don’t think it was the primary factor that led their own children to also want big families. Rather, the real commonality between my parents and my husband’s parents is that both parented with the same goal: having kids that other people enjoyed. Because of this, they deeply enjoyed us too, and we always knew it. Growing up knowing that your parents genuinely love being around you creates an innate love of your family unlike anything else. I think a lot of people who “hate kids” were probably raised by parents who didn’t enjoy them or want to be around them. Frankly, kids know if you like them or not. Individuals that were raised by parents who didn’t enjoy them are likely to struggle to believe that raising 3+ children can be genuinely joyful or a “preferred” lifestyle. However, those of us loved by big families know it is a gift that can never be replicated by travel, careers, or money, and it is more than worth sacrificing the “status” that comes with all three.
As a mom of six, the biggest challenge was having an emotional and mental trust that God cares for us and through our cooperating with whatever plan God had in mind for us, our effort was equal to the challenges we faced as a family. A basic non-contraceptive approach in accordance with a sense of mutual self-sacrificial parental giving went a long way to combatting the prevailing cultural mindset that larger human families were somehow environmentally criminal, selfish, and obviously insane. For a culture to even propose building public support for larger families, it would first have to have some agreement that more humans are a good thing. Ask any parent of a larger family how many times a medical professional suggested sterilization or other means of avoiding pregnancy, or a complete stranger offers their unasked for negative comment on family size...
My first thought is with the 1940 data, I would be interested in seeing the number adjusted for infant and young child mortality. Babies born back then were not children raised as often as they are now.
The second one is more personal. I’m expecting our third child in the next month. It wasn’t planned, not because we didn’t want more kids but because pregnancy is genuinely the worst time in my life. But with the preparations for a third child, we ran into a handful of those difficulties. We had a CRV, that won’t fit three car seats in one row, so we needed a new vehicle with a third row. We live in a 3 bedroom house and had it set up with a work space for my husband. In about a year, we will have to rearrange our entire house to accommodate (we have 2 boys and soon we’ll have a little girl), we were planning on my being more involved outside the home (I’m a SAHM) and maybe being able to bring in a little bit of income as our kids got older, now that timeline is greatly extended. The change from 2 to 3 kids really is so much more difficult logistically than 1 to 2.
The incremental cost of more kids really isn’t that much. Yes, minivan and a 3-4 bedroom house increases the budget a bit. But you have to move to places where other families are and make friends. You probably can’t live around a bunch of restaurants. (I’ve lived in the hip areas and after a while all the food starts tasting the same). Join a church even if you’re not that much of a believer. One parent takes on a job that is less demanding. And you just don’t expect as much out of everyone. The key is living where people with larger families live, and you make it work— if that’s what you want, instead of pride flags and dogs.
Great article. I read about half, hopefully I can come back to it later. I knew the subject of parentification would rear it's ugly head in the comments. I'm sure for most of human history it was just being prepared for adulthood but in come the psychologists to dement us further. Looking at the amount of adults who are fundamentally unprepared to be adults (Disney adults for an example). Yeah, there's extreme outliers but for the vast majority having responsibilities in your family was good.
I was hoping for more recommendations on how to address this. I liked this article! But you seem to restate the problem over and over and over again: society is not setup for big families, this is part of a trend. And I take your point that a tax credit is not enough, children should be responsible and independent, but as a reader I was hoping the bulk of the article would be spent suggesting ways to address this. Maybe in a follow up?
I feel like one suggestion hidden in here is: people should live near their families and intentionally create community to rely on. I live in New York and my family can’t move here because it’s expensive. I can’t move where they live because my career doesn’t exist there. Community is amazing, and everyone should build it, but it’s hard, especially when everyone is dealing with the same squeeze that you’re alluding to.
One big suggestion I have: move schools away from their agrarian schedules that don’t match their parents. We don’t need help out on the farm! We need schools that operate while parents are working all year long. If I could count on schools being open all year long, 9-5, I wouldn’t have to spend a significant part of my mental and financial resources on planning early pickups in the summer, haphazard summer camps, random non-National holidays. It would be a MASSIVE relief.
Another—local, no-travel-required children sports (or other activities). Slow Boring did a great piece on travel sports and how they’re bad for communities.
