I grew up with with 9 siblings. AMA

[joyfulexistance84]

I grew up with 9 siblings and now I have my own family.

And I feel like so many people have so many questions in my personal life when they find out I have 9 siblings. So I'm sure some people on mumsnet might have questions too!

I’m the eldest of a large family. It was a miserable way to grow up, as my parents had neither the emotional or financial capacity to raise so many properly, but they never realised this, as both were from very deprived backgrounds themselves, so their bar was low. My siblings are all childfree by choice. I have one child by choice. I suppose you could say we voted with our feet.

I got new clothes on birthdays and Christmas so I did have some new clothes but a lot of my clothes were hand me downs.

As an adult, I cherish the peace of my small family. I have 2 kids. And I'm married to my husband. So we are a family of 4. And I truly cherish the peace.

My parents could provide the basic necessities for the whole family. However, mentally, they were not able to give equal love and attention to all 10 of us.

Most of my siblings are either childree by choice or they only have 1 or 2 children. One of my siblings has 4 children and one of my siblings has 3 children.

Yes, that’s what prompted me to post. Our upbringing wasn’t a good experience, and we dealt with it by claiming independence and physical space for many years, by spreading out across the world — at one point no one lived in our home country, we were in China, France, Poland, Tokyo, ME and the US. We’ve only really begun to be in contact again in our 40s and 50s. The other thing I notice is that we all hate sharing rooms (two of my sisters are in longterm, committed relationships, but don’t live with their partners) and shared plates type meals make us all very twitchy because there wasn’t any too much food growing up at times. And obviously we’ve almost all chosen not to have children.

Did you do things altogether as a family, at the same time, or more in 'shifts' or sub-groups?

I've seen quite a few episodes of 22 Kids & Counting (or whatever number there were at the time) and just one thing that occurred to me was that there was no single non-commercial vehicle that the family could all travel in together. When they did go out altogether, they went in two separate large minibuses and I found it sad to think that they could never travel together as a family, and that they would be with mum OR dad, but never both of them.

We would always have to take 2 care everywhere. But we did do things as a family, although that was rare and also when the youngest siblings were born, a lot of my older siblings were teenagers already and didn't want to join family outings

Your dad must of had a well paid job to feed 9 children. Did any you go to university and need them to contribute. Did you go on school trips?

On the clothes issue, did you actually have your own individual clothes - and if so, did you have a way of distinguishing whose were whose?

I'm thinking that, if you have two or three children of the same sex and who are a similar size, the temptation must be to just grab a suitable garment for whichever child as it comes, rather than being strict about who wears what.

Also other things, like bikes - did you have one each or just a 'selection' for the family and you took one that was a suitable size when you needed one?

Did you have a place on a sofa or an armchair for each of you? Thinking practically, you'd need a minimum of 4 3-seater sofas, which I think many living rooms - even in larger houses - would struggle to accommodate.

Part of what is making me wonder this is because I have (now very much grown up) cousins who had 'only' 4 children in the family, and they always had a caravan - it was almost 'iconic' as part of their family identity - but it was only a few years ago, when I spoke to one of them at a funeral, that I learned that the two older children always had to sleep in the awning... so although they had family caravanning holidays, for two of them, they were only essentially camping holidays.

This is probably a silly one, but did your parents have a naming theme for you all - e.g. all beginning with the same letter or Alice, Brian, Chloe ...; and are they all 'off the same shelf'? Did names get recycled - especially middle names?

Do you think they considered long and hard about every child's names - even though MN and the Baby Names forum wasn't around then - or just picked 'safe' or predictable ones... and was there a clear difference between the older kids' names and the younger ones' names, if they started to run out of 'favourite' names? I suppose a lot of this would depend on whether they planned how many they were wanting from the outset, which I'm guessing they probably didn't?

@Lentilcakesin in the same position as you. Only child born to slightly older parents. No siblings and no cousins, lived in rural area. Definitely influenced my decision to have 2 kids close together. But the thought of 9 or 10 siblings fries my brain!

Thanks. That leads me to wonder another thing, though: do you believe that the older teenagers didn't want to join in family pursuits anymore just because they were getting older and more independent; or do you think they maybe felt pushed out and saw their way of escape?

How would you even plan holidays or days out that were suitable and enjoyable for that range of ages? Did the older ones find themselves dragged along to soft play as teenagers; or were the little ones taken to things that were boring for them, because they just wanted to play and make a noise?

Not just with holidays; with living at home too - do you think some of them may have left home before they may have done had they only had one or two siblings? Might they even have felt it their duty to move out ASAP, so that the younger ones could have more space and fewer people per bedroom?

I'm not the OP, but from another large family -- I don't think we ever learned to see anything as ours, until we got to the age where we were able to get teenage jobs, and buy our own clothes, and I remember not wanting to put any of these precious garments in the wash, because I was sure I would never get them back. I am the eldest, but my clothes were also handmedowns from a slightly older cousin (who was a very different shape).

We all had completely off the shelf. very common names. I don't think they gave them a moment's thought. The nun midwife present at my birth was allowed to name me, for instance. I don't think they had 'favourite' names, their only thought was something unremarkable. And it was completely normal for both parents to address us by the wrong names (certainly the girls, as there were only two boys), and to actually start a sentence 'Anne, Marie, Karen, Lisa -- GEMMA! hurry up!' because I don't think they really differentiated, they would just go through the names until they hit on the right child.

