When is "too many?"

[PrincessFiona]

When I was pregnant with baby #2, my good friend had 5 children....Her youngest was a boisterous 4 year old who would come over and leap from my sofa, climb on the coffee table and mom hardly blinked while we talked. I told myself I would *never* *ever* have more than 3 children.....for a variety of reasons. My friend, of course, now has the last laugh. She is Irish catholic and every single one of her children is well-adjusted and happy. Most have gone on to college and start families of their own..and the little guy is now 15 or 15 years old...and isn't the little criminal I was sure he would be :> He makes straight A's and is a really neat kid.

So...I think it all depends on the family.

kris

[Rapunzel]

One thought about why large LDS families may have a better average of sending their kids on to college is BYU. A friend of mine (who is LDS) told me that the tuition there for LDS is very, very low. So the community supports their college, and therefore people from all walks of live can go to school.

It's a good point. But, there are literally millions of young people in the church. Hundreds of thousands of college aged people in the church cannot attend BYU because there is physically not enough room for them. So, they go to other colleges/universities throughout the country/world. I, myself, was accepted to BYU and chose not to go because they wouldn't give me a full scholarship (my ACT score was one point too low for the President's scholarship) and I was able to secure a full scholarship at a different, non-LDS, university.

I think that the difference with LDS families is the incredible, consistant, and on-going emphasis the leaders of the LDS church have on education and its importance. I have entire books on my bookshelf written by LDS priesthood authorities on the subject of education and its importance. And, in our church, we take what our priesthood leaders say as inspired revelation (ie literally part of our religious beliefs). I guess you could say it's almost a commandment for LDS to get the best educations they can. This means that the vast majority of members will not attend a BYU (there are now three - Provo, Hawaii, and Idaho). But, there is definitely still a HUGE emphasis on those members receiving an education beyond high school.

Jennifer

[Phoebe]

One thought I had about the children in the Duggars family and probably other children coming from large families is that they don't know what they are missing, especially since they are homeschooled. They are growing up in this environment that they know as normal. They may not even know that they are missing out on individual attention from parents or what it really means to be a kid when they are paired with one or two smaller children to help when they get older.

To an outsider, I could come up with a whole host of reasons why the parents are insane to family so many children, but do the kids know any different? I think it is easy to look back and blame our childhood or parents for mistakes and why we turned out a certain way. I have many issues that I blame on my childhood. I am totally committed to paying for my children's therapy since I am probably screwing them up somehow.

Each person has limits and needs to make an educated (meaning well thought out or informed) decision on how many children to have based on their family upbringing, financial situation, religious beliefs or coping skills (whatever drives someone to know how many kids they want).

Jennifer

[Auspicious]

The zero population growth matter is another thing entirely. It's a myth based on opinion rather than reality.

If you have a source on this that you can point us to, I would be interested in reading it.

[Rapunzel]

Here are a few links:

Quick facts:

http://www.ncpa.org/pd/pdint21.html

And, here's an interesting article:

