As we tumble headlong into the coming New Year, we often re-evaluate ourselves. We form our own ideas about "resolutions" or as I like to call them, "temporary changes for the better." We look at what we are lacking by financial reasoning as well as what we are lacking psychically. There is probably some ridiculous percentage of people who make the resolution to lose weight. I've even done it once or twice.
The idea behind the New Year's resolution is good; we should always be looking to evaluate ourselves and improve in whatever areas are noticeable. I personally feel, however, that this should not be a yearly commitment. We should consistently look to improve on our circumstance.
I have been recently committed to keeping the flow of my household in check; I struggle to keep us on our daily schedule and I need constant refreshers to continue instituting it in a smooth and progressive manner. I often worry that while it seems to work extremely well with three children, it may be an entirely new process when the Huskey family welcomes a fourth blessing. Will I have to start all over from the beginning? Will I have to tweak the schedule to fit in a new baby? Or will it be basically the same, but with about fifteen added nursing schedules dotting the colorful graph display?
These unanswered questions make me vaguely more aware of why so many families are ready to call it quits before they reach large-family status. The family dynamic is turned upside down once you surpass the typical "two children, two adults" quota.
So the ultimate question is, why have a large family when it is obviously more convenient and inexpensive just to stop at two? Well, I want to accept every child that the Lord wants to bless me with. Every baby (in itself) is an amazing gift. It's when you put all of them together and have (collective) babies that it might seem overwhelming. How does someone -especially someone as scatterbrained as me- find a large family favorable?
There are two important aspects to finding favor with a large and growing family. One is looking at the benefits of having a large family. I know there are always negative effects as well - obviously, they are going to cost more and you are going to be more busy keeping up on a house of 15 than you are a house with two. So the second part is learning how to view the large family.
Benefits, in my opinion, of a large family, include:
Fellowship
A large family is one that is blessed with the opportunity to experience fellowship as a constant occurrence. I had my sister growing up, and that was it. My parents weren't really.... emotionally there a lot of the time. The fellowship you get from a sibling is one that cannot be matched with any other relationship. One of the most beautiful things about a large family is that you will notice, as their guest, that fellowship abounds in their home. What a blessing it is to bestow on our children the gift of constant fellowship! In large families, everyone has a playmate (at least most of the time) and no one ever gets bored.
Socializing
A hot topic among large families is socialization. Part of this may be due to the high rate of homeschooling large families. People assume that a large family that homeschools is just going to be full of children that are hermits in social situations.
From my own experience (in my own home and around other large families) this is just not the case. Think of it this way; children that go to school learn how to interact with other children their own age. Their exact age, in fact. They don't mix and mingle very often with different age groups at all. And as far as that goes, they usually follow the same group of peers through their entire school career.
In a large family, however, each child is exposed to the varied age groups of his/her siblings. They learn quickly how to interact with more than one person at a time, how to interact with varied temperaments from early on, and since mom cannot drop everything to settle every little dispute, they learn to be problem solvers. They don't learn to share from their caregiver drilling it into their head to share, but instead, out of necessity.
Help
In a large family, everyone gets help when they need it. I know that even now, with three children, someone is often told to "wait." There is only one of me and three children, so I have to weigh everything according to priority. 2-year-old needs help putting his pants back on, 4-year-old needs help pouring her juice, and 1-year-old has eggs all over his face and he is running for our creme-colored couch. Eggs gets stopped first. Then pants. Then juice.
Of course, the more children I have, the less these things will be a problem. As it stands now, Rowan can help Dash put his pants on, and help clean up the baby if I need her to. With each blessing added to our family, the children I already have get older too (common sense...tehehe). So by the time I have four kids, Rowan will be 5 or 6 at least and able to do even more. And Dash will hopefully be able to do more for himself as well, so I would assume I would have two little helpers for the two little ones.
Deeper definition of Gender
Children in large families grasp the concept of gender separation quicker and more naturally than their peers. As conservative christians, gender roles and gender identity are important concepts to our family. As old-fashioned and corny as it sounds, I want my young women to learn how to act like young women, and my young men to be young men. I'm not saying that my daughters will be forbidden from playing with trucks or that I will fart gold if my son drags a purse around for a while, but the identification of gender roles starts enabling them at a very young age to understand personal goals for life and a sense of self. I was a tom-boy until I was 18. There was my sister, and there was me. She was slightly more girly than I was, but not by a ton. There was no "boys' room and girls' room," there was no "boys' clothes and girls' clothes"....there was no separation because we were "the kids." Learning feminism and masculinity is an important development that has gone missing throughout the generations.
Education
Being in a large family gives children the epic benefit of having more than one teacher for everything. They are constantly educating each other about many things, and there is a wealth of knowledge available to them by seeing the world through the eyes of each other. Just for example, I tried and tried to teach Dash about colors, numbers, and letters but he did not want to hear it from me. He eventually learned all of his colors and numbers up to ten from his sister. She is a natural teacher (more so than I am, that's for sure) and just by repeating it to him during play, he picked up on it and learned from it. Instead of just being exposed to the education in their own age range, they are exposed to a whole spectrum of things that they can take interest in.
