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Comment by kotlin2 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always wondered how people with many kids can be emotionally available for all of them. How do you do it?

Part of it is that you are not their only support network; many siblings offers many outlets and sources for help / support / etc.

Running a family that large is also certainly more time consuming in some aspects- grocery shopping is a significantly different experience when you go through multiple gallons of milk and dozens of eggs every few days, as an example.

You rely on older children to help, and the whole family unit functions as a team.

A good friend has 8 siblings. My parents both had 6. I only have the one, who is several years older than me. The family dynamic between a small and large family is simply fundamentally different. That doesn't mean less emotionally attachable or available, but almost certainly less one-on-one time.

Hmm that’s interesting. I wonder if the two systems produce equal outcomes into adulthood.

I’m not certain about adulthood (I doubt they are equal - there are probably positives and negatives both ways), but one of my kids has a friend who is an only child. She spends most of her time by herself and her home is very quiet. When she first came to our house, which is constantly in commotion (in a good way), she was sort of shell shocked. She has gotten used to it over time.

> equal outcomes

How do you compare the outcome for a kid who never exists? People are an end in themselves before considering any outcomes.

If people are an end to themselves, everyone would have as many kids as possible. Clearly some people believe people to be an end to themselves, but I doubt that opinion is held by the majority. My question about outcomes was specifically about those that exist.

I think what they mean is, every person is different and it is impossible to say how any individual would be if they had been raised in a large family instead of a small one, or vice versa.

I don't think so. "an end" means a goal. "People are an end", to me, means that the creation of people is the goal. This is a common belief in religions like Catholicism that are against contraception.

> "People are an end", to me, means that the creation of people is the goal. This is a common belief in religions like Catholicism that are against contraception.

Catholics believe that the primary end of sex and marriage is procreation, albeit not ruling out secondary ends. That’s beside the point. People being an end in themselves means that before considering any outcomes of their lives their existence is good. E.g. if I have a kid who has Downs Syndrome their life is a fundamental good even though their outcome will probably be considerably worse than a healthy child. Many non-Catholics share this view. That does have implications for family size as it moves one’s attitude towards responsible generosity to having children rather than primarily considering the child a threat to or means to some other end.

I know that I come from a family of five and was starved for attention. My husband comes from a family of 2 and felt he always got attention when he wanted it.

Like some of my strongest memories are of leaving notes for my Mom about how I felt neglected and was in <x> room waiting for her just to BE there with me. She'd last about ten minutes before she'd begin multi-tasking. Not because she was a bad mom but because she just had so. much. to do with five kids and a full-time job.

If you're going to have a large family older kids have to take on some of the emotional labor or the younger kids are totally shafted.

It's interesting how opinions on this change depending on how it's phrased.

Sometimes I see it phrased as older kids taking on some of the labor in what is perceived as maturity building activity that may serve them in adulthood.

Others use a completely different phrase, calling it "parentification" and then call it child abuse or worse, believing it's better for the kids to all fight for the resource of the parent rather than share the burden with older children.

I withhold a conclusion of what the results are. But it's funny to me to see how the opinions can be gamed based on how you frame it.

A proffessional athlete was asked, in the context of a knockout tournament where different conpetitors had different waiting period between matches: "is it better to have more time and rest between the fights, or to have less time but more momentum?" She replied: "Whichever happens to you, you turn into a positive frame."

Or the 21st century version: Whichever happens to you, you turn it into a reason why you didn't succeed and you're not to blame.

My parents both grew up in large families (10 kids and 8 kids) and most of their peers grew up in large families (5-12 children) and what I hear from my parents, aunts and uncles, and their friends is, unequivocally, you don't. There's simply not enough parental resources to go around when you have that many children to provide emotional availability to everyone, even if one parent is a full time caregiver. You end up feeling much more like a number, "child #7", than an actual person, and it's extremely difficult to develop a sense of self. The research backs this up, the larger the family the worse outcomes are in almost every measurable category - academic achievement, criminal convictions, salary, teenage pregnancy, etc.

Siblings often become extremely resentful of each other in these arrangements because they are usually forced to either parent their siblings or be parented by their siblings, they compete for parental attention and get bitter because they can't get it, and they can't find private alone time. This sort of resentfulness shows up in weird non-overt ways that's hard to describe but easy for parents to miss. The siblings still end up spending time with each other in adulthood anyways, probably some sort of Stockholm Syndrome. That doesn't mean they like each other.

Maybe there exist some person on Earth who is capable of caring for so many kids. But I haven't personally seen it.

I don’t do it. At least not all of it. There is also their mom and their siblings. They have tons of people available for them. Often they are more interested in finding alone time since they are constantly surrounded by people who are emotionally available for them.

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