Are you one of 4+ siblings?

[AdultFishcakes]

Hello

Thinking of going for #4. I’m an only child, DH one of two and we have DC 4, 2 and 1. All going well baby would arrive end next year when I’m 40.

(Under normal circumstances) we have a good mix of flexible work, and childcare, space and the financial ability to meet the costs.

If you’re a sibling from a large family I’d love to know what your experience was growing up, especially in terms of privacy, noise, major pros and major cons of being one of four or above.

Thanks

DH was from a large family and he was insistent on having more than 2 (and most of his siblings have had 3+). Luckily I was happy with that.

One of four, with 3 years between each of us.

It was fun; lots of memories of squishing in to cars going on holidays, endless school summer holidays and Christmases were amazing. Never felt like we were lacking in attention but Mum was at home the whole time and did constant baking, crafts etc with us. There was a bit of bedroom sharing which caused a few dramas pre-teen but then we started going off to Uni one by one so it wasn’t for long.

We’re not massively close because we’re now spread all over the country but all get on well when we do meet up.

I won’t have that many because we couldn’t afford for me to stay at home for 20 years but definitely not inherently bad!

I’m the younges of 6, my DH is in the middle of 5.
I sometimes think our family of 4 (2 DC) is a bit small and quiet.
We didn’t grow up like the Walton’s though, as the youngest I think I was unaware of the worst problems, my eldest siblings all moved out by the time I was 10 then it was just me and my brother. Prior to that we lived in a 3 bed house, 3 girls in one room 3 boys in another, my mum and dad in the box room. We definately didn’t have enough money.
My sisters used to fight all the time, my brothers were a bit roudy and at school everyone know our family which was good and bad.
I had a very different experience growing up to my eldest brothers and sisters and we’ve had lots of family tension over the years, especially around my mum (my dad left home when I was 15) so my sisters relationship has had lots of jealousy.
I moved away but my siblings all still live in the area we grew up in and they do all get together but there’s still an underlying tension. I hardy ever speak to my brothers although I’m quite close to my eldest sister.
My DH Family is a bit more balanced but I think they share a great family sense of humour and have all been very independant since leaving home, but also because my husbands parents died quite young (early 60s) we’ve missed out on the big family christmasses we used to do.
My DC have loads of cousins but because we’ve never lived close by they’ve not felt like they are part of a big family which I sometime think is a bit sad, but when we do get together my DC find my family rather overwhelming as there is so many of them.

@AmandaHoldensLips I don't disagree with you. Having dc is hard & absolutely not for everyone & I think you can have an equally fulfilling life without them. I think as a country we are having less children & having them later. I met DH at 22 but didn't have my first until 31 as my career was important & I just wasn't ready.

I am the eldest of 4 (all born within just over 5 years, so very close together in age).

Interestingly, all four of us chose to have just two children each.

I love my siblings and can't imagine growing up without them, or not having them now, but when I had my own DC I wanted them to have a quieter childhood than I did, and more time and attention. And also to have more money to spend on them. I did have my DC very close together though, which was probably influenced by my childhood.

How can anyone know that a parent who didn't make the time for their children would have done so if they'd have fewer? How can you be sure that they'd have suddenly been a great parent had they had less kids?

@WoahBodyforrrm, time, like attention, is a finite resource. The more you have to share it out, the less there is for any individual to claim. You might juggle two balls very well. Juggling eight is a whole other matter. A cake cut into ten slices means there's less for everyone than the same cake cut into quarters.

@derta, no, not that I remember. But in fairness, I'm not sure that was a key element in the average parenting handbook of those days!

No 3 of 6 and it was awful , same as other op's no privacy, all sat on top of each other, no money. Loss of parental affection, they spread themselves very thin with six and its badly damaged relationships with some of us. The one good thing about it all was the older three drifted to their 'pair' from the other three, so no 6 is my best friend and its killed me not being able to hug him over the last few months. Out of us only 3 have kids, I've got 1, another sib has 1 and the third has two.