Another—like New York is doing—earlier, free or subsidized education.
Another—public spaces with some level of childcare built in or that have families in mind. Libraries in some places seem to be meeting the moment. They’re not just places to get books, but places with playgrounds, activities. A big struggle on the weekend is where to take the kids that’s not expensive (private science centers), stressful (parks with open drug use or unleashed dogs), or unwelcoming (restaurants, bars).
Another—housing! Housing being more abundant makes housing cheaper, makes it easier for bigger families to exist, makes child care cheaper (caregivers need to earn less to live)
These are things that would seem to have straight-forward (if difficult or expensive) policy solutions.
Would love to hear why I’m wrong or if there are other big suggestions people have to help big families. We’re expecting a 3rd and I’m scared as hell!
Sorry I am just getting aronud to this comment now! Yes, I do think there are some potentially more straightforward policy solutions, instead of just cultural changes. Agree with basically all of your suggestions! Hadn't thought about school calendar + agrarian roots, but that is a very good point about the challenges of summer in general for most parents (who often these days tend to try to cram a new expensive camp in every week over the summer).
Some other thoughts I have, repasted from a comment above:
Housing / zoning:
-- Legalize + normalize compact 4–5 bedroom homes instead of effectively forcing “more bedrooms” to mean huge luxury houses. This would make housing a lot more affordable for large families.
-- Broadly legalize ADUs, duplexes, and multiple homes on one lot so grandparents/siblings can live nearby. These should be for family, not AirBnBs
College / education
-- Restore the FAFSA sibling adjustment for multiple kids in college.
-- Reduce the admissions arms race around extracurriculars, essays, and curated resumes. And as much as I never thought I would say this, at this point I think more weight on testing than anything else, as much as that is now countercultural. The lever here would be federal funding to change this.
-- High school career fairs should openly advertise and promote trades, entrepreneurship, etc. or other non-college avenues
Childcare / family economics
-- Childcare subsidies (e.g CCDF) expanded to allow for care by parents, grandparents, relatives, co-ops, etc, not just federally subsidized childcare. Maybe even redirecting this towards substantial caregiver allowance for parents of young children, regardless of whether they purchase daycare.
-- Make tax policy much more favorable to 3rd/4th+ children rather than giving roughly the same marginal treatment to every child.
Big families do scale. Large van instead of min-van. Kids double and in some cases triple in bedrooms. What does not scale? Dental bills, sneakers, food and some other sundries. The work, as you suggest, gets spread out among the siblings who grow up responsible for the others. But a big problem is the lack of an extended family, as you suggest. Parents of parents who feel they do not have any responsibility to live nearby to help.
But explaining the joys of a large family to most people is like trying to describe the taste of a good steak to someone who has never had any. A life lived abundantly.
Good points, and I definitely agree that large families do scale and often are far more realistic than people assume, but this requires we change some of our preconceived notions about what family life looks like. This I think is the biggest battle amongst people who currently have small families, who are operating under small family assumptions, and assume that those same conventions (assumptions such as 1 child per bedroom, multiple extracurriculars per kid, normal sized cars, kids must be supervised by an adult at all times, kids should be constantly engaged in “enrichment” activities rather than free time, etc.) all hold true to a larger family. They simply can’t — and I think if people reevaluated these assumptions they might realize that having a large family is a lot more possible than they might have thought it was.
So, I am someone who falls on one side of your tail (I don't and won't ever have children), however I live in one of the only places in the US that still is at least somewhat (though increasingly less so, year by year) built for large families, ie Utah, and I fully agree with your post.
However, and not to be a downer, but I think this is much more difficult to solve than you indicate. Because for one thing, these changes happened organically as families opted to invest more per child and have less of them in an increasingly competitive world...they were never imposed top down and the structural changes adapted to meet the realities moreso than the other way around. For instance, part of the reason colleges charge so much is because they can. If parents started to refuse to pay, they'd be forced to a drop their prices. But with more small families, and also a lot more RICH families nowadays (at least partly bc of less kids), there are simply enough parents out there willing and able to pay high prices, and wanting to do whatever they can to beat advantage their kids, that there is zero incentive for a university to drop its tuition. They will always charge as much as they can.
