EP 92 – Unexpected Benefits of Big Family Living

The CDC announced last week that the US General Fertility Rate has recently hit an all-time low of only 1.6 children per woman of childbearing age. That makes me sad, because I know how much joy children bring to life. The more, the merrier! In fact, as parents of twelve, my husband and I have reaped a lot of blessings from having a large family we could have never anticipated beforehand — and so have our kids. Which is exactly what I’m talking about today on Loving Life at Home: The wonderful, unexpected benefits of big family living!

Benefits of Big Family Living

Full Transcript of Episode 92

Hello, friend.

Welcome to Episode 92 of Loving Life at Home. Today I’d like to talk about parenting – specifically all the unexpected blessings and benefits that come with raising children, especially when you have a bunch of them.

Last month the CDC released new data that indicates the general fertility rate has hit an all time low in the US recently. That GFR number is a little different than national birth rate. It’s the average births per woman between the ages of 15 -44, I believe, and that number is apparently a better indicator of a country’s population trend than the annual birth rate, which may fluctuate a little more from year to year.

So the US general fertility rate is now sitting at an average of 1.6 children per woman during all her childbearing years, which is well below the replacement level of 2.1 or 2.2 children per woman, and that spells trouble for our country.

This announcement was made last week at the same time I was reading a book by  Timothy Carney called Family Unfriendly. I’m not quite finished with it yet – I’ve only read 13 of the 14 chapters, but it’s been an interesting read so far.

Carney is a Catholic father of six commenting on how our culture has made raising kids harder than it has to be – which is the subtitle of his book. He offers a lot of good food for thought, and I’ve found myself nodding in agreement to many – though not all – of  his observations and suggested solutions.

One thing that I found interesting is the fact that the birth rates across the globe continue to plummet, despite the fact that many of countries are doing everything they can to encourage their citizens to procreate – including cash incentives, tax breaks, lengthy, government-funded maternity and paternity leave, subsidized childcare, the list goes on and on.

But despite their best efforts, it hasn’t significantly moved the needle.

Couples who are inclined to have children may have them a bit earlier to take advantage of governmental incentive programs, but couples who don’t want children do not seem suddenly tempted to have a houseful – or even a single baby — just because they’d get a bonus check for doing so.

The only thing in my reading – so far – that seems to make a big difference in family size is when a couple has strong religious beliefs that highly value children – that is certainly the case for me and my husband – or they are completely surrounded by a community who highly values children.

So I’ll start with that first idea and circle back to the second in a little bit.

The Bible presents children as an unequivocally good thing. Depending on which Bible translation you’re reading, Psalm 127:3-5 calls them

• a gift
• a heritage
• a blessing
• a reward

So if we want to align our hearts with the heart of God, then we must view children in the same way He does.

And, in fact, that has always been my goal. I love children and I’ve wanted a bunch of them for as long as I can remember. Not surprisingly, this fact significantly narrowed the field of potential marriage partners back when I was in college.

If an interested classmate so much as invited me to grab a cup of coffee with him, I’d answer matter-of-factly. “That depends…. How many kids do you plan to have when you get married?”

Subtlety has never been my strong suit.

This line of questioning quickly scared off most would-be suitors, but I didn’t want to risk falling in love with someone who didn’t share my desire for a big family. So I held out… and my patience eventually paid off. Mr. Right – hereafter known as my husband Doug — finally showed up a few weeks before graduation.

Not only was he interested (in me!), but he gave the desired response to all of my questions — and didn’t seem intimidated by my asking them. The rest, as they say, is history: I married him 16 months later, got pregnant two weeks into our honeymoon, and spent the following quarter of a century either pregnant or nursing (or both).

Life as the mother of many has been every bit as blissful as I imagined. Sure, there have been lots of unexpected challenges, but there have also been plenty of unanticipated rewards.

I wrote a blog post over a decade ago listing a bunch of benefits we’ve reaped by having a big family.  Some of them the things I listed were a little tongue-in-cheek, as you will see in a minute when I share my favorites.

But some of the blessings we’ve reaped from having a big family fill my heart with so much gratitude it would be impossible to ever completely plumb its depths.

And still other benefits have presented themselves now that I didn’t even realize were in store for us when I first started compiling that list.

