Making Big Families Normal Again

The fertility crisis in America and around the globe is well documented, with America’s fertility rate dropping to 1.62 children per woman. While much of this is due to people simply not having children at all, declining family size in general, and a lack of big families in particular, this trend plays a role. Big families, though, get treated as if they are weird and disrespected. Even if you do not want a big family or do not even like seeing them around, if you want your country to survive, you should want some people to have big families. Beyond policy items like expanding child tax credits to make big families more affordable, we need to make them socially acceptable again. This starts with recognizing the problem.  

I was at a business dinner once in San Francisco when it came as a great surprise that I had (at the time) four kids. I was asked if I was "Mormon or something?" I was a little sad that my Catholicism was denigrated to the "or something" category, but the truth is that Catholics and Mormons do not really have that many more children on average than the rest of the country. Utah's fertility rate is also below replacement level. I am used to comments about my family size, and they’ve only grown as my family has grown.

It is a frequent complaint among parents of big families that people offer unsolicited opinions about their family size or ask ridiculous questions. People may have personal opinions about wearing socks with sandals, but normally strangers do not go up and talk to you about it at the grocery store. If you show up with socks and sandals, they will judge you quietly; if you have more kids than they deem socially acceptable, they will talk to you about it. The comments range from the almost innocuous “are they all yours” to more salacious remarks suggesting the parents of a big family should watch more TV or asking if we know where babies come from.

These comments target those whose families are big enough to count as weird. On multiple occasions, I have watched people comment about how large a family a woman has because of her five kids. Each of the commentators had four kids. For some reason, having five kids crossed into the level of weirdness and a topic of conversation, while four kids (in my family-friendly midwestern town) were within the normal range. The range is lower in San Francisco, of course, but anywhere in America there is a number of kids that makes you weird in the eyes of your neighbors. 

Catherine Pakaluk’s excellent book Hannah’s Children studies women with large families and sets the threshold at five kids--that’s what makes us weird enough to study. Five percent of American women have five or more kids. To put that in context, eight percent of American men are colorblind. Big families are even rarer. 

The exact number where family size makes you weird is going to vary by geography, religious group, and occupation. The families of five might be able to hide or blend in. Once you hit seven kids, though, there’s no hiding. At that point, you have outgrown even the biggest SUV and are driving some form of church van. You are going to look weird. As a society, if we want more children and higher birthrates, we need to make large families seem less weird, or at least shift the threshold that counts as weird. Dr. Pakaluk, a fellow Catholic and mother to eight, notes that "there's no doctrine that it's holier to have more kids.” It goes without saying that many people who desire large families are unable to have them, and that does not diminish their value. But we should encourage and support big families to help turn around the birth dearth.  

To raise the number of socially acceptable kids, we must start by recognizing that there is a number of kids that weirds out the neighbors and labeling it. I propose that we call this number of kids W. Once we accept that W represents a number in our culture, then we can try to raise W in our social circle and our area. Catholics can do more in this area through catechesis and teaching theology of the body, but this is not a Catholic issue. There are certainly public policy changes that could promote and normalize big families, but cultural action is both possible and effective. Conservative memes--the kind treating fathers as revolutionary for loving their kids or taking them to church--only ever show two or three kids. Even the picture books for kids about going to Mass only show small families. Maybe it is cheaper to illustrate a small family, but we can probably eat the cost. Even if you are not a creator, you could still engage with or support the clips or pictures showing big families online. When you encounter a big troupe at the grocery store, you can remark how beautiful the family is rather than offering a referral for a vasectomy. If we raise the W number a little, we might just find that bigger families are embraced, rather than questioned, in our communities. This might help move our fertility in the right direction.

 
J.C. Miller is an attorney and father of seven (!) kids.