That's just one example but it runs to so many things. There are a lot of things in Utah that are clearly different than other places bc people still have, or at least aspire to have, bigger families. But the thing is, they kind of don't work when it's just a minority. It's really hard that way, just on basic economics.
Here's another example: there are a lot more shops and businesses here that are closed on Sundays and closed by 6 pm the other days, than most places in the US, where doing that would be business suicide. It used to be the norm, and now it isn't, and that's bc the vast majority of all adults, or the people who can actually patronize a business and spend money there, are at work M-F til 6. So if you're closed when they're out of work and can actually spend money, you're going to go out of business. This model only works in a place where you still have a critical mass of stay at home parents who can actually shop and buy things during the day. The reason a lot of shop owners want to be closed in the evenings and on Sundays is because they too have big families and they want to go home and be with them. Which makes perfect sense, for the the business owner, if there are enough local customers who can actually patronize your establishment during the weekdays. But if 80% of adults are at work, it doesn't work, and that business being closed in the evenings and on weekends is going to really annoy and piss off the working parents who can't ever go buy something at a shop bc they're always closed when they have actual free time.
There are so, so many little things like that. Kids still run outside and play everywhere here, without adult supervision. But that's bc there are enough kids to do that. Prices for kid-oriented stuff tend to be a lot lower here...again, because the market won't bear higher prices, since parents can't afford it when they have so many kids. If everyone had 1 or 2, and the parents had more cash, those businesses would of course jack their prices up, as they have everywhere else.
A lot of this stuff just ends up being the natural economic outcome of what happens when there are less kids and adults with more disposable cash, at a critical mass. So while I agree with your analysis, I'm not sure what the solution is other than just giving massive subsidies to large families, which would be quite difficult politically.
I suppose one point I'd raise it that it somewhat seems like a silly lost opportunity here, when you also DO have a lot more households with zero children. One would think that childless households would be an obvious source of extra support for parents precisely bc they usually DO have the extra time and money. And yet parents virtually never ask non-parents for help or favors, ever. I think this is bc they often have some distrust of childless people and/or maybe even a little hostility and/or assume they hate or dislike children. I think that's a shame and unnecessary and untrue, and that actually plenty of childless people would be more than willing to pitch in and watch a neighbor's kid or otherwise take a little burden off. They may not want or think they can handle a 24-7, 20-year commitment to kids, but that doesn't mean they aren't happy to help part time or in a pinch. And yet they are virtually never asked and almost assumed to live totally alien and separate lives and I think it's kind of dumb. Like just a silly misallocation where you have one group of people who are overwhelmed and another with excess capacity and no one ever thinks to shift that a bit, as between them, which would be the normal thing to do in most circumstances but it seems like some parents are afraid that non-parents are child hating baby eaters they can't trust or something. To be clear I think that is much more pronounced with men, where people do not want to tolerate the idea of an unrelated non-father ever spending time with a child bc they fear some kind of evil/perverse sexual thing, and is less an issue with women, but even there, I see a lot of excess wasted capacity.
This is a really thoughtful comment, and I think your Utah examples get at something important. Large-family life only really seems possible when there are enough other people around you living that way too. Once housing, businesses, activities, and work life all adapt around smaller families, the whole thing becomes self-reinforcing. In my view, addressing that kind of critical-mass problem starts with a broader cultural acceptance of large families, which may require some pioneering families leading the way and, over time, creating enough momentum for wider social change. But agreed it’s definitely not an issue with a simple overnight fix by any means.
I think part of this issue is that families typically add one kid at a time and so they adapt to having 1 or two kids. I think often they like giving so much material abundance to their kid and it seems like a lot to give up. A lot of the 3rd and 4th kids are surprises - they didn’t plan for it and they deal with it but they didn’t intend it. Some people go into it wanting a big family but more fall into it. A lot of changes would have to happen for this to be more common again - def a vibe shift and more shifts to make it possible and sustainable
I have 6 kids and I agree that this isn’t as easily remedied as the author imagines. The entire economy would have to be overhauled.