So let’s discuss them all, one by one. First on my list was something I called…

1. Expanded Options

Granted, I wouldn’t recommend having a bunch of kids ONLY to keep from having to decide on a single name, but that is definitely a perk to giving birth a dozen times over.  There are so many beautiful names with so many wonderful meanings out there, it’s difficult to narrow down the list of favorites to pick just one. 

So you have to either do what one of my great-grandmothers did and saddle one child with a dozen different names. She gave her first son a moniker a mile long. But then my grandfather was born, and I guess there were no unused options available for him, because the family just called him “Pete” until he was old enough to choose his own name, which is exactly what he did. The story goes that one day, when his mother was trying to get his attention, he told her, “If you’ll call me John, I’ll answer.” And he went by John for the rest of his life.

Of course, having a big family completely solves that quandary — you can use all your favorite names (or in our case, almost all — I never did give birth to a Hannah) without needing to bestow a long string of names upon a solitary child.

By the way, Hannah was the girl’s name my husband and I had picked out during four successive pregnancies that all ended up in my delivering boys. Then, by the time I finally got a girl, about five or six of our friends had all named their daughters Hannah, and so we went with Rebekah instead.

But even though I never had a baby of my own named Hannah Flanders, we do have a grandbaby with that name. So that makes me happy.

Incidentally, I’m not the only person that sees this idea of expanded options for naming babies as a blessing. My son Ben and his wife Mikayla just announced the fact two weeks ago that they’re expecting again. They already have four, so this will be #5 for them.

And Mikayla came over last week to get my opinion on four different names they’re considering this time around. Two of them are decidedly boy names and two equally distinctive girl names, but here’s the catch. She told me she didn’t just want me to pick a favorite. She wanted to know what ORDER of those four particular names I thought sounded best, because  they would eventually like to use all of them.

Hearing her say that made me laugh – first of all, because it tells me she’s on board for having at least eight children (which is totally awesome). And second, because the idea of planning a preferred order of gender-specific baby names without knowing the sexes of the babies receiving those names just struck me as funny.

So I told her I thought the order should depend entirely on whether a particular pregnancy resulted in a son or a daughter. So I simply told her: “I recommend you use your favorite boy name for the first boy, your favorite girl name for the first girl, and so one, adjusting as necessary if you don’t wind up with an even split.”

So, we’ll see how it goes and what they ultimately decide. I love all four names they’ve picked for the kids already born as well as the new four they’ve chosen for future babies, but I’m hoping maybe they’ll find several other names, too, that will keep them growing their family even beyond eight.

Benjamin used to tell me he wanted sixteen children. He even spent time as a teen designing a modified van that would allow him to tote a family of 18 in a single vehicle.

In fact, when he first started dating his wife, a family friend who was interested in Ben herself, tried to scare Mikayla off at a Christmas party both were attending by telling her how many kids Ben was hoping to have. “So good luck to whoever marries him, right?” the girl told Mik. But Mik was undeterred, and here they are a few years later, expecting their fifth and hoping for at least three more beyond that.

2. Boredom Busters

The second blessing I see to living in a big family is that it’s an antidote to boredom.

There is never a dull moment in a home filled with children, and there is always somebody to play with. Neighbors and schoolmates will come and go, but siblings are friends you can keep for life.

Now, when I was growing up, it was common for parents to turn their children lose in the neighborhood with instructions to come back home when the streetlights turned on at dusk. We had so much freedom….

Back when I was in grade school, I’d walk to and from school all week long, then on Saturday, I’d pack a lunch, hop on my bike, and leave home early in the morning to ride all by myself down to the park and hike along the creek hunting tadpoles or play on the jungle gym at the playground and pretend I was exploring a new planet or stranded on a desert island. Or I’d go to the neighborhood pool to swim, or climb as high up in a tree as I possibly could then perch in its branches and read a book.

I have one sister, and although she eventually married a man who LOVES to hike and takes her with him as much as he can, back when we were kids, she was not nearly as fond of exploring or scaling trees or wading through muddy creeks or catching frogs and fish and lizards as I was, so I usually did that kind of thing alone.

Which I suppose proves you don’t absolutely have to have a bunch of siblings to keep from ever feeling bored. Because I barely ever remember ever feeling bored in my whole life.

