In defense of big families

Big families are getting more popular. For good reason.

Credit: Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

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When I was a kid, I didn’t love big families. I was the oldest child initially of two kids, then three, then four, and so on until we reached a staggering-to-most-people seven. After I had moved out, an eighth was born and shortly thereafter two step siblings joined as well.

I had an overall pretty happy upbringing, but living in a house with seven kids is not always easy. There wasn’t much personal space. As a teenager, I never had friends over. We weren’t poor, but having a very large family is a major financial commitment that my parents pulled off largely thanks to dedicated frugality. All of which is to say that growing up in a big family wasn’t often bad, but it was often annoying. I’ve written before about delaying the decision to have kids of my own for financial and career reasons, but part of that choice also had to do with feeling like I had already raised several kids.

Often when I tell someone I’m the oldest of ten, their eyes get wide and I can see in their expressions that they’re glad to have nothing to do with large families. And as a teenager in a crowded house, I would have shared those overall negative views on big families.

But here’s the thing: The more time that goes by, the more grateful I am that I grew up in a big family. As an adult, it’s amazing. It provides a built-in support network and social circle. It’s as close to having a village as I can personally imagine getting. Not everyone can have a big family — as an adult I’m not planning on having anywhere close to eight kids — but it’s worth setting the record straight and correcting the PR problem from which big families suffer. They’re great, and ought to be celebrated.

It also appears I’m not the only person coming around to big families.

Last week, Gallup revealed that Americans’ preference is trending toward larger families. Specifically, 45% “favor larger families, including 29% who say having three children is ideal, 12% who think four is best, and 2% each who prefer having five or six or more children.”

Meanwhile, the percent of Americans who favor two or fewer kids has been trending down and has fallen from the mid 50% range to 47% today. Having kids in general also remains overwhelmingly popular, with only 2% saying the ideal family includes no kids.

Gallup’s research links family size preferences to the broader economic conditions, and the Institute for Family Studies offered some additional analysis on these findings.

In my own experience, the case for big families is multifaceted. At the most basic level, more people increase the odds of more social connections. For instance, I have one sibling who lives on a different side of the country from me. If he and I were the only two kids in our family, each of us might lack family in our immediate vicinity. But with numerous other siblings, we improve the odds that members of the family will live near each other.

And if fact that is what has happened. Three of my siblings live within a mile of my house. Two more live in my same metro area, while another lives about an hour away¹.

We see each other often for family dinners, dessert nights, and various family celebrations. Typically, one or two or three siblings won’t be able to attend a specific gathering. But because there are so many people, the family can still gather even if everyone isn’t present.

In my last post, I mentioned a metaphor comparing family to a ship that keeps chugging along in the ocean even when one or two members hop off and float away. But the largeness of the family — or at least of my family — is critical for the metaphor to work. The group is big enough that even if everyone isn’t present all the time, it survives as a group. This works on a small scale: I might miss out on a family dinner while on vacation, but the tradition of gathering doesn’t die without me or any other single person. And it works on a larger scale: Even when I or others have moved away for several years, enough family members remained concentrated in a single place that there was still a group to return to.

There are all sorts of other benefits as well. A significant part of my social life consists of texting my siblings and telling them to come over for dessert in a couple of hours. We can turn to siblings to water plants and pick up mail while we’re on vacation. When one of our kids recently needed to go to urgent care, one of my sisters was able to get to my house within 10 minutes to watch the other kids.

But you might be thinking, “hey that happens in much smaller families too!” And it does, which is great. But consider that with so many people, we increase the odds that someone will be available. When we had to go to urgent care, for example, we only needed one person to answer the call, but we had at least four good candidates to ask — all of whom had different work schedules and commitments. And with more people, the load doesn’t become too heavy; if we had needed to go to urgent care the very next day (thankfully we didn’t) we could have asked someone else in the family to babysit and it wouldn’t have seemed like we were leaning too much on any one person. We have a higher level of support, while each other individual has less to do. It’s a win-win for everyone.

The benefits don’t stop there though. Because the family is so large, we have a larger referral network. If one family member needs a roofer or a plumber, the odds are better that at least someone will have a good contact.

Having a large group also increases what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call diversity. Obviously I’m talking about a single family so this isn’t racial diversity. But there are a range of ideological views in the family, which makes for more interesting discussions. And if someone gets hurt feelings during, say, a political conversation, having a big group means there are more people to diffuse the situation. It also means returning to the group after a heated discussion doesn’t have to mean one-on-one time between the offender and offendee. It’s the ship metaphor again; the group is bigger than any one person, and the family culture transcends any particular political identity, so you can get back on board without having to confront a person or idea with whom you might have clashed. In my family you can be a Bernie Bro or a Trump supporter, but you should still be at family dinner.

I suspect if my family were smaller, that’d be more difficult to pull off. Or at least, it seems to be harder to pull off based on the families of my friends, and the families mentioned in the scores of online advice columns I read — many of which seem to amount to people asking columnists for permission to cut off their family members for assorted peccadilloes. Indeed, I suspect that my family has largely avoided estrangements — which are a growing problem — because it’s a large group.

Viewpoint diversity has other benefits as well. Some of the adults in my family are great with kids, but also don’t themselves want to have children. But having many nieces and nephews makes it much easier for people to have a multi-generational network that includes kids even if they don’t want or can’t have kids themselves.

In other words, and ironically, having a huge nuclear family has theoretically liberated the individual members of my family to customize their lifestyles as they see fit. You can choose to have kids or not, but either way you get access to as much of the kid experience as you want.

I could go on and on, and certainly my family is no utopian community. We’re pretty normal. But the point I’m trying to make is that over time I’ve come to see my big family as a key source of whatever richness and joy I’ve found in life. There are many important things out there, but I can’t think of any that are more important than family. And with a bigger family, I’ve found more potential for a bigger life.

I’m not writing this to persuade everyone to have big families. For many people, that’s not possible or desirable. I myself have three kids, which is slightly larger than average but not what I’d describe as “big.”² And like I said at the beginning of this post, there are downsides to having a big family, especially when you’re a kid who wants more space or less babysitting duty.

But I do hope to push back against the idea that big families are somehow crazy or to be avoided. In fact they can be great. And what I’ve also realized as an adult is that even if it can be annoying to grow up in a big family, childhood is brief. My siblings and I will know each other far longer as adults than we did as kids. And at least in my opinion, our adult lives are so much better because there are so many of us.

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Headlines to check out this week:

An Interview with Haley Baumeister from "Life Considered"

“How and when did you become a homemaker? (I’ve talked to many women for whom it has been almost an accidental transition, and others for whom it was very purposeful).

I knew I wanted to the primarily caregiver for our kids -- especially in the younger years. Between the pull toward the benefits of being home with little ones, it also made financial sense. Not having pursued educational or professional options that were clearly-defined (or, let's be honest, well-paid) the cost/benefit conclusion was that I would take the reins on the home front. This felt right to us both. Between the pandemic, two cross-country moves, and 3 kids of childcare age, I'm not even sure how any other arrangement would have worked anyways!”

1. Our family village also now includes one of my wife’s siblings, who moved to our street. The thing with a strong family village that’s centered in one location is that it can sort of pick up steam on its own and attract people.

2. My hope is that by maintaining stronger relationships with my adult siblings and their kids, my own children will have access to a big family group — the “ship” in the metaphor — even though for a variety of reasons they won’t have as many siblings as I do.