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Are Large Families Better For Kids Than Small Families? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Are large families better or worse for children? There was a really interesting firestorm that erupted on X this week, looking at this tradeoff between having fewer children or having a large family. And I am really interested in trying to understand how this topic is framed today.
• 0:21
  Because it does appear like people have a single frame when it comes to thinking about family. And this is one of the enormous blind spots. So I want to talk a little bit about how this happened. This started when Rebecca Reed responded to a E! News post about Hannah Nealman. So Hannah is known for her trad wife blog, The Ballerina Farm. And she announced that she is pregnant and expecting her ninth baby.
• 0:48
  So how do you react when somebody has a ninth child? How do you think about that family?
• 0:54
  And Rebecca describes what she says and what she's thinking. She said, you cannot give nine children adequate time, attention, and connection. You are unquestionably with nine children spending less time with your children than a working parent with two kids. So one of the blind spots that was pointed out by many people when Rebecca Reed posted this on X was...
• 1:21
  was that she is thinking about how to raise a family from a small family frame. And so part of what's occurred is that we started having smaller families,
• 1:31
  We developed a parenting style that is unique to small families. She describes it here about how to have time, attention, and connection from the adult to the child. Then all of a sudden you observe somebody having a large family and you say they can succeed because they can't use a small family parenting style in their situation. You see the trick here?
• 1:51
  The whole problem is that large families have a completely different kind of culture that she is not familiar with. Rachel Wilson pointed this out. She says she doesn't understand this because she doesn't have a big family. I didn't either. But once you get past three kids, the whole family dynamic becomes different. You don't have to be your kid's entire universe. They have each other.
• 2:12
  It's pretty amazing. This is a huge blind spot that we have culturally. We are criticizing large families without an understanding of what actually occurs within a large family, within a healthy, large family. So I want to talk a little bit about this dynamic and how, especially at family teams, we think about this. Because we are promoting the idea that we need to move from these hyper-individualistic ideas of family to a family team.
• 2:36
  We need to move from thinking about our family as a nest, where we're raising these little chickies and firing them off and then starting over every generation to creating multi-generational family teams. And within a multi-generational family team, there are so many enormous advantages to having a larger family. You don't have to have a larger family. You can have a family team with one, two, three, four kids. There's different ways to do it. But with each child, the dynamic begins to shift, and people are very unaware of how these dynamic changes.
• 3:06
  Now, just to kind of give you guys a little more context, there were some really interesting things that were pointed out. So here's a tweet by Metatrav at Metatrav. And he says, she's measuring the wrong variable. Time spent with your kids is not what raises them.
• 3:21
  The research is clear. Judith Rich Harris laid it out decades ago. Peer socialization is the dominant force in child development, not parental attention, not quality time. The peer group does the work. And nine kids create something most modern families cannot buy.
• 3:37
  A stratified age group under one roof. Older siblings teaching younger ones conflict resolution, social hierarchy, cooperation. Kids learning to negotiate with people two, five, eight years ahead of them. This is how humans raise children for 200,000 years. Mixed age groups figuring out together while adults handled adult problems. The tribe did the heavy lifting.
• 4:00
  The modern obsession with adequate time and attention per child is a broken framework. Two parents hovering over one or two kids produces anxiety, poorly socialized children who never had to negotiate with a real peer group. The parenting debates themselves cause the community destruction that actually damages children. Nine siblings is a tribe. The tribe is what raises children. Always has been.
• 4:25
  Now, I appreciate some of the things he's mentioning here. He's talking about this research that Judith Rich Harris talked about, and this has been observed by many people, that parenting, we're over-indexing on the effect a parent has on a child, that peer socialization has enormous impact. Now, part of this is because we raise our kids in a hyper-peer-oriented way. In a world in which you're primarily around your parents and your siblings,
• 4:51
  Is peer orientation the most dominant element in your parenting and in what is raising you and influencing you as you grow and mature? It's probably your family is going to have an outsized influence in that world. But most folks today, they don't really see that because all they see is the way they were raised.
• 5:10
  So these are just totally different kinds of families. Lila Rose also jumped in on this. She said, I'm one of eight kids. I never felt lonely my entire life until I went to college and then learned what loneliness felt like freshman year. It's because in big families, your siblings become best friends. There's always someone to play with, to talk to, to experience life with.
• 5:28
  You're never alone unless you intentionally seek that out. My parents were always very busy, but we spent time together as a family often, and we discovered our own personalities, interests, dreams, and everything else in an environment rich in relationships. One of the things I think is really important is to pay attention to children that come from large, healthy families.
• 5:46
  And so if you're asking the question, and this is really what we're here to try to answer, which is better? Would you rather be raised in a small healthy family or a large healthy family, given these two frameworks? In the small healthy family, what is optimized for is the time that you get to spend with your individual parents, right? So you get to spend more time with your mom, more time with your dad, more time with your
• 6:11
  There's a fixed small amount of pie. You get half of it. Let's say there's only two kids in that family. Would you rather be raised in that family or would you rather be raised in a family where you had a lot more siblings and you were raised like a team, like a tribe? You had access to your parents, but not as much individual time. You had lots of access to siblings who were constantly playing with you and involving you in this larger family culture.
• 6:37
  She goes on to say, in large families, kids come every one and a half to three years. So there are natural age gaps. Older kids learn to help care for younger kids, making them less self-absorbed. Younger kids learn to play with younger kids. It's not always dependent on mom to play with, entertain, and provide personally 100% of all the care for every kid.