But, sadly, we are living in a much different era now than the one I grew up in. And if I let one of my kids spend a whole day at the park, alone and unsupervised, somebody might turn me in to CPS for child neglect or endangerment. Not that unsupervised play really is dangerous or negligent, but that we live in a society that seems to think so nowadays.

Fortunately, there is safety in numbers. And while I wouldn’t feel comfortable turning a young child loose to spend a Saturday afternoon hiking through woods and wading through streams, I have absolutely no problem allowing a group of my children to do exactly that. Which has allowed them to experience a lot of the same freedoms and adventures and opportunities to explore and grow and investigate that I so enjoyed as a child. And that makes my heart so happy.

When they were younger, they’d all hop on their bikes and ride to the neighborhood pool  to swim or to the bookstore to browse or to the gas station to get a treat or the craft store to buy supplies for some creative project they wanted to make or to something they called “the bamboo forest” to cut long poles for teepees. They still like to go to that bamboo forest, which was a dense grove of bamboo that grew near a creek in our old neighborhood, and earlier this summer they brought home two 10-foot poles to use as supports for a movie screen so we can host an outdoor movie for our family and friends this fall, once the Texas weather cools off a little.

Now that they’re older, they don’t just ride bikes around our town, but get in the car and drive further away to visit their grandmother and married siblings or – just last month – five of the unmarried kids – acutally four kids and one grandkids who is just a few months older than my youngest son – flew to California together to explore several national parks. They saved up their money and all bought their own plane tickets, took lots of pictures while they were there, and made wonderful memories together.

But all that adventuring started with a bike ride to the pool, which meant crossing one busy street by themselves.

Parents who helicopter and micro-manage and plan out every minute of their offspring’s childhood rob them of the growth that comes from doing some things – not everything, but some things – on their own. Each new adventure builds a little more confidence so that when the time comes, they aren’t afraid to tackle bigger escapades and more daunting challenges.

And having a  houseful of siblings gave everyone plenty of buddies to bring along on all those adventures – without forcing anybody who was more of a homebody (like my sister as a child) out of their own comfort zone prematurely.

3. Conversation Starters

Another benefit big families enjoy? Well, maybe not all of them enjoy this, but we normally did – was the knack our large crew had for starting conversations.

Big families invite all sorts of inquiries:

• “Are all these kids yours?”
• “Don’t you know what causes that?”
• “Are you going to have any more?”
• “Do I need to buy you a TV?”

In our experience, most of the people asking such questions aren’t trying to be rude — they’re genuinely curious — so we answer as graciously and amicably as we possibly can. What a great way to meet people!

Our willingness to engage such folks and answer their questions has led to lots of newspaper articles – especially on homeschooling – and TV interviews… First for just our local papers and news stations, but those eventually led to us being interviewed by Al Jazeera’s America Tonight, and that led to the BBC contacting us about appearing in a documentary with a British actress  Miriam Margolyes – -which we did, and are still in contact with her all these years later. I’ll include links to both those interviews in today’s show notes. 

Even ABC’s 20/20 came out and filmed our family along with our good friends the Halberstadts (who now have 10 children, although I think they only had six or seven at the time of that interview), although to my knowledge, none of that footage has ever aired.

1 Peter 3:15 tells us,

“But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”

I view having a large family as an opportunity to put this verse into practice, which is why I’m always happy to answer questions about why we’ve made the life decisions we’ve made – whether the person asking me the questions is standing behind me in line at the grocery store or eating at a table near ours in a restaurant or thrusting a microphone in my face with lights blaring and cameras rolling.

It’s all the same to me, and if you’re willing to ask the questions, I’m willing to answer them in the best, most God-honoring way I know how.

4. Group Discounts

Another benefit to big-family living is built-in group discounts.

A really big family can qualify for discounted group admission rates without even trying. And do we ever get our money’s worth on those annual zoo and museum memberships — especially the ones that offer reciprocal benefits at sister sites! Which often means free museum admission whenever we travel.

For years, I’ve planned potty breaks on road trips to coincide with museum or zoo or botanical garden visits, so that we’re stopping every 3-4 hours on the road at some reciprocal site that gives us free admission. (I talk about that more in my episode on family travel, which I’ll link in today’s shownotes, if you’re interested).