I agree that some of this is pretty hard to change without overhauling the economy entirely. But some things I think could be done piece by piece and would actually make a big difference on the economic front (entirely separate from the cultural points I mentioned) without a super radical change. For example:
Housing / zoning:
-- Legalize + normalize compact 4–5 bedroom homes instead of effectively forcing “more bedrooms” to mean huge luxury houses. This would make housing a lot more affordable for large families.
-- Broadly legalize ADUs, duplexes, and multiple homes on one lot so grandparents/siblings can live nearby. These should be for family, not AirBnBs
College / education
-- Restore the FAFSA sibling adjustment for multiple kids in college.
-- Reduce the admissions arms race around extracurriculars, essays, and curated resumes. And as much as I never thought I would say this, at this point I think more weight on testing than anything else, as much as that is now countercultural.
-- High school career fairs that openly advertise and promote trades, entrepreneurship, etc. or other non-college avenues
Childcare / family economics
-- Childcare subsidies (e.g CCDF) expanded to allow for care by parents, grandparents, relatives, co-ops, etc, not just federally subsidized childcare. Maybe even redirecting this towards substantial caregiver allowance for parents of young children, regardless of whether they purchase daycare.
-- Make tax policy much more favorable to 3rd/4th+ children rather than giving roughly the same marginal treatment to every child.
Your last point makes me think you’d enjoy the Auntie Bulletin.
My husband and I have 12 children (yep—all ours together). We basically decided to ignore “the system” and build our own family culture in spite of it. That has meant sometimes living in houses people would consider too small (even when we “only” had five children). I made the decision not to over-schedule our kids but to make sure we had opportunities to get together with other families at church and in the neighborhood to play, eat meals, and socialize. We lived overseas for eight years due to my husband’s work, and the last place we lived for five years was a tiny village in South Africa where the children could freely roam and where dozens of retirees taught classes—everything from piano to pottery to woodworking. It was an absolute boon for a big family—not paradise, but definitely far more supportive than the modern American town. When we returned to the US, we made the decision to move back to my husband’s hometown and buy a “fixer-upper” 1906 house in the oldest section of town…within walking distance of downtown and a local park. We have since finished out the back cottage for our older sons to live in while they continue to work and save, and we just added another small cottage for our oldest daughter. We are sticking to a nearly extinct model of family-building where everyone learns to pitch in and help each other succeed. Our second son married two years ago, and he and his wife chose to buy a house two blocks from us. They have the same vision of sticking together and helping one another—even if it’s just moral support and socialization. The oldest teens put together a business plan for a small coffee shop in 2020, since our downtown didn’t have one. They made it a school project, and Kickstarter raised the funds for it. We have since grown into a farm-to-fork bistro. One son is the chef, two others are baristas, two daughters bake and do clean-up. Large families really have to create their own job opportunities and educational options for their children without a societal support network backing them up. In this age of AI kicking people out of jobs, our children are all very motivated to “AI-proof” their lives and work with their hands and in service to others. I couldn’t be more proud of them. It has been a lot of very hard work, plus a lot of prayer and many sleepless nights, but the end results are so worth it. Kids don’t need iPads and endless entertainment—they need to feel needed. In a big family, we all need each other, and that is a beautiful thing. I am very thankful for parents who gave us the tools to do this…in spite of a massive cultural shift away from large families.
This is amazing, and twelve children is such a rare accomplishment now that I had to read that twice. What really strikes me is the way you describe building a family culture where children are needed, useful, connected, and part of something real rather than just having all their time curated and entertained. That feels like exactly the kind of nearly-lost model I was trying to get at, and it’s really encouraging to hear from someone actually living it.
Reading Cheaper by the Dozen (true story of a NJ family with 12 children in the 1920s) really inspired me as a kid. The 1950s movie with Myrna Loy as the mother is wonderful, but the book is even better.
It's great having 11 brothers and sisters, like I do. I would not want to have 12 children (we have 2), but once we all grew up, it was great.
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Ignore Mpp
This article makes some really interesting points that I hadn't considered as one of four children and somebody who would _like_ 4 children but has definitely felt a creeping sense of "can I make that work?" Cost + expectation of college definitely feels like a big factor.
I do wish the post was a bit more concise & contained less AI filler - the good points are getting lost in the fluff.
Agreed. This is the exact feeling I was trying to name, and the individual costs + expectations of college really do make it tough these days.