• 6:56
  Kids learn that life is full of love, but life isn't only about them. And that life is about loving and being loved by other people. You learn amazing skills of how to relate to and work with people as well. By the way, one of the things that this immediately stirs up for people is, well, you cannot expect an older child to do any parenting of younger children because we have this very fixed definition of what parenting is. We don't actually understand what it means to be an older sibling, an older brother, an older sister.
• 7:22
  And so we immediately discount all that. There's parents and there's a child. Again, this is all coming from small family frames. This is all incredibly recent. This is not the way that families were raised in most history. And it's really important to understand that why do we think that's somehow more healthy?
• 7:40
  Like what's wrong with having an older brother be an older brother? What's wrong with having an older sister be an older sister? Why do we say that they're parentizing the older kids if those kids are investing in any kind of intentional way into their younger siblings? That's kind of crazy. Yeah.
• 7:55
  part of what you're, it's a gift, not just to the younger siblings, it's also a gift to the older brother, the older sister. Yeah, this can be overblown. There's ways in which this can really hurt those older siblings. But again, we're talking in both cases about a healthy family culture.
• 8:11
  A family culture where we are really intentionally thinking about how do we make sure that everyone is maximally doing what really they're supposed to do in that season of their life. And part of what it means to be an older brother or an older sister is to get the incredible privilege of investing into those younger siblings. Yeah.
• 8:29
  And there are many, many benefits to that. One benefit, of course, is the skills that you develop. We're perfectly happy to put people into industrial schools and just shove their head for years with math facts that they may never use for the rest of their lives. But we immediately say that there's something almost abusive about giving children the kind of training they're going to use every day for the rest of their lives by helping their younger siblings. Right.
• 8:55
  That is such a bizarre idea, right? So that's one of the elements that's odd about this. The other element that's really odd is that when you are investing in those younger siblings, you're actually investing in a team that you're going to have access to for the rest of your life. Part of what is being discounted in this entire conversation is adult life with more siblings, right?
• 9:17
  And so part of what you have to ask is not just what the experience is like when you're five or seven or 12, but what the experience is like when you're 25, when you're 42, when you're 56, when you're 78. Like the experience of having access to more siblings all the way through those 40, 50, 60 years of your adult life.
• 9:36
  That's a tremendous advantage that you're giving to your children by choosing to have more kids. And so if they need to help out a little bit to get access to that advantage for the next 50, 60 years of their adult life, that's a great tradeoff that I know that many of us would be willing to make. That's not abusive. That is just basic understanding that I want my kids to have all the advantages that we can. And so in the same way, I might work extra to be able to squirrel away more money for their education in the future. And I say, look, that's a tradeoff I think is worth it.
• 10:06
  We make that trade-off all the time in modern society. What's wrong with the other trade-off? They say, look, I need you to help a little bit around the house. You'll be getting really good training, but you'll also be getting a sibling for life that will be a part of your life and that in all kinds of ways that we can't even predict will benefit you and that you guys can continue to live life as a team into the future.
• 10:27
  She continues to say, this is back from Lila Rose, when I hire for my organizations, I've discovered some of the best employees come from big families. When I learned my program manager was the oldest of nine kids, it confirmed everything I saw about her in the interview process. An amazing heart, great attitude, incredible competencies.
• 10:46
  and reliability, flexibility, very easy to work with. She's become one of our very best hires. Parents can absolutely love and connect with many kids at once. The greatest gift you can give your kids besides a strong faith and a strong marriage to their other parent is siblings.
• 11:01
  We want to think about this again from a much larger frame. If you're going to be raising your family to live their life like a family team, and that you want to begin that process when they're in the home, and then you want to activate that team to be able to benefit each individual and each branch of the family as they're getting older, then having more kids makes a lot of sense. We experience this dynamic every day. We have adult kids now. We have adult kids now.
• 11:25
  Our daughter-in-law just yesterday afternoon, she posted in the family chat, hey, I'm going to be discipling some girls this afternoon. Can anybody help with my daughter, our granddaughter, Ophelia, who's only one and a half years old?
• 11:41
  And so our daughter, Elisa, she stepped in. She was able to spend the next two hours with her niece. And this allowed Angel to be on mission for the kingdom of God and to invest in these other girls. This is a constant desire.
• 11:56
  benefit that we are, there's ways in which you create win-wins all over the place in large families that are discounted by this sort of zero-sum idea that how much of the pie is each child getting? You don't see the pie just exploding and expanding when you have a larger family and all the different advantages that that creates that, you know,
• 12:18
  Elisa now gets to spend more time with her niece. Angela gets to spend that time with the girls that she's investing in and mentoring. This is part of what we're constantly trying to figure out. How do we be a family on mission? And how do we work like a team and constantly cover each other and help each other? And man, having an extra teammate in that process is...
• 12:40
  massively advantageous and is being completely discounted by people who don't know what it's like to be in a healthy, large family team. So if you want to know what it's like to build a family team, we have a whole email course that we'd love to send to you at familyteams.com slash transform, because we see that part of what you need to do is completely rethink
• 13:00
  family sort of from the ground up. And if you want to know what that's like, what are some of the paradigm shifts that are most foundational and the tools that will begin to transform your family from a group of individuals or a nest into a multi-generational team on mission, just go to familyteams.com slash transform, get access to those initial steps. We'd love to share with you what that's like. So man, we need to get the word out. There are amazing advantages to raising large families. We know that that's not possible for everyone.
• 13:29
  There are ways to, there are of course advantages to smaller families as well, but they're really well known. The advantages to larger families are largely hidden. And so we need to get the word out about these advantages. So head over to familyteams.com slash transform. And we'd love to share with you guys some of the paradigm shifts that'll help transform the way you think about family.