Also, whenever we travel en masse with extended family, I try to take advantage of as many kids eat free restaurants as I can. Even though most restaurants understandably limit free kids meals to one per paying adult, we usually have enough diners ages 13 and up in our group to get all the little ones fed for free.

I keep a couple of lists on my website (which I’ll link in the show notes, as well), one of local restaurants in Tyler, Texas, where we live and another of national chains like Freebirds and Luby’s where kids eat free on certain days of the week, and even though all my children have now aged out of those promotions, we still refer to it when the grandkids are in town or we have a reunion in another city.

5. A Deeper Admiration

The love and affection I felt for my husband as a spouse, great though it was, increased manifold when he became the father of my children. I so enjoyed watching him teach and train and interact with our preschoolers, adolescents, teens, and adult children, but there is something so specially endearing about the way he cuddles and cootchy-coos our babies, it makes me glad that for so long we had one in the house to draw that tenderness out of him.

He’s still that way with the grandchildren. They all adore him and attend to his voice the minute he walks into the room.

6. Household Help

A wise man once observed, “Many hands make light labor.” He was right. Of course, many hands make bigger messes to begin with, but when everyone pitches in to help clean up, household chores are knocked out in short order, and kids learn responsibility and other important life skills from an early age. It is fun to work side by side to accomplish daily tasks in short order, and then be able to play side by side making wonderful family memories.

Now, let me pause here to interject something that I think should be obvious, but evidently isn’t. I just want to acknowledge the fact that children create a lot more messes than they clean up, at least in the beginning.

But if you do your job and train them well, they will eventually get much better at cleaning up after themselves, which is a huge help to any homemaker.

I say this because whenever I’ve written about assigning children’s chores on my blog (and I’ll link a few of those posts in the show notes), I get messages from readers who tell me I’m robbing my kids of their childhoods or say things like, “Well, its obvious you only had a bunch of kids because you wanted free slave labor.” Which would be laughable if they weren’t 100% serious.

Which is utter nonsense. That would be like saying I only teach Algebra so I can copy off my students’ homework. Only a person who doesn’t understand math would ever suggest such a thing.

But I do understand math –in fact, I’ve always loved math — so (1) I can easily do all my own computations without cheating off anybody else’s work, thank you very much. And (2) I know that if I don’t do my job of teaching Algebra well, none of my students would be turning in homework worth copying, anyway.

The same is true for kids and chores. Only somebody who doesn’t have children or doesn’t understand what is involved in raising children would suggest any parent would have a whole houseful of kids so as to have extra help keeping said house nice and tidy. That’s ludicrous.

As I already mentioned, several of our single kids – including almost all the ones still living at home (Daniel had to work, so he didn’t make the trip, and neither did Isaac who’s doing an engineering internship in Longview  this summer, nor Rachel, who had one more month of serving as an au pair in Germany) – but the rest of them  spent a week in California hiking through National Parks.

And my husband and I were absolutely amazed at how clean the house stayed for the six days they were gone. We barely had any laundry. There were no dirty dishes piled in the sink – ever. We hardly messed anything up or had any housework to do while they were away. So that part was great.

However, they house was so quiet and lonely and still without all our kids in it, so we were overjoyed and relieved when they all made it back safely, despite the fact they brought a ton of dirty clothes home with them.

Because we really love our children, and we enjoy spending time with them.

Yes, they’re able to wash the dirty clothes themselves now and will often load the dishwasher and wipe down the countertops and straighten the house as well. And those are all nice things. But let’s not forget that many of those things would not need to be done at all if the kids weren’t living in our home in the first place. Proverbs 14:4 tells us, “Where no oxen are, the manger is clean, But much increase comes by the strength of the ox.”

And the same is true for kids. Where there are no kids, the house stays tidy, but much joy comes through the presence of children.

That’s because our lives are greatly enriched by our large family. Free slave labor? That’s not an efficient business model.
But if someone were to suggest we had a passel of kids because we enjoy having a houseful of amazing humans to do life with – to talk to and spend time with and make memories together and be challenged and stretched and sharpened by – that would be a far more accurate statement.

Wooo! I’m never going to get through all these benefits if I don’t pick up the pace. Next on my list, number seven, is…

7. No PMS

Between pregnancy and breastfeeding, you can literally go for years without having a monthly cycle. This is experience talking. And I’m not gonna lie — that was really, really nice.