And also fair hit on the fluff, it got over-edited and I'm tightening it, the argument shouldn't be buried in cliches/word count.
We have 3 children and never saved or paid for college. We couldn't, because we ran out of money. kids can earn money at that stage of life, and that's exactly how our 2 oldest to date got through college.
I wish more people felt this way. I know a lot of parents who feel like they are failing if they do not pay most of their kids’ college costs.
I get it because nobody wants their kids buried in debt. But college probably needs to be less of an automatic default life decision and more of a real choice among several possible paths, and if you do choose it then it may involve some sacrifices like working to help pay for it.
Interestingly, my husband and I were recently talking about our large family (9 children) and the economies of scale we enjoy as parents of so many children. Specifically, school books, toys, clothing, gear… you really get your bang for your buck when you end up using them for child after child. Buying food in bulk saves on cost per serving, etc. Obviously these aren’t the only expenses related to child-rearing, but it’s nice to count the wins where you find them!
In the general scheme of things, yes, I would agree that the world is at best not designed for large families and at worst openly hostile to them. As a large family, you kind of write your own rules and don’t really care what other people think about them. I stay home with our children and my husband is an entrepreneur so he can be in the home most days, as well as scale his income to our family’s various needs. The children do have more responsibilities than they might if we were a smaller family, but we all share the extra work. I also have more work than the mom of a smaller family does, so it’s not like I’m passing stuff along because I don’t feel like doing it.
I noticed that the job of mothering switched to more of a management role after 6 kids - now I realize that sounds utilitarian, which in practice it really is not. There are just a lot of details to handle when there are so many people under one roof! We still have great relationships with our kids and are very hands-on (a necessary luxury with both parents home nearly 24/7).
The external community is the largest piece missing in our life and definitely the hardest thing to try and replicate. Our children’s grandparents aren’t especially interested in being involved and none are local. Neighbors are friendly enough but certainly don’t have an interest in getting too close. We have a wonderful group of friends, many of whom also have larger families, but of course we are all in the trenches at the same time. So the practicality of being there for some of those traditionally family-filled needs is less than if we had some kind of multi-generational situation. We hope to be able to provide our children with some of the support that we wish we could have as we navigate our own parenting journey.
I’m 1of8 young millennial. We had a 5 bedroom house so it was big but in the middle of nowhere. We all were limited to one activity at a time starting in middle school (no elementary activities). Older kids helped a lot with younger kids. My parents both worked full time too and we had no extended family around. We rode the bus to & from school. We had chore lists, a house landline, and no one babysat our schoolwork. We had a ton of freedom to roam around our 3acres of land. I think the modern expectations and living in heavy traffic areas makes it really hard. And yeah car seat laws my parents definitely didn’t follow those laws perfectly.
Super interesting to hear this. I truly don’t hear about this sort of childhood very often anymore, and I’m curious: with both parents working and no extended family nearby, did your parents seem like they were barely holding it together, or did the freedom/chore/older-kids-helping model actually make the whole thing pretty manageable?
My dad was calm and seemed content but my mom was very stressed out. She also still is the breadwinner and works in healthcare management whereas my dad is a highschool history teacher. I don’t recommend being far away from family and both parents working non flexible jobs while raising a lot of kids. They definitely needed more support. As we got older and could drive things got easier.
I couldn't agree more. One of the things that strikes me is how often conversations about family size focus on culture, values, or personal preference while ignoring the economics of family life.
When the federal government says childcare should cost no more than 7% of household income, but many families pay far more than that, it becomes difficult to separate family decisions from financial reality. Add housing, healthcare, transportation, and the general cost of raising children, and it's not surprising that many families stop at one or two children even if they might have preferred more.
I suspect affordability and family stress deserve a much larger place in this conversation than they usually receive.
Declining numbers of children per woman happens everywhere where women have economic and educational opportunities and opportunities for contraceptives. I think part of this is that pregnancy and childbirth is incredibly difficult and dangerous, even with modern medicine. When women have the choice, regardless of attitudes toward parenting and family systems, few are willing to take on the long term physical consequences of 4+ children.
That’s a fair point. Pregnancy and childbirth are physically serious, and there are many women who simply do not want a larger family because of the physical risks, toll, difficult births, etc, as you say.