On the flip side, DH is no 3 of 4 and they're all grateful for growing up in a big family, everything we missed out on they had, both parents working 2 part time jobs at the time to cover childcare etc and they're all so close. Interestingly they also dont have loads of kids, SIL 1&3 have 2 kids and SIL2 has one with our 1 and they've all grown up almost like siblings.

As long as you can provide the emotional support and love to your family go for it, you don't know what the future holds but you sound like you've got the best interests of your family at heart that I don't think my parents had.

Sorry that was so long.

If you are happy with the family you have, why not keep the family you have?
1 of 5, I didn't mind second hand/hand me down clothes or relatively poor compared with neighbours and friends (think 20k family income which increased when we were teenagers).
I never expected to have 1 to 1 or "quality time" with my parents.

The main thing to consider for you (IMO) is that my Mum got ground down by what I call the "grunt work" which is constant washing, cooking, driving us places, tidying up. My Dad did help but only up to a point. We were all quiet/well behaved at school but fought bitterly between ourselves at home. She was returning to work after the 3rd and there was a gap and then the 4th and 5th came along and financially/organisationally it was too much so she stopped for years.
By the time we were teenagers she was quite exhausted and bitter. It wasn't all bad, we keep in touch and I see my siblings about once a year.

You cannot have it all. Adding will add but will also take away.

Also, some kids, because of their personalities, won't tell you (verbally) that they need attention or want 1:1 time. It's up to parents anticipate their kids needs, read their behaviour and respond to them. My parents had too many kids to be able to really, really see us. To read us, to hear what we weren't saying. It very much seemed in our family that the ones who shouted loudest, or had the most obvious needs were the ones that got heard.

I had a very different experience growing up to my eldest brothers and sisters

I think that's a fair point, too, @Itscoldouthere DH is the baby of a big family,, and is aware that he had a very different experience of family life to his eldest siblings (and to me, as the eldest of a big family), in part because the eldest three had moved out by the time he was in his early teens, and as a consequence -- there was more money, parental attention and space available.

1 of 4.

I didn't hate it, but as the eldest, it did mean that I got left to my own devices a lot because the younger ones needed my parent's attention more. We're not close siblings now we're adults, but I think that's more our family dynamic, and stuff that happened rather than because there were 4 of us.

TBH, what put me off the big family myself was remembering that we didn't fit in a normal car (5 fit in a car.. 6 don't), that things like going on holiday were much more tricky when you had 4 kids rather than the standard 2, that even silly things like shopping are more hassle when you need 6 of everything. So I stuck at 2, for boring and practical reasons!

I am the eldest of five with an 11 year gap from oldest to youngest.
As a child being the oldest and a girl meant a lot of unpaid childcare help, which my DM would to this day dismiss as a little.
There were also financial restrictions, we weren't poor but money is finite.
I love my siblings and wouldn't give any of them back, but as the saying goes "you don't miss what you never had"
Your DC would be much closer in age to each other in childhood but there is a big difference between 12 and 17. If your eldest has the opportunity to study abroad or the drive and ability to study medicine will you be able to emotionally/financially support that with three younger siblings at home?
One advantage for a teenager with plenty of siblings is that you can get away with a lot more.

Adding will add but will also take away.

Good phrase.

I'm the oldest of 5, and the only girl. I hated it. We were middle class and reasonably well-off but I never felt that there was enough time, love or attention for all of us. I was given a lot of responsibility for my brothers, partly because those were times when boys went out to play while girls helped Mummy make dinner and wash up afterwards. I suppose one benefit is that it made me a feminist. I also felt that such a large family put a lot of strain on my parents' marriage, which we caught a lot of. Or maybe my father just was an unhappy and angry man who took his work stress out on his family. Or both. Any way, not a good thing. Gods alone know why they thought it was a good idea to have so many.

Between the five of us we have two singletons, two sets of two children, and one three but the third was an accident, so I think it's fair to say that we don't feel that being one of a large family was particularly enriching. We are not close as adults.