Also, so many pregnancies allowed me to save up my eggs – a woman is born with a limited number – so I didn’t end up going through menopause – or deal with any of the side affects that normally accompany that change of life — until I was 57 years old. Which was also nice, in my opinion.

8. Pick Your Sport

Depending on the size of your family, you can field your own basketball team. Or volleyball. Or baseball. Or soccer. The physical exercise does a body good, and the games give ample opportunity to practice good sportsmanship among other players who are held to the same standard.

We’ve always had a very competitive family – but it’s a friendly sort of competition, where each child cheers on the others. Playing sports, or even board and card games – is a great way to work out character flaws. And when our kids were little, my husband hit on a great way to do just that. We’d play games every night after dinner – sometimes we’d grab a basketball to play knock-out in the driveway, sometimes we’d play zombie tag in the back yard, if it rained, we’d stay inside and play spoons or maybe bananagrams at the kitchen table or around-the-world ping pong in the garage.

But we’d play together consistently as soon as the kitchen chores were done, and if anybody got mad or upset or lost their temper or tried to cheat or showed any other sign of poor sportsmanship, he (or she) would get to be the “guest speaker” when we came back inside for storytime that evening.

We have a topical arrangement of Proverbs called Proverbs for Parenting, so we’d flip over to the appropriate section of the book and have that child read relevant verses on anger or impatience or greed or unkindness or whatever the present problem happened to be. Sometimes, even mom or dad had to take a turn as guest speaker, because ours was the most egregious behavior for that day’s game playing.

Another benefit of having a big family is…

9. Social Security

Contrary to what “Zero Population Growth” proponents will tell you, demographic declines are causing deeply troubling problems for societies worldwide, which is why many countries (Germany, Japan, and Austrailia, to name just a few) are now actually paying people to procreate. Big families are simply ahead of the curve.

And, in our case, with twelve children, my husband has always teased that when he and I get too old or feeble to care for ourselves, we can rotate houses and spend one month with each child so that nobody need be unduly burdened by our care.

Hopefully, it won’t ever come to that – or at least not for a long, long time — because the tenth benefit to having a big family is …

10. Youthful Appearance

While pregnancy keeps you looking young (think thick, glossy hair and glowing complexion), the children themselves keep you feeling young. It’s a wonderful thing to see the world through the eyes of a child, so filled with awe and excitement over each new discovery. Their energy, enthusiasm, and laughter are infectious.

And keeping up with them – whether it’s playing frisbee or taking bike rides or running foot races or hiking through National Parks — which is something our whole family normally does together. My husband’s work schedule just wouldn’t allow us to accompany them this summer. We’ve already made plans to take another 3-day hike in November together, though, and we’ll go tent camping with them for a week in October. But keeping up with the kids, in whatever form that takes, helps keep us on our toes and physically fit.

As for the youthful appearance, I know lots of large families where mom and dad look more like their children’s siblings than their parents. One of my husband’s favorite happened when our oldest daughter was in college and he drove to campus to change cars with her. Several of her friends saw him talking to her as they traded keys and came rushing over after he left to ask Bethany who the cute guy was. They thought Doug was her boyfriend, and were shocked to learn he was her dad because he “looked sooo young.”

Number 11 on my list of unexpected benefits to having lots of children is it’s…

11. One Less Excuse

Being open to pregnancy allows couples to enjoy intimacy as God intended. No frantic search for a misplaced diaphragm. No mad dash to the drugstore when you run out of condoms. No having to compensate for the fact that the Pill completely decimates a woman’s libido. Just blessed spontaneity (although regularly scheduling time for said spontaneity is highly recommended).

12. No Sour Milk

In a house full of kids (especially teenaged boys), food seldom lasts long enough to go bad. That’s a plus! You can buy in bulk without fear of spoilage.

They go through everything so fast! For several years when my oldest boys were teens, we’d buy 10 gallons of milk at a time, and it would only last us about 4 days. If it were just my husband and I drinking it, I don’t think we would finish a full gallon before it went bad.

Same is true for eggs and bread. Neither of those staples normally last long enough to go bad at our house.

As an added bonus, dinner conversation never drags with so many different personalities contributing to it.