These things are considered beneficial to those who want them to be beneficial. You have to learn to view children as blessings, always, to find the idea of a large family appealing.
Educational for us, too
The idea of a large family is much more appealing when you see what it can teach you!
Having a large family teaches us things that we might not learn otherwise. Most people assume that people who are parents have already learned to put others before themselves. Yet the mindset of having only one or two children so that you can have things your way is prevalent in today's society. I've seen many people say that they only want one or two children so they can still afford to go on vacations, spoil them with christmas presents, and once the extremely involved stage of infancy is over, the parents can go on with their lives. This reasoning definitely opposes the desire for a large family. By saying yes to a large family, you know that you may be saying no to these worldly desires (the activities themselves are not worldly necessarily, but turning them into a desire for one's self is worldly). In this way, having a large family teaches us about what we want for ourselves and for our families - I have come to the realization that being at home with my family, teaching my children, and setting a good example for them is much more desirable than taking expensive vacations. That's not to say that we will never take a family vacation, but I don't want to factor it into whether or not we will have a large family.
On that note, most large families learn frugality. This in itself is a huge blessing. This is such a huge benefit that more large families probably experience than small families. Most small families do it because it is a popular trend right now - but large families do it out of necessity. Learning what to shop for, as well as how and when, is vital for large family budgeting.
Ministering to non-believers
Having a large family is an asset for those who want to minister to the world. Your attitude towards your large family and your view of children is a perfect example of Christ's love. Jesus had a special relationship with children and spoke about them often. When we begin to see children as a burden, a hindrance, or a nuisance, we are moving farther from being Christlike. Unfortunately, that is the general view of the world - kids get in the way. It often stops people in their tracks to see someone who values all of their children, born and unborn, and who sees them as a major and appreciated role in the family. If Christ could throw out a number as an example of the "perfect" set of children, do you think he would? This is the attitude we should be embracing, and setting this example for others.
Having sat on all of this for a long time (long to me is like, three months... I have severe A.D.D.) I can honestly say that I can't wait to have a really large family. I would be happy to have five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty children. It's taken some time to reach this point, and I won't lie - at first, I was disabled by the fear of having "too many" children. But the more I pray about it and start to view children and the family dynamic differently, the more I find a large family...erm... favorable.
I realize that was a totally dry and witless end to a blog post...
They can't all be winners.
The idea behind the New Year's resolution is good; we should always be looking to evaluate ourselves and improve in whatever areas are noticeable. I personally feel, however, that this should not be a yearly commitment. We should consistently look to improve on our circumstance.
I have been recently committed to keeping the flow of my household in check; I struggle to keep us on our daily schedule and I need constant refreshers to continue instituting it in a smooth and progressive manner. I often worry that while it seems to work extremely well with three children, it may be an entirely new process when the Huskey family welcomes a fourth blessing. Will I have to start all over from the beginning? Will I have to tweak the schedule to fit in a new baby? Or will it be basically the same, but with about fifteen added nursing schedules dotting the colorful graph display?
These unanswered questions make me vaguely more aware of why so many families are ready to call it quits before they reach large-family status. The family dynamic is turned upside down once you surpass the typical "two children, two adults" quota.
So the ultimate question is, why have a large family when it is obviously more convenient and inexpensive just to stop at two? Well, I want to accept every child that the Lord wants to bless me with. Every baby (in itself) is an amazing gift. It's when you put all of them together and have (collective) babies that it might seem overwhelming. How does someone -especially someone as scatterbrained as me- find a large family favorable?
There are two important aspects to finding favor with a large and growing family. One is looking at the benefits of having a large family. I know there are always negative effects as well - obviously, they are going to cost more and you are going to be more busy keeping up on a house of 15 than you are a house with two. So the second part is learning how to view the large family.
Benefits, in my opinion, of a large family, include:
Fellowship
A large family is one that is blessed with the opportunity to experience fellowship as a constant occurrence. I had my sister growing up, and that was it. My parents weren't really.... emotionally there a lot of the time. The fellowship you get from a sibling is one that cannot be matched with any other relationship. One of the most beautiful things about a large family is that you will notice, as their guest, that fellowship abounds in their home. What a blessing it is to bestow on our children the gift of constant fellowship! In large families, everyone has a playmate (at least most of the time) and no one ever gets bored.
Socializing
A hot topic among large families is socialization. Part of this may be due to the high rate of homeschooling large families. People assume that a large family that homeschools is just going to be full of children that are hermits in social situations.