The article is focused on a different group of women and families who might actually want another child, but feel practical limitations of life makes it impossible. Housing, childcare, work, lack of nearby help, and modern parenting expectations all push in the same direction towards smaller families, often against the personal desires of many mothers and families.
This also can be seen in the data in the currently increasing gap between desired fertility and actual fertility. My read, from the data and from people I know personally, is that for many families in that gap, the limiting factor is not mainly “I never want to go through pregnancy and birth again", but is more like “I don’t think our life could practically support another child.”
I appreciate your response (I somehow missed it until now). I support part of my point is that there are very few women who would choose to have four or more children (that they birth, perhaps adoptions make this different). Your reference for the purposes of this piece shouldn’t be all women and the number of children they have, but all women who want four or more children. I think if you looked at that smaller referent, very many of those who want a large family have it.
Yes and no. I feel like this point makes more sense if the demographic decline truly represented many more women having no children. But you can see that over 35% have 2 children, and about 18% have 3 children (another 18% have 1 child), so that’s around 72% of women. Add in the 12 or 13% with 4+ children, and it’s nearly 85% of women. I think the article accurately assesses that many parents WOULD have more children if they could afford it and had the social support to do so.
On a cultural/standard-of-living front in the United States, I'm constantly surprised by how often people ask, "Where will they fit?" when they learn we have a second child on the way. We live in a 1200' spft home with four bedrooms. I tend to take the economics and the post-Great Recession crash for these trends the most seriously, but anecdotally, there seems to be a near-unattainable housing-space standard to "fit" a modern family.
Yes, great example. The standard for what counts as “enough space” has changed a lot in recent decades.
A 1200 sq ft house with 4 bedrooms would have been totally normal for a growing family not that long ago. My wife's mother group up with 8 siblings in a 1500 square foot farmhouse! Now people hear 2 kids and wonder if their 1600 sq. ft house is big enough.
Along side this there's also a supply/housing design issue too. For example, I don’t see many modest 4-bedroom houses like what you have anymore. At least near me (and maybe this is regional), a 4-bed house often means 2000+ sq ft, which puts it in a totally different price range.
My assumption is that these folks making these comments grew up in larger homes and are now living in much smaller homes in our urban area. For me, I kind of am signing up my kids to have a "lower standard" than I did in terms of space. There are times when I feel guilty about not being able to match or exceed what I had, but we gain a lot of quality-of-life improvements based on where we live that more than make up for it for me. American Dream expectations of giving your kids more than you had must top out at some point, where living space is concerned.
I feel this. We just had our fourth. And we sold our “big house” and are downsizing to a townhouse that’s walkable to parks, splash pads, and a million restaurants!
Everyone thinks we’re crazy, but after spending 3 months in Europe we’re done. The time we have to work to pay for all these frivolous things don’t matter.
What matters is being present and having time for your children.
If my kids had to pick between us being gone all day and having the big house to maintain vs the small townhouse and the travel and time that comes with it, hopefully they like our decision 😂
Kids are no longer allowed to go outside unsupervised. that’s why space is required now. Kids go crazy indoors without enough space and gross motor toys. That or they have to be put on iPads. Both very suboptimal situations.
Agree on your point about more bedrooms correlating to a large jump in square footage. We currently live in a 4 bed 1800 sq ft house (in which we homeschool, I run a business from, and we often have houseguests so we use every inch of it.) We’re expecting our 5th and would love a tiny bit more room and another bedroom, but 5-6 bedroom houses where we live suddenly become these behemoth 3800-4000 sq ft homes. There’s really no in-between that we’ve seen.
We have 6 kids and live on 65% of my electrician husband's salary, giving and saving the rest. I feel incredibly blessed that we are able to march to our own beat and have a life that is rich, full, and fun, with the people we love the most all under one roof!
It's all about trade-offs, and what we've chosen isn't usually what others choose: we read aloud, play games, cook, and hike together and have no TV or social media. We share one $3500 van. We eat out maybe twice a year. For three years, when we only had 3-4 kids, we lived for free (without housing expenses) in a tiny house we built ourselves, in exchange for farm chores. So now, the lovely 3 bedroom home we rent feels like a mansion:) It's all perspective. The Lord has blessed us with an adventurous life and many children; what is there to be afraid of?