I think it must come down to parents, rather than number of children. I am one of two but my DH and BF are both one of four. In both their cases they are, as adults, emotionally distant from their siblings, completely uninvolved and disinterested in each others lives, and see their parents only as an obligation.
They do not know their parents as individuals, do not spend time with them, even when they have shared interests - DH and his family all play the same sport, live in the same area but would never get together to enjoy a game together, for example. DH parents are not particularly interested in their grandchildren either, so have no relationship or shared interests with our DC or their cousins. Cousins do not know each other well despite living within 15 minutes of each other and all similar ages.
In both DH and BF families the youngest seems the most affected - DH youngest brother is basically NC now they're in their 40s still complaining about how they were treated as a child and has no children himself. BF younger sister put herself through hell trying desperately to conceive her 4th child, several miscarriages later and a huge age gap between her DC3 and DC4, like justifying her own position as the DC4. Seemed very sad to me.
Two is enough for us!

@Puckishly yes exactly that, my early teens were just me and my brother at home and we moved away from my siblings due to my fathers work.
However at 16 we moved back and my older siblings all had small children, I was then surrounded by chaos again. At one point my sister and her husband moved in with us and they had 4 small children (I’ve been an Aunty since age 10) so I was the one looking after them and helping out.
I left home at 18 to go to university and never went back and didn’t start having my own DC till I was 34, I think it was a reaction to being surround by babies at 16 and feeling like my mum had been trapped by children all her life and my sisters were doing the same and I really didn’t want that life for myself.
For context we were living in Ireland when I was born so no birth control for my parents and a family of 6 was normal, we were a bit more unusual when we returned to England.

I'm 4th of a very large family. Even by the time I was born it was obvious parents had limited capacity to care for us all. To be honest, the financial issues were far less of an issue than the parental neglect. You queued up to get any attention. Those of us who were older did much of the parenting ourselves but what we couldn't do was deal with the school issues, the emotional support or the special needs.

My siblings and I, should we choose to reproduce, have all kept our families very small.

@readingallday

I think it must come down to parents, rather than number of children. I am one of two but my DH and BF are both one of four. In both their cases they are, as adults, emotionally distant from their siblings, completely uninvolved and disinterested in each others lives, and see their parents only as an obligation. They do not know their parents as individuals, do not spend time with them, even when they have shared interests - DH and his family all play the same sport, live in the same area but would never get together to enjoy a game together, for example. DH parents are not particularly interested in their grandchildren either, so have no relationship or shared interests with our DC or their cousins. Cousins do not know each other well despite living within 15 minutes of each other and all similar ages. In both DH and BF families the youngest seems the most affected - DH youngest brother is basically NC now they're in their 40s still complaining about how they were treated as a child and has no children himself. BF younger sister put herself through hell trying desperately to conceive her 4th child, several miscarriages later and a huge age gap between her DC3 and DC4, like justifying her own position as the DC4. Seemed very sad to me. Two is enough for us!

I think it must be parents. DH is like this with his brother (only 2 of them) and the grandparents are very uninvolved whereas we are much more cohesive despite being larger. My mum loves nothing more than all her kids and all their families squeezing into her house for a summer holidays visit.

One other thing about only 2 is that when a pair of siblings don't get on there is no dilution of that. DH and his brother hated each other as kids and when I first met him the doors of his parents house had kick marks where they had physically fought. Our eldest two (also both boys) are polar opposites and don't get on even slightly but they can divide themselves into other combinations that get along better very easily.

I'm the second if 4 girls. Spent the majority of growing up as part of a single parent household on a council estate. Growing up was shit - bullied by my elder sister and her friends pretty relentlessly, criticised by my mum, didn't get on that well with my younger sisters. No money. Made to feel like the black sheep. Didn't get enough positive attention. As an adult I have 2 DD's of my own and that's it. Two sisters currently child free, one sister has one DD.

I was one of 5 growing up, absolutely loved it then and