Number thirteen, having lots of kids means you’ll eventually have…

13. Built-In Babysitters

Our kids absolutely love babies and are always clamoring to hold our newest addition. As a result, they can all handle infants very comfortably and capably — experience that definitely came in handy when they started having kids of their own.

Several of our daughters in law were youngest in their family and had little to no experience caring for infants, so having a husband who knew how to hold and swaddle and change and burp a baby was a huge help and reassuring comfort to them as new moms.

Now just to clarify, when I say “built-in babysitters,” I’m not talking about parents expecting their older children to raise the younger ones. …..This isn’t about shirking your job or pushing the hard work of parenting off on somebody else to do – especially not on older siblings who are still children themselves.

It has always been my responsibility and the responsibility of my husband to care for our babies – to feed them, provide for their needs, change their diapers, bathe them, teach them, train them, watch over them, make sure they learn right from wrong. That sort of thing.

But there’s a big difference between not leaning on your children to do your job and not allowing them to interact with the baby at all. You have to strike a balance.

I know it drove some of the grandmothers in our life crazy to watch us pass the baby around from person to person and child to child. The more babies we had, the more older siblings were at our elbows, clamoring for their turn to hold them.

And I really think that one reason our kids are still so close is that they were allowed to be involved with the babies from the get go – holding them, rocking them, entertaining them. One of our sons, Samuel, begged us to install a baby carrier on his bike so he could pump his little brother around the neighborhood.

Another son, Benjamin, would spend his own money buying little clothes for his baby brother, so they could match when we went out.

Another son, David, would whisk Abigail out of my arms nearly every Sunday morning just as church started – we always kept our babies with us in the service – and would sit with her in his lap. If she started to squirm, he would just look at her sideways, and she’d settle right back down. It was incredible. And good training for him, too, as he has three girls of his own now, plus one little boy, and they respond to his instruction just as consistently as his little sister did.

I never asked or expected him to do that. He just volunteered. And, oh my! When he left for dental school, Abby missed him so much! Whenever he’d come home to visit, he’d ask to be the one to wake her up in the morning, and she would just squeal with delight as soon as she saw him!

Whenever we did school, the older kids would each take a turn playing with the littles while I went over math lessons with school-aged siblings. They’d build blanket tents for them in the living room or feed them snacks or take them in the backyard to swing.

I felt a little conflicted about assigning them the “chore” of watching their younger siblings, even though it was for only half an hour each – but that was the easiest way I could think of to make sure everyone got their school work done and the littles weren’t neglected during the process.

But then one morning, I heard my boys arguing about something that let me know they didn’t view this half-hour of babysitting as a chore at all, but as a privilege.

On that day, Ben had claimed the 7:30-8:00 AM time slot but was precisely two minutes late handing the baby off to the next in line. So Samuel arbitrated, “That means I get her until 8:34, then David can have her until 9:06!”

As an added bonus, our big guys quickly discovered that nothing attracts attention from the opposite sex more effectively than toting around a new baby brother or sister (otherwise known as a “chick magnet”). So closer sibling relationships were not the only benefit they derived from developing great baby skills.

Another benefit to having a big family is that having a lot of children can help each child learn to put their…

14. Best Foot Forward

Not only do children help refine their parents’ character qualities, but they polish one another, as well. Proverbs 27:17 tells us,

 “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” 

And I’ve definitely seen that principle at work within the four walls of our own home.

Siblings have a way of knocking off one another’s rough edges in private, so they’re less likely to make fools of themselves in public. Corny jokes and lame pranks can be tested (then reworked as needed or altogether abandoned) at home, where the stakes are lower and the audience is more forgiving.

Homeschoolers are sometimes stereotyped as being socially awkward and unsocialized, but that has not been our experience. Most of the homeschoolers we know, including our own kids, are articulate and gregarious and able to carry on interesting conversations with a wide range of ages – not just their peers.

And I think that is largely due to the fact they get so much practice relating to young and old alike within our own family instead of spending eight hours a day sequestered in a classroom surrounded only by their age mates.

In fact, with so many children spread over so many years, a large family really forms its own micro-culture, which is especially handy if you’re interested in bucking societal norms.

