Darwin points out something that I really need to keep in mind more often:
….one thing we are typically not very good at is imagining the future as much other than a straight line extrapolation from the present.
This seems particularly important as regards family. Right now my ideas of what it means to be a parent are fully formed around what it means to be a parent of kids ranging from 8 through newborn….
I tend to think of parenting in terms of having young children around the house, but looked at from the perspective of our entire marriage we will spend more time with adult children than with young children.
And boy, when people think of "a family with five kids" or "seven kids" or whatever, aren't they imagining the house full of little ones? But they DO get big, and eventually they are adults. Don't we have a different visceral reaction to the family at that point? Imagine a party of seven adults at a restaurant, maybe celebrating a special birthday or anniversary — Mom and Dad and the five grown kids. Do people look at the parents and ask, "Are they all yours?" And if they do, can it be with anything other than admiration? Is it only the little ones that people recoil from?
And what about the experience of coming from a larger family? I don't know, I only have one brother and one half-brother, so I can hardly even imagine it. It seems like it would be better to have lots of adult siblings than to have only one or two. It seems like you'd have a better chance of being close to a sibling if there were more of them. At first glance, some situations might be more difficult with multiple grown siblings (important family decisions could be trickier) but with some foresight maybe those could be headed off. It seems to me that with more people to share the responsibilities of family, the hard parts of growing older could be easier on everyone, and that the fun parts (holiday gatherings and such) could be even more fun. You'd have to do some things differently, of course…
Do people who come from big families look at their siblings and wish there were fewer of them? I wouldn't think so.
bearing blog 