I really appreciate that you value big families enough to write this essay—perhaps I missed it, but it makes me wonder if you came from one! I’m the oldest of five (born 2000-2009) and my husband is the second-youngest of five (born 1990-2000). His brother (30) has five kids already, and his dad was one of six! My mother was one of four. We aren’t Amish, Mormon, or embedded in a culture that normalizes it either. Although both our families are Christian, we were always the biggest families we knew. I’m from North Carolina and my husband’s family is in Minnesota. Our parents’ educational philosophies had a lot in common—both homeschooled and neither paid for their kids’ college or ever planned to. Despite this, all their adult children are financially independent, several have college degrees, and almost all are married, some with kids. Although their educational philosophies were similar, I don’t think it was the primary factor that led their own children to also want big families. Rather, the real commonality between my parents and my husband’s parents is that both parented with the same goal: having kids that other people enjoyed. Because of this, they deeply enjoyed us too, and we always knew it. Growing up knowing that your parents genuinely love being around you creates an innate love of your family unlike anything else. I think a lot of people who “hate kids” were probably raised by parents who didn’t enjoy them or want to be around them. Frankly, kids know if you like them or not. Individuals that were raised by parents who didn’t enjoy them are likely to struggle to believe that raising 3+ children can be genuinely joyful or a “preferred” lifestyle. However, those of us loved by big families know it is a gift that can never be replicated by travel, careers, or money, and it is more than worth sacrificing the “status” that comes with all three.
As a mom of six, the biggest challenge was having an emotional and mental trust that God cares for us and through our cooperating with whatever plan God had in mind for us, our effort was equal to the challenges we faced as a family. A basic non-contraceptive approach in accordance with a sense of mutual self-sacrificial parental giving went a long way to combatting the prevailing cultural mindset that larger human families were somehow environmentally criminal, selfish, and obviously insane. For a culture to even propose building public support for larger families, it would first have to have some agreement that more humans are a good thing. Ask any parent of a larger family how many times a medical professional suggested sterilization or other means of avoiding pregnancy, or a complete stranger offers their unasked for negative comment on family size...
This was a really interesting article!
My first thought is with the 1940 data, I would be interested in seeing the number adjusted for infant and young child mortality. Babies born back then were not children raised as often as they are now.
The second one is more personal. I’m expecting our third child in the next month. It wasn’t planned, not because we didn’t want more kids but because pregnancy is genuinely the worst time in my life. But with the preparations for a third child, we ran into a handful of those difficulties. We had a CRV, that won’t fit three car seats in one row, so we needed a new vehicle with a third row. We live in a 3 bedroom house and had it set up with a work space for my husband. In about a year, we will have to rearrange our entire house to accommodate (we have 2 boys and soon we’ll have a little girl), we were planning on my being more involved outside the home (I’m a SAHM) and maybe being able to bring in a little bit of income as our kids got older, now that timeline is greatly extended. The change from 2 to 3 kids really is so much more difficult logistically than 1 to 2.
The incremental cost of more kids really isn’t that much. Yes, minivan and a 3-4 bedroom house increases the budget a bit. But you have to move to places where other families are and make friends. You probably can’t live around a bunch of restaurants. (I’ve lived in the hip areas and after a while all the food starts tasting the same). Join a church even if you’re not that much of a believer. One parent takes on a job that is less demanding. And you just don’t expect as much out of everyone. The key is living where people with larger families live, and you make it work— if that’s what you want, instead of pride flags and dogs.
Great article. I read about half, hopefully I can come back to it later. I knew the subject of parentification would rear it's ugly head in the comments. I'm sure for most of human history it was just being prepared for adulthood but in come the psychologists to dement us further. Looking at the amount of adults who are fundamentally unprepared to be adults (Disney adults for an example). Yeah, there's extreme outliers but for the vast majority having responsibilities in your family was good.
I was hoping for more recommendations on how to address this. I liked this article! But you seem to restate the problem over and over and over again: society is not setup for big families, this is part of a trend. And I take your point that a tax credit is not enough, children should be responsible and independent, but as a reader I was hoping the bulk of the article would be spent suggesting ways to address this. Maybe in a follow up?