Washington Post
Underpopulation, Not Overpopulation, is the Real Global Problem
by Nicholas Eberstadt
Sunday, March 18, 2001
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It may not be the first way we think of ourselves, but all of us alive today are children of the "world population explosion." Thanks to sweeping mortality declines, human numbers leapt from about 1.6 billion or 1.7 billion in 1900 to more than 6 billion in 2000.
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In certain circles within Washington (and outside the United States), that unprecedented leap in human numbers fueled an anti-natalist obsession. But continuing preoccupation with high fertility and rapid population growth leaves us poorly prepared to comprehend (much less respond to) emerging demographic trends.
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Three of these are poised to refigure our global profile in surprising -- and not always beneficial -- ways. The first is the spread of "sub-replacement" fertility regimens: patterns of childbearing that will eventually result, all else being equal, in indefinite population decline.
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According to the US Census Bureau, 83 countries and territories are now thought to experience below-replacement fertility. Those places encompass nearly 2.7 billion people -- roughly 44% of the world's total population.
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Today's global march toward smaller family size flies in the face of many prevailing assumptions about when rapid fertility decline can and cannot occur. Poverty and illiteracy (especially female illiteracy) are widely regarded as impediments to fertility decline, yet they have not prevented Bangladesh from reducing its fertility rate by more than half over the past quarter-century. By the same token, "traditional" religious attitudes are commonly seen as a barrier against low fertility. Yet over the past two decades, Iran, under the tight rule of a militantly Islamic clerisy, has slashed its fertility level by fully two-thirds, and now apparently it stands on the verge of sub-replacement.
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What accounts for the worldwide plunge in fertility? The honest answer is that nobody really knows -- at least, with any degree of confidence. If you can find the shared determinants of fertility decline in such disparate below-replacement societies as the United States, Guadeloupe, Thailand and Tunisia, then your Nobel Prize is in the mail.
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While causes might be uncertain, results are quite predictable. Global population growth will decelerate markedly over the coming generation. By current projections, in fact, slightly fewer babies will be born worldwide in the year 2025 than at any point over the previous four decades.
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Thanks to extreme birth dearth, depopulation is now imminent for both Europe and Japan. In Europe, immigration must nearly quadruple -- to an average of almost 4 million net entrants a year -- to prevent a decline in the size of the 15- to-64-year-old "working age" population over the next 50 years. In Japan, where net immigration approximates zero, more than 600,000 newcomers a year will be needed to keep the working age population from shrinking.
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Will these territories opt for indefinite decline -- or for ethnic transformation? Given the arithmetic, they have no other options. Low and decreasing fertility levels will accelerate the tempo of social aging -- the second great demographic trend of the coming era.
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We all know about the coming pensioner problem in Western countries -- but Western countries are rich. Many of today's developing countries, by contrast, will become "gray" before they become "rich." One of the most arresting cases of population aging is now set to unfold in China. Between 2000 and 2025, China's median age will soar -- in fact, it may exceed America's within 25 years. By 2025, roughly 200 million Chinese will be 65 or older. Caring for China's elderly will inexorably become a domestic, and global, political issue -- for nothing remotely resembling a national pension system is yet in place in that country.
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The third, and most ominous, demographic trend of the coming era involves unexpected and brutal mortality spikes. In our era, we have come to presume that death rates inevitably decline during times of peace and order. That happy presumption must now be discarded. By Census Bureau projections, nearly 40 countries and territories will have lower life expectancies in 2010 than they enjoyed in 1990. More than 750 million people -- one-sixth of the world's current population -- live in such spots. Many of these countries are today's sub-Saharan victims of the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
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But the international health setback is not just about Africa and AIDS. In Russia -- an urbanized, industrialized, peacetime society -- lifespans are shorter today than 40 years ago. In a dozen other post-Communist countries, life expectancy is lower today than in the 1970s.
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Since virtually no one predicted these foreshortenings of national lifespan, we cannot yet claim to know which countries will be afflicted by -- or spared from -- uncontrollable bouts of mortality in the years to come. Before too long, unfortunately, our current era's widespread anxiety about health-driven global population growth may look remarkably quaint and naive.

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Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. This article is adapted from a longer one in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

The following analysis of a UN report on the subject can be found at http://www.juntosociety.com/guest/sperl ... 10903.html :

New York -- A new UN report studying the effects of population growth on the environment provides information that challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions of population control, assumptions used to justify sterilization, abortion and contraception. "World Population Monitoring 2001," prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, emphasizes that many of the most dire predictions about the consequences of population growth have proven unfounded, and remain unlikely to occur even if the world population rises to 8.9 billion by 2050.
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The most common argument against population growth is that the earth has a "carrying capacity," a threshold number of humans beyond which civilization will descend into chronic famine, disease, poverty and civil strife. According to the report, however, "Over the period 1961-1998, world per capita food available for direct human consumption increased by 24 per cent, and there is enough being produced for everyone on the planet to be adequately nourished." Also, general advances in technology and industry have resulted in a dramatic growth in average material well-being -- "From 1900 to 2000, world population grew from 1.6 billion persons to 6.1 billion. However, while world population increased close to 4 times, world real gross domestic product increased 20 to 40 times, allowing the world to not only sustain a four-fold population increase, but also to do so at vastly higher standards of living." The report shows guarded optimism that these trends will continue, and that food production will continue to grow along with the population.
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Population control advocates also argue that growth will strip the world of nonrenewable resources like oil and minerals, thereby throwing economies into disarray. But, the Population Division report says, "During recent decades new reserves have been discovered, producing the seeming paradox that even though consumption of many minerals has risen, so has the estimated amount of the resource as yet untapped."
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The latest argument concerns the environmental effects of population growth, including pollution, habitat destruction and the extinction of species. The report contends that population growth may contribute to some of these problems, especially fisheries depletion and water contamination, but "In general, population growth appears to be much less important as a driving force of such problems than is economic growth and technology." Even global warming will be "mainly due to modes of production, not to the size, growth and distribution of population." Consumption patterns among developed countries with declining populations also have a detrimental impact on the environment.
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The report advances no specific policy initiatives, but it emphasizes that population is only one of a number of complex, interrelated issues affecting the environment and human development. When famine occurs, for instance, it can be because "People have inadequate physical and/or economic access to food as a result of poverty, political instability, economic inefficiency and social inequity," not simply because there are too many people.
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The report brings into question the ever-constant UN goal of decreasing birth rates worldwide. The Population Division, which makes all UN predictions about population growth, is seen as mostly non-ideological.