Some of us went to University but our parents couldn't afford to pay

Thanks - that's very interesting, although also very sad.

It's not quite the same scenario, as she wasn't from a big family, but my DGM was given hand-me-downs from her DSis, who was older, but naturally had a considerably smaller frame than DGM did.

Older DSis was the golden child, and my DGM naturally hated having to wear clothes that were too small for her. I don't think the second-hand aspect bothered her especially; but in spite of their actual ages, it was obvious to anybody with eyes that she should have had the clothes first and then handed them up, in that scenario. She suffered from very bad feet for her whole life, from a childhood of being forced to wear much too small shoes as a child. She actually took a size 10 shoe, even as a frail old lady in her 90s.

Understandably, this gave her an innate hatred of anything that was second-hand, and as soon as she'd grown up and left home, she refused to ever have anything that wasn't new - including insisting that she and her DH would only consider buying a brand new house (not a big, posh one; but it had to be new).

My NDN is one of 7 children. 2 of the younger ones have additional needs (autism, learning difficulties). She does see her parents (dad was a solicitor) and is close to some siblings but she only has 2 children now. I get the feeling that she just got on with things, she doesn’t make a big deal about it, her mum was a SAHM.

Do you think you , or any of your siblings have a selfish personality as an adult.

Did you ever feel judged by other families?

I am also a child with several siblings and distinctly remember a couple of occasions where people referred to us negatively because of how many kids there were. It used to really upset me.
My parents had a lot of failing, but they made a huge effort to ensure their children were clean, well dressed, and grew up with decent manners, etc. I think for my Mum, this was a particular sticking point because she didn't want people thinking less of us. We had to behave impeccably.

Also from a large family, I have 10 siblings. So much of this is instantly recognisable to me.

To answer the holiday question, once it got to 7 children we never went on an entire family holiday again. We went in batches of similar aged children, usually to one of the cousins home. My mother was from a farming family so being dispatched to spend the summer rounding up cows for milking or “helping “ in other farm tasks was a highly prized option. One year we were loaned a holiday house by one of my grandmother’s W.I. friends. Dad stayed home with the 2 eldest who had summer jobs while the rest of us went feral on a remote lake. I have very fond memories of that holiday. But the reality was that holidays were not affordable normally.

like the OP none of my siblings have more than 3 children themselves. It may sound like an idyllic live but it’s grinding, noisy and you have nothing to yourself ever.

The one advantage though is that when it came to having children, nothing came as a surprise. Short of giving birth, I’d been doing it all before I turned 7.

I went to school with a girl who had 9 or 10 siblings, we were friends. Her family lived in two council houses next door to each other, they were not knocked through. The older kids lived in one, tne younger In the other with the parents. You had to come out the door of one, to go into the other. They were semi detached. They all shared.

it was chaotic to say the least. Some of the older kids were always in trouble. They were nice people, skint. Kids were poorly dressed, parents looked knackered and run down, the father always at work. The mother stayed home/But none of the kids got much attention, they basically raised themselves. No one checked where my friend was, when she was home etc, she was fairly isolated in it, she could come and go as she pleased.

so I’m not surprised you’ve not copied your parents. It is one of those situations that stick out in my mind, as it was just so unusual and even as a teenager I found extremely odd and felt sorry for them all. We were skint, so no judgment on that, and my parents were abusive, but I still looked at them and thought her situation was also shit, just in a different way, likely why we got on, we both could relate.

Your last point is why I had only one child and my siblings are all childfree, though! I do remember being absolutely baffled when people at my NCT class appeared to be primarily worried about things like nappy-changing or bathing babies or how you knew when they had a temperature or needed medical attention. As you say, I was expert in that stuff depressingly young, and it made parenthood look pretty unappealing.

Is your mum in good health now or utterly worn out and broken from bearing so many children?

Were you hungry? The only 9/10 children families are my grandparents generation and DH's grandad was sent down the mine on his 14th birthday to help buy more food.

I think my parents certainly perceive my siblings and me to be reprehensibly selfish. I would see it as a natural response to being raised as a sort of generic group without individual attention or enough space, food etc. I would describe us as liking our own space, being unapologetic about centring our own needs, and having strong boundaries.

It’s not a question I would expect the OP to answer but when are these parents having the time, the privacy and the energy to create all these babies?!

I've recently fallen down a rabbit hole of large family Instagram/Facebook. The kids always rave about how wonderful it is to be part of a large family. I wonder if they are ever allowed to express a negative view. Do you see any of these accounts and if so, how do you feel about them?

Again, I'm not the OP, but big families were far from unusual in Ireland when I was born. Contraception was generally still illegal until the late 1970s, and only available via a sympathetic doctor who prescribed the pill as a 'cycle regulator'. I don't think it took undue amounts of privacy, time or energy to have a lot of babies, if every single time you have sex, it is unprotected because that is your government and your church's official position. My childhood best friend's devout parents, having had four children, became ardent advocates of natural family planning, and had three further children as a result.

And families had already got smaller. My MIL, now in her early 80s, is the eldest of 13. One of my older BILs (64 ish) is the baby of 12.

Thsts really sad. I knew a lot of multi child families when I was growing up in the 60s and they always seemed very chaotic.
They were mostly catholic.
Why did your parents have so many children?