The Unexpected Joys of Large Families

With each child, love and joy multiply.

The legacy of a large family stretches across generations, forming a living testament to love and perseverance. adamkaz/Getty Images

Today, having a large family is a countercultural act. In the space of just a few generations, families abounding in children moved from being the norm to being the exception—an exception that will draw long looks from strangers at the grocery store. What was, not so long ago, an ordinary occurrence now marks out parents with more than two or three kids as cultural oddities.

In a somewhat puzzling trend, at the same time that affluence and standards of living have increased dramatically, people’s desire to reproduce seems to have decreased at just as rapid a pace. One might think that, as one of the richest societies in human history, the modern West would welcome lots of children with the confidence that there are plenty of resources to go around and with the desire to share our comfortable material existence with future generations. But that isn’t the course we’ve taken.

As Ross Douthat wrote in “The Decadent Society“: ”Amid all of our society’s material plenty, one resource is conspicuously scarce. That resource is babies.”

Douthat went on to sketch what he calls the “thinning of the family tree,” the way that once vast familial structures have rapidly dwindled as each generation has decided to have fewer children than the previous one.

“Everywhere across the developed world, the decline of birthrates means that families have grown more attenuated: fewer and later marriages, fewer brothers and sisters and cousins, more people living for longer and longer stretches on their own,” Douthat wrote.

He calls this phenomenon, which is virtually unheard of in human history, “postfamilialism.”

The exact causes of this postfamilialism are complex and not fully understood even by experts. It has arisen from a combination of economic, technological, cultural, and religious factors, including an emphasis on individual fulfillment, sexual freedom, and career achievement. But whatever the precise causes of the current cultural reluctance to reproduce, my purpose here is to make a case for why that reluctance is misplaced.

Abundance

Although I was born into a small family, I married into a large one (seven children). My wife’s house when she was growing up was full: full of toys and shoes and laughter and tears, full of shouting and chattering and bickering, full of boots and books and music and movies, full of, well, children, obviously—in a word, full of life.

That house exuded a warmth and vitality I haven’t experienced anywhere else, not because everything ran perfectly smoothly—large families are always a little chaotic—but because the basic goodness of family life was multiplied and extrapolated. There were more people to love and there was more love to go around.

Amid the noise and motion of a big household, tenderness is found in each small moment of connection. Oliver Rossi/Getty Images

The first defense I’d offer, then, for large families has to do with this fullness, this plenitude. Of course, more children mean more work and more trials, but they also mean more fun and more joy, and it’s these latter realities that are so often overlooked in society’s perception of big families. Hardship and joy are part of the balance sheet of every life and every family, big or small.

The advantage of the big family, I have observed, is that it tends to mysteriously multiply the “joy” side and, over time, divide down the “hardship” side. While raising a lot of kids certainly entails sacrifices that can sometimes be quite painful, the purpose of those sacrifices is clear. Every new life provides the mother and father with new motivation and purpose, and the rewards are commensurate with the effort. The reward is a miracle: Another human person—with all the universe of experiences, emotions, and personality traits that make him uniquely himself—whom the parents can love and who can love the parents in turn.

Having a lot of kids is perhaps the most optimistic thing a person can do. It’s an act of profound affirmation of the world and life, of their inherent goodness, and of the desire to share this existence with as many people as possible.

Skill-Building and Other Benefits

From the perspective of the children, too, growing up in a large family brings a lot of blessings. We often hear that children from large families don’t do as well in school or receive fewer economic opportunities because there’s not always enough money to go around. But while that may be true in some cases, these drawbacks can be mitigated, and they have to be weighed against the many benefits of a big brood of siblings.

Sanjana Gupta, writing for Verywell Mind, listed the many skills the children of large families tend to develop. These include communication, sociability, collaboration, conflict resolution, self-reliance, adaptability, responsibility, patience, resourcefulness, resilience, playfulness, and competitiveness. Yes, a child in a big family will wear more hand-me-downs and get fewer new toys, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Learning to sometimes do without can build strength of character and freedom from the entitled, consumerist tendencies in our culture.

Most importantly, like their parents, children in large families simply have more people to love and bond with than children from smaller families. One adult I know who was raised in a big family summarized it this way: “I basically had a bunch of built-in best friends from a young age.” What child wouldn’t want that?

Freedom to Choose

All of us want to live a full life. Conventionally, we are told that we can grasp this fullness by maintaining a large sphere of autonomy for ourselves: the freedom to pursue our personal goals and interests and to not be hemmed in by anything. For this reason, children, who necessarily take away from our autonomy, are often discouraged, viewed as obstacles rather than means to fulfillment.

Yet the wisdom of the ages cautions us against equating “options” with “fulfillment.” We cannot keep endless options open forever. People must choose or life chooses for them. Having lots of kids is one generous path to choose (among others), a path that, while limiting freedom in one sense, opens it up in another as one’s interior freedom grows through sacrifice and love.

Each child brings renewed purpose and joy, multiplying love rather than dividing it. PeopleImages/Shutterstock

Life experience teaches us that, often, we only really discover ourselves through the act of giving ourselves to others—and one way to give oneself, of course, is to have children. A full household provides a better shot at a full life—in the deepest sense—than a full wallet. Relationships and responsibility bring more meaning than the pursuit of personal gratification, at least in the long run.

In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Through his extensive study of the human condition, including his own experiences in a Nazi prison camp, Frankl concluded that the most essential thing to the human soul—its oxygen, its life—wasn’t pleasure, or power, or wealth, but rather meaning. Meaning gives us strength to endure and opens the way to a joy that runs deeper than mere pleasure ever can. Studies indicate that people with children have a deep and profound sense of meaning in their lives. That meaning just multiplies with each new baby welcomed into their arms.