10 Kids Is Not in Fact Easier Than 2 Kids

I wrote last week about big families. In doing some research for that post, I came upon an article titled Top Ten Reasons to Have a Large Family, by Amy, a homeschool mom and the author of the Raising Arrows blog. I want to take a moment to address a few items from her list:

#2 – 5 (or 6 or 10) is easier than 2. I often hear, “I can’t handle my two children, I don’t know how you do it.”  Honestly, I didn’t handle my two very well either.  I was exhausted, short-fused, and outnumbered.  But, they grow up!  They aren’t all in diapers all the time.  They aren’t all house-wrecking toddlers all at the same time.  If you are diligent to train them with love and discipline, they grow up into lovely “big kids.”  Which leads me to…

#3 – Many hands make light work. I have a lot of helpers now.  I’m not left to do everything by myself all day long.  I have a 12 year old who could single-handedly run this household if need be, and a 9 year old fast on his heels.  The 4 and 5 year olds are learning and the 16 month old isn’t going to be 16 months forever.  They grow up and take on more responsibility, and there is such a blessing to working alongside a “big kid”!

Wait wait wait wait. I have two children. In a few years, they’ll be 12 and 9. No one in the world can convince me that it would be easier to have children ages 12, 9, 7, 6, 4, 3, and 1 than it will be to only have a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old. And as for having a lot of helpers, the reason this becomes important when you have 5 or 6 or 10 kids is that raising all those kids is a lot of work. It’s easier to have just two kids and have them do chores and be responsible for their own spaces than it is to have 5 or 6 or 10 kids, even if you put an extra large burden on each of the older ones (which can I just say, is not advisable). And I say this as a child of a large family myself.

I’m honestly not sure what logic Amy is using here, but she’s not alone in making this argument. I’ve seen homeschool parents claim that big families are easier than small ones more times than I care to count, and literally the only way to make that true is if you’re basically using your older children as slave labor. If you can make your older children take on so much that you’re doing less parenting than you did when you had two children, even though you now have 8 or 10 kids, something is very wrong. It is completely reasonable to ask children to help out around the house, but if you’re the parent, you’re the one who is supposed to be actually parenting, and parenting alone is hard work, even excluding all of the cleaning and cooking and washing.

I do want to touch on a few other items.

#5 – If you’re bored, it’s your own fault. Need I say more?

My parents used to tell me this, and I hated it. Just because you have siblings doesn’t mean you always want to play with them, and siblings don’t replace friends. Besides that, it’s human to sometimes be bored. I keep individual craft activities in boxes on a specific shelf on my house to point my kids to if they get bored, and I also point them to puzzles and art supplies and so forth.

#6 – You get a lot of attention. Who needs paparazzi? Unload a slew of kiddos out of a 15 passenger van and see how many stares your attract.

Are you kidding me?! First of all, her kids never asked for that attention, and at least some of them are going to absolutely hate it. I speak from experience, here. Secondly, that Amy can mention “attention” as a perk of having a big family without addressing children’s need for attention from their parents is stunning. Each additional child decreases the amount of one-on-one time a child can have with their parents. Each additional child decreases the amount of time and attention parents have to spend on their children’s academic and social development. But no—attention is mentioned only in the context of getting a kick out of raising strangers’ eyebrows.

I get that this post is partly an attempt to use jest in the face of constant judgement. I remember. Complete strangers would ask my mom whether she knew what “causes that” or whether they were “all hers.” It’s also an attempt to use jest in the face of constant business and clutter. For all Amy’s talk of having many hands, I know how fast chaos could envelop a day. But I’ve seen way too many families where the older children are saddled with far more work and authority than they should have, where parents’ time is so divided that younger children bond to their older siblings rather than to their parents, to let “jokes” like this go. It’s not funny.

There are clearly reasons some people choose to have large families, despite the extra work involved. I grew up in a large families, and there are quite a number of things I really did like about it (which doesn’t mean there weren’t also downsides). I wish bloggers like Amy would point to the reasons they have chosen to have many, and the benefits they’ve run into over time, rather than misleading young parents with bogus promises that parenting would be easier if they would just have 10 children rather than 2—because that’s not helpful in the least.