I feel like one suggestion hidden in here is: people should live near their families and intentionally create community to rely on. I live in New York and my family can’t move here because it’s expensive. I can’t move where they live because my career doesn’t exist there. Community is amazing, and everyone should build it, but it’s hard, especially when everyone is dealing with the same squeeze that you’re alluding to.
One big suggestion I have: move schools away from their agrarian schedules that don’t match their parents. We don’t need help out on the farm! We need schools that operate while parents are working all year long. If I could count on schools being open all year long, 9-5, I wouldn’t have to spend a significant part of my mental and financial resources on planning early pickups in the summer, haphazard summer camps, random non-National holidays. It would be a MASSIVE relief.
Another—local, no-travel-required children sports (or other activities). Slow Boring did a great piece on travel sports and how they’re bad for communities.
Another—like New York is doing—earlier, free or subsidized education.
Another—public spaces with some level of childcare built in or that have families in mind. Libraries in some places seem to be meeting the moment. They’re not just places to get books, but places with playgrounds, activities. A big struggle on the weekend is where to take the kids that’s not expensive (private science centers), stressful (parks with open drug use or unleashed dogs), or unwelcoming (restaurants, bars).
Another—housing! Housing being more abundant makes housing cheaper, makes it easier for bigger families to exist, makes child care cheaper (caregivers need to earn less to live)
These are things that would seem to have straight-forward (if difficult or expensive) policy solutions.
Would love to hear why I’m wrong or if there are other big suggestions people have to help big families. We’re expecting a 3rd and I’m scared as hell!
Sorry I am just getting aronud to this comment now! Yes, I do think there are some potentially more straightforward policy solutions, instead of just cultural changes. Agree with basically all of your suggestions! Hadn't thought about school calendar + agrarian roots, but that is a very good point about the challenges of summer in general for most parents (who often these days tend to try to cram a new expensive camp in every week over the summer).
Some other thoughts I have, repasted from a comment above:
Housing / zoning:
-- Legalize + normalize compact 4–5 bedroom homes instead of effectively forcing “more bedrooms” to mean huge luxury houses. This would make housing a lot more affordable for large families.
-- Broadly legalize ADUs, duplexes, and multiple homes on one lot so grandparents/siblings can live nearby. These should be for family, not AirBnBs
College / education
-- Restore the FAFSA sibling adjustment for multiple kids in college.
-- Reduce the admissions arms race around extracurriculars, essays, and curated resumes. And as much as I never thought I would say this, at this point I think more weight on testing than anything else, as much as that is now countercultural. The lever here would be federal funding to change this.
-- High school career fairs should openly advertise and promote trades, entrepreneurship, etc. or other non-college avenues
Childcare / family economics
-- Childcare subsidies (e.g CCDF) expanded to allow for care by parents, grandparents, relatives, co-ops, etc, not just federally subsidized childcare. Maybe even redirecting this towards substantial caregiver allowance for parents of young children, regardless of whether they purchase daycare.
-- Make tax policy much more favorable to 3rd/4th+ children rather than giving roughly the same marginal treatment to every child.
Big families do scale. Large van instead of min-van. Kids double and in some cases triple in bedrooms. What does not scale? Dental bills, sneakers, food and some other sundries. The work, as you suggest, gets spread out among the siblings who grow up responsible for the others. But a big problem is the lack of an extended family, as you suggest. Parents of parents who feel they do not have any responsibility to live nearby to help.
But explaining the joys of a large family to most people is like trying to describe the taste of a good steak to someone who has never had any. A life lived abundantly.
Good points, and I definitely agree that large families do scale and often are far more realistic than people assume, but this requires we change some of our preconceived notions about what family life looks like. This I think is the biggest battle amongst people who currently have small families, who are operating under small family assumptions, and assume that those same conventions (assumptions such as 1 child per bedroom, multiple extracurriculars per kid, normal sized cars, kids must be supervised by an adult at all times, kids should be constantly engaged in “enrichment” activities rather than free time, etc.) all hold true to a larger family. They simply can’t — and I think if people reevaluated these assumptions they might realize that having a large family is a lot more possible than they might have thought it was.