This guy does a very good analysis of the issue here:

http://www.jefflindsay.com/Overpop.shtml

Here's a link on Thomas Malthus (creator of the "Overpopulation" theory). Make sure to read the links to his essay and its problems at the bottom of the page:

http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/malthus.html

Here's another article of interest:

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/ ... lation.htm

The following document goes into greater detail doing the math for the number of people the earth could sustain:

http://uffl.org/vol%207/maloy7.pdf

I found this website with the most delightful name: "Question Everything". Here's an interesting entry there that relates the "overpopulation" theory is nothing new and scares about it have been around throughout history:

"What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint), is our teeming population: our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, whilst Nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance. In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race" - Tertullian, 2nd century C.E.

http://question-everything.mahost.org/2 ... -myth.html

Finally, the following website makes every effort to support its arguments with solid facts and research (rather than Malthus' faulty theories or modern pop culture ideas):

http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/P ... lation.asp

The page I link to above specifically mentions the fact that population size is not the factor in determining hunger among a given population. If you scroll to the bottom of that particular page you will find additional information on related subjects. Excerpt:

In 1989 Cornell University sociologists Frederick Buttel and Laura Raynolds published a careful study of population growth, food consumption, and other variables in ninety-three third world countries.20 Their statistical analysis found no evidence that rapid population growth causes hunger. What they did find was that the populations of poorer countries, and those countries where the poorest 20 percent of the population earned a smaller percentage of a nation's total income, had less to eat. In other words, poverty and inequality cause hunger.

Jennifer

[Auspicious]

Thanks.

[SueC]

I think it is easy to look back and blame our childhood or parents for mistakes and why we turned out a certain way. I have many issues that I blame on my childhood. I am totally committed to paying for my children's therapy since I am probably screwing them up somehow.Jennifer

Or you could take the "lottery ticket" approach to family planning. You could buy one lottery ticket, and just keep your fingers crossed that that one is a winner, or you could buy like a dozen and raise your chances exponentially! :>

I just watched "14 children and pregnant again", followed by "The Duggars Raising 16 children", and finally "1 month on the road with 16 children".

:thud:

The parents do seem to have it under control, and the kids all seemed ... content? But what was the deal with them all dressing the same?

My only observation / qualm is that this religion (I never did catch what it was) that encourages homeschooling also seems to encourage such large families. They went to a conference of sorts, and each person the crew spoke to had an inordinate number of kids! I think 8 was the least, with 10-12 being the median. Is it an attempt to create more population for their church?

Clearly not for me.

[Meenah]

At the risk of being stoned to death, I think it is a way to increase the numbers of whatever religion it is. I think all fanatical religions are dangerous, no matter what they are. Encouraging women to have 15 or 16 children is really fanatical and morally wrong.

[Vanquisher]

I watched too Jenn, and sadly, not the first time I have watched it either. It's just so morbidly amusing to me. I shake my head and say why??

When the kids talked, I would say, "Robot!"

There was one question when they asked about individuality, and the only things they came up with for why they were individuals were that they liked different things, for example, "Dad doesn't like pickles." WOW, yes that is the definition of individuality.

I was thinking of all the brainwashing that must be involved, because, I mean, wouldn't you SNAP, go postal? I would. Their clothes are horrible - especially for the girls.

I keep wondering if they [the kids] are going to grow up and find partners in their little cult and do the same thing or if a few of them are going to get out into the world somewhere and say, "screw that!"

Sadly, I think the girls are more doomed.

[Vanquisher]

An editorial from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 101905.DTL :

Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost?

And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob and he's hankerin' to be a Republican senator and try not to wince in sociopolitical pain when you say that -- isn't more than a little numb to the real world, and that bringing 16 hungry mewling attention-deprived kids (and she wants more! Yay!) into this exhausted world zips right by "touching" and races right past "disturbing" and lurches its way, heaving and gasping and sweating from the karmic armpits, straight into "Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with you people?"

But that would be, you know, mean. Mean and callous to suggest that this might be the most disquieting photo you see all year, this bizarre Duggar family of 18 spotless white hyperreligious interchangeable people with alarmingly bad hair, the kids ranging in ages from 1 to 17, worse than those nuked Smurfs in that UNICEF commercial and worse than all the horrific rubble in Pakistan and worse than the cluster-bomb nightmare that is Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise having a child as they suck the skin from each other's Scientological faces and even worse than that huge 13-foot python which ate that six-foot alligator and then exploded.

It's wrong to be this judgmental. Wrong to suggest that it is exactly this kind of weird pathological protofamily breeding-happy gluttony that's making the world groan and cry and recoil, contributing to vicious overpopulation rates and unrepentant economic strain and a bitter moral warpage resulting from a massive viral outbreak of homophobic neo-Christians across our troubled and Bush-ravaged land. Or is it?