For instance, if the parents of an only child were to decide, “You, know, I think eight or ten or twelve years old is much too young to own a phone. I don’t want my son or daughter to spend their whole childhood staring at a screen.” – and those are entirely reasonable concerns, by the way. But an only child will not really get the results you might be hoping to achieve by waiting to give her a phone or refusing to buy him a gaming console or by suggesting they spend more time playing outdoors.

Because now, instead of staring at her own screen, if all her little friends are still glued to their phones, she’ll wind up staring at the tops of their heads while they scroll at the lunch table or school playground or church youth group or wherever else the kids tend to congregate.

If you want to create a culture of screen-free kids who actually talk to one another and play outside with one another and go exploring together, you’ve either got to get a whole lot more parents on board, setting similar guidelines for their own kids to make it happen… or you’ve got to raise more kids yourself so that those siblings will all have built-in playmates.

That’s what I mean by micro-culture within a home. Your decisions about how your kids will or won’t spend their time, the amount of TV and YouTube and movie streaming you allow, the use (or non-use) of social media or video games, whether or not you eat refined sugar or participate in travel sports or go to slumber parties or have evening curfews or require household chores or participate in  or homeschool co-ops or attend church on Sundays – all those decisions and more affect the whole crew, and so they are all in it together and adapt accordingly – which is really a helpful thing and makes it so much easier to resist the pressure society tries to exert on parents to raise our children in a certain way.

If I decide I don’t want to spend all my time shuffling kids back and forth from one extra-curricular activity to another, guess what? I don’t have to. And they’ll still have things to do and people to play with.

Whereas, if the parent of an only child decides to avoid what Timothe Carney calls “the travel team trap” – he may be the only kids in the neighborhood on a given Saturday, because all his little friends who live nearby are at out-of-town games.

So that’s been a benefit of having a bunch of kids. Another big blessing is the fact that having a lot of children means you won’t have to deal with an empty nest as soon as you might otherwise. I love that fact!

15. Empty Nest Postponed

Also, when you are blessed with many children, you don’t have to give up all your favorite things about one stage of life to enjoy all the great things about the next. You’ll still have little ones at home to cuddle even after first ones move away.

That’s a happy distraction during what would otherwise be a bittersweet time. Also, studies show that the older a couple is when their last child leaves home, the more likely their marriage will survive the transition.

I wholeheartedly agree with what John wrote in his third epistle:

“I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth.” – 3 John 1:4 

It has been great watching our children grow up and mature into such amazing adults. They eventually become more like really good friends – They are all so thoughtful and kind and smart  and interesting and articulate and witty. I often feel compelled to take notes whenever I talk to them.

But I’m also grateful to still have a few children left at home, although even those few are perched on the edge of the nest ready to fledge and fly away. And it will be a little bittersweet when that happens, signaling the end, as it were, of such a wonderfully rich and rewarding season of my life.

16. Community Impact

The last benefit I want to mention is the potential impact a big family has on the people around them.

I don’t just mean pointing others to Jesus or loving your neighbors as you love yourself or trying to make the world a better place. Those are all things Christians can do whether they have a house filled with children or raise only one or two or never have kids at all. Our circumstances are all different, and we can purpose to glorify God no matter what those circumstances are – whether we get to spend our lives doing what we always dreamed of doing or our lives take a detour and we wind up with plan B or even C or D.

The impact I’m talking about is specific to having a bunch of kids. It can actually serve to encourage and motivate other families to buck the current 1.6 accepted average of a “normal” sized family.

I’ve lost count of how many of my husband’s coworkers have confided him over the years that they’d originally planned to stop at 2 or maybe 3 kids, but when they saw our family keep having baby after baby (we were expecting our sixth when we first moved to town and doubled that number before it was all said and done) – it convinced them to keep going as well.

That phenomenon was something that showed up in the research Timothy Carney did for the book I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. Other than having deeply held religious convictions yourself that view children in a favorable light, one of the strongest predictors of larger family size is living in a community where larger families are common and children are valued.

The author visited Orthodox Jewish communities, Mormon neighborhoods, and cul de sacs populated primarily by large Catholic families and found that average family size even of non-religious couples shifted up when those families were surrounded by other large families.

When everyone you know has only 1 or 2 kids, choosing to raise 5 or 6 seems excessive. But when you know families with 10, 11, 12 children, having 5 or 6 feels much more acceptable —  almost as if you’re just getting started.