In defense of big families

Leslie Leyland Fields is a business owner and writer, but what sets her apart from many of her peers is that she is a self-described “six-time breeder.”With six children ages 3 to 18, Mrs. Fields knows

she is a rarity at a time when the average American woman has only two children — or, to be more precise, 2.034 children, a fact she discovered while researching her latest book, “Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy.”

Family size has a cultural significance, she says.

“My defense of the larger family is more of a question,” says Mrs. Fields, who lives on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. “What do our cultures lose when our families shrink to one or no children or 2.034 children?”

Large families offer social and interpersonal benefits, such as teaching children to be more tolerant, conserve resources and work as part of a group, practicing good citizenship on a daily basis, she says.

However, Mrs. Fields explained in a recent issue of Christianity Today, mothers of large broods in contemporary America face a stereotype.

“The smart, ambitious, fully realized 21st-century woman chooses career. The ambitionless woman has children.”

This stereotype is specially true in a society that celebrates “individualism, the pursuit of ‘unfettered time,’ and the freedoms of self-fulfillment and self-actualization,” she says.

Large families were relatively common until the mid-1960s. At the peak of the baby boom in 1957, the average American woman had 3.7 children in her lifetime. That changed with the advent of the birth-control pill in the 1960s, said Steven Mintz, co-chairman of the Council on Contemporary Families, a Chicago-based nonprofit.

“For the most part, there is a consensus among parents about how many children they want, and what has happened is people are now able to realize that,” said Mr. Mintz, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, Calif. He lives in Palo Alto, Calif., and has two children.

Parents now want to have “high-quality kids rather than quantity of kids,” said Mr. Mintz, adding that each child requires emotional, financial and psychological investment.

Mr. Mintz notes that in the past, it was considered “pathological” to have only one child, because it was felt that the child would grow up spoiled, lonely and unable to make friends.

However, says author Deborah Siegel, only children often have intense friendships and have to learn to turn friends into “family.”

“Only children often are very comfortable at an early age relating to adults,” says Ms. Siegel, co-editor with Daphne Uviller of “Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo,” which will be published in December.

“Being the sole focus of your parents’ attention is both good and bad,” says Ms. Siegel, a fellow at the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership in New York. “It’s good in that children feel so much love shining on them. They grow up with a strong sense of self-esteem.”

Story Continues →