A BREED APART
Prince Harry wants two kids ‘maximum,’ but life is better with a big family
WHEN I walk through the supermarket with my family, I feel a bit like a Coney Island freak-show attraction. People stop what they’re doing and stare at me as I wander by with my four kids — two girls, two boys — all aged 5 and under. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard, “Wow, you have your hands full,” wecould open a hefty college fund for our youngest.
I always reply, “Yes, thank God,” because I never want my children to overhear the exchange and think I regret the choices we’ve made in any way. And I don’t. There’s another kind of comment I’ve heard, especially in the last few months when people could see I was pregnant and we were expanding our brood past the already abnormal three kids. It usually comes from an older woman who tells me that I’m doing it right. She’ll tell me she had four kids, too, sometimes five or six, or even up to eight. She’ll say, “I know how hard it is right now, but let me tell you how worth it this is, even in just a few years. They play together, they support each other, they will form a tribe.”
I appreciate the words of encouragement, especially when it feels like everyone thinks I’m crazy. But I don’t need anyone to tell me I’m doing the right thing. I know I am.
I grew up as an only child and always knew I’d raise more than just one kid. I wanted to give my first child a sibling, and I wanted to give her a lot of them — not just because I wanted her to have other kids to play with. In my late teens, I watched both my parents die and had nobody else to share the same childhood
memories, no one who grieved for my mom and dad in the same way I did. I’ve spoken to a fair number of only children over the years who feel the same. One friend who just had her fifth told me “we’re both onlies so [we] feel a need to keep making them.”
Fewer Americans are having kids these days. Just last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced fertility rates had hit “all-time record lows.” Women — especially college-educated women — are having kids later, and they’re having fewer kids, too. These two facts aren’t unrelated. Women who may have once borne four or five kids are waiting so long to have their first, they frequently run out of time to have more. And many do want more. According to a 2018 report by the Institute of Family Studies, “women have fewer kids than they say they want, desire, intend, expect or consider ideal — for themselves or for society on the whole.”
No, it’s not easy raising a gaggle of kids these days. The cost of bringing up just one kid is estimated to be more than $200,000 for a middleclass family. But what’s surprising about having more than one kid, outside of paying for early child care, is how the expenses don’t double with two or triple with three. When we had our fourth child just a month ago, we couldn’t think of what to add to our baby registry outside of a car seat, because we didn’t need much.
It’s a hard fact to accept, especially in our overachieving, helicopter society, but kids don’t need all that much. Kids can, and should, share clothes, rooms, toys, supplies and more, and forcing them to do so doesn’t just help your bottom line, it teaches important life lessons as well. What’s important in life? More stuff or more family?
Still, millennials — like Prince Harry, who recently declared he’d have “two, maximum” — are concerned about too much procreation amid fears of climate change. Every generation has had their reasons not to have kids (imagine bringing a baby into the world during WWII), but with every child there comes the promise of who they might turn out to be and the positive impact they could have on society. We cannot have hope for the future without a future generation.
Many women are understandably worried their careers will suffer if they have one kid, let alone a large brood. I was 27 when we started having kids six years ago and while I’ve turned down a number of professional opportunities to prioritize my family life, that doesn’t mean my career has come to a halt either, even while staying home with all of my kids full-time. I’ll never know where my career would be had I put off having kids, but I know that becoming a mother has added experience and perspective and provided invaluable skills like writing newspaper columns on my phone while nursing a baby. At the end of the day, having kids has taught me to prioritize what’s important in life, and it isn’t my 9-to-5.
Even famed “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell, the real-life Carrie Bradshaw, has changed her perspective on having kids since her divorce and turning 50. Last week Bushnell told the Sunday Times Magazine, “When I was in my 30s and 40s, I didn’t think about it. Then when I got divorced and I was in my 50s, I started to see the impact of not having children and of truly being alone. I do see that people with children have an anchor in a way that people who have no kids don’t.”
It’s hard to convince anyone to take the countercultural plunge of having more than one or two kids. But we are given just one life on this earth, and more important than anything else is feeling happy and fulfilled and giving our kids the tools to feel the same. Given the choice between a couple of kids who each have tons of toys and their own rooms or a house full of playmates who share everything, our family chooses the latter without hesitation.
And to answer a question I received from a random stranger in a restaurant the other day: Yes, we may have even more.