From my own experience (in my own home and around other large families) this is just not the case. Think of it this way; children that go to school learn how to interact with other children their own age. Their exact age, in fact. They don't mix and mingle very often with different age groups at all. And as far as that goes, they usually follow the same group of peers through their entire school career.
In a large family, however, each child is exposed to the varied age groups of his/her siblings. They learn quickly how to interact with more than one person at a time, how to interact with varied temperaments from early on, and since mom cannot drop everything to settle every little dispute, they learn to be problem solvers. They don't learn to share from their caregiver drilling it into their head to share, but instead, out of necessity.
Help
In a large family, everyone gets help when they need it. I know that even now, with three children, someone is often told to "wait." There is only one of me and three children, so I have to weigh everything according to priority. 2-year-old needs help putting his pants back on, 4-year-old needs help pouring her juice, and 1-year-old has eggs all over his face and he is running for our creme-colored couch. Eggs gets stopped first. Then pants. Then juice.
Of course, the more children I have, the less these things will be a problem. As it stands now, Rowan can help Dash put his pants on, and help clean up the baby if I need her to. With each blessing added to our family, the children I already have get older too (common sense...tehehe). So by the time I have four kids, Rowan will be 5 or 6 at least and able to do even more. And Dash will hopefully be able to do more for himself as well, so I would assume I would have two little helpers for the two little ones.
Deeper definition of Gender
Children in large families grasp the concept of gender separation quicker and more naturally than their peers. As conservative christians, gender roles and gender identity are important concepts to our family. As old-fashioned and corny as it sounds, I want my young women to learn how to act like young women, and my young men to be young men. I'm not saying that my daughters will be forbidden from playing with trucks or that I will fart gold if my son drags a purse around for a while, but the identification of gender roles starts enabling them at a very young age to understand personal goals for life and a sense of self. I was a tom-boy until I was 18. There was my sister, and there was me. She was slightly more girly than I was, but not by a ton. There was no "boys' room and girls' room," there was no "boys' clothes and girls' clothes"....there was no separation because we were "the kids." Learning feminism and masculinity is an important development that has gone missing throughout the generations.
Education
Being in a large family gives children the epic benefit of having more than one teacher for everything. They are constantly educating each other about many things, and there is a wealth of knowledge available to them by seeing the world through the eyes of each other. Just for example, I tried and tried to teach Dash about colors, numbers, and letters but he did not want to hear it from me. He eventually learned all of his colors and numbers up to ten from his sister. She is a natural teacher (more so than I am, that's for sure) and just by repeating it to him during play, he picked up on it and learned from it. Instead of just being exposed to the education in their own age range, they are exposed to a whole spectrum of things that they can take interest in.
These things are considered beneficial to those who want them to be beneficial. You have to learn to view children as blessings, always, to find the idea of a large family appealing.
Educational for us, too
The idea of a large family is much more appealing when you see what it can teach you!
Having a large family teaches us things that we might not learn otherwise. Most people assume that people who are parents have already learned to put others before themselves. Yet the mindset of having only one or two children so that you can have things your way is prevalent in today's society. I've seen many people say that they only want one or two children so they can still afford to go on vacations, spoil them with christmas presents, and once the extremely involved stage of infancy is over, the parents can go on with their lives. This reasoning definitely opposes the desire for a large family. By saying yes to a large family, you know that you may be saying no to these worldly desires (the activities themselves are not worldly necessarily, but turning them into a desire for one's self is worldly). In this way, having a large family teaches us about what we want for ourselves and for our families - I have come to the realization that being at home with my family, teaching my children, and setting a good example for them is much more desirable than taking expensive vacations. That's not to say that we will never take a family vacation, but I don't want to factor it into whether or not we will have a large family.
On that note, most large families learn frugality. This in itself is a huge blessing. This is such a huge benefit that more large families probably experience than small families. Most small families do it because it is a popular trend right now - but large families do it out of necessity. Learning what to shop for, as well as how and when, is vital for large family budgeting.
Ministering to non-believers
Having a large family is an asset for those who want to minister to the world. Your attitude towards your large family and your view of children is a perfect example of Christ's love. Jesus had a special relationship with children and spoke about them often. When we begin to see children as a burden, a hindrance, or a nuisance, we are moving farther from being Christlike. Unfortunately, that is the general view of the world - kids get in the way. It often stops people in their tracks to see someone who values all of their children, born and unborn, and who sees them as a major and appreciated role in the family. If Christ could throw out a number as an example of the "perfect" set of children, do you think he would? This is the attitude we should be embracing, and setting this example for others.
Having sat on all of this for a long time (long to me is like, three months... I have severe A.D.D.) I can honestly say that I can't wait to have a really large family. I would be happy to have five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty children. It's taken some time to reach this point, and I won't lie - at first, I was disabled by the fear of having "too many" children. But the more I pray about it and start to view children and the family dynamic differently, the more I find a large family...erm... favorable.
I realize that was a totally dry and witless end to a blog post...
They can't all be winners.
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