Is it wrong to notice how all the Duggar kids' names start with the letter J (Jeremiah and Josiah and Jedediah and Jesus, someone please stop them), and that if you study the above photo (or the even more disturbing family Web site) too closely you will become rashy and depressed and you will crave large quantities of alcohol and loud aggressive music to deflect the creeping feeling that this planet is devolving faster than you can suck the contents from a large bong? But I'm not judging.

I have a friend who used to co-babysit (yes, it required two sitters) for a family of 10 kids, and she reports that they were, almost without fail, manic and hyper and bewildered and attention deprived in the worst way, half of them addicted to prescription meds to calm their neglected nerves and the other half bound for years of therapy due to complete loss of having the slightest clue as to who they actually were, lost in the family crowd, just another blank, needy face at the table. Is this the guaranteed affliction for every child of very large families? Of course not. But I'm guessing it's more common than you imagine.

What's more, after the 10th kid popped out, the family doctor essentially prohibited the baby-addicted mother from having any more offspring, considering the pummeling endured by her various matronly systems, and it's actually painful to imagine the logistics, the toll on Michelle Duggar's body, the ravages it has endured to give birth to roughly one child per year for nearly two decades, and you cannot help but wonder about her body and its various biological and sexual ... no, no, it is not for this space to visualize frighteningly capacious vaginal dimensions. It is not for this space to imagine this couple's soggy sexual mutations. We do not have enough wine on hand for that.

Perhaps the point is this: Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? In other words -- assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their massive brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will all be, as the charming photo suggests, never allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right -- where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on the culture? Where is the counterbalance, to offset the damage?

Where is, in other words, the funky tattooed intellectual poetess who, along with her genius anarchist husband, is popping out 16 funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring to answer the Duggar's squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers? Where is the liberal, spiritualized, pro-sex flip side? Verily I say unto thee, it ain't lookin' good.

Perhaps this the scariest aspect of our squishy birthin' tale: Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation. Is that an oversimplification?

Why does this sort of thoughtfulness seem so far from the norm? Why is having a stadiumful of offspring still seen as some sort of happy joyous thing?

You already know why. It is the Biggest Reason of All. Children are, after all, God's little gifts. Kids are little blessings from the Lord, the Almighty's own screaming spitballs of joy. Hell, Jim Bob said so himself, when asked if the couple would soon be going for a 17th rug rat: "We both just love children and we consider each a blessing from the Lord. I have asked Michelle if she wants more and she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them." This is what he actually said. And God did not strike him dead on the spot.

Let us be clear: I don't care what sort of God you believe in, it's a safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables. God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them) lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet's resources faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children, she'd have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door. Stop it now.

Ah, but this is America, yes? People should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want with their families if they can afford it and if it's within the law and so long as they aren't gay or deviant or happily flouting Good Christian Values, right? Shouldn't they? Hell, gay couples still can't openly adopt a baby in most states (they either lie, or one adopts and the other must apply as "co-parent"), but Michelle Duggar can pop out 16 kids and no one says, oh my freaking God, stop it, stop it now, you thoughtless, selfish, baby-drunk people.

No, no one says that. That would be mean.

No comment necessary on my part, I think.

Interesting article Heidi.

I'm now morbidly intrigued by these folks. I find it interesting that they never directly refer to the name of their religion -- only calling themselves "Evangelical Christians". Sally - these kinds of people are why I have always grouped Evangelicals into an extreme, fundamentalist kind of thing.

I also agree that it seems they're trying to create a population. According to their website, Michelle originally took the pill, went off, had a baby, went back on - and then experienced a miscarriage. They took this experience and the "concept" of the pill to equal the "concept" of abortion, and then decided to allow God to dictate how many children they have. The thing is - they could still try NFP if they wanted to (clearly she's pretty darn regular as far as ovulating), but obviously don't.

They claim that the matching clothes concept is to simplify laundry. Certain colors, certain days. They give their children specific 'jurisdictions' - laundry, meals, animals. They assign babies past nursing age to an older sister for the following 2 years. She handles all of the feedings, diapers, and caretaking! That frees Michelle up to have more, to handle homeschooling, etc.

I'm just so blown away! I stand by my original statements in this thread from long ago. My friend who is one of 8 is from a wonderful, wonderful family. Large families can be done - and done w/o brainwashing or color coding. But this is a scary extreme! IMO it truly is more "breeding" than parenting or family.

[Vanquisher]

Yes, the article is vitriolic. But, I hardly think that equates to offending an obese person. There are millions upon millions of obese people and one crazy couple who continue to have more and more children.

I personally think it is creepy.

[rainbabies]

Here is the family website. I have seen the show when they had JUST 14. Then I saw the one where they built their own house and when they finally got to move in. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.


http://www.jimbob.info/

[Stella]

Are you as convinced as I am that the kids will definitely resent their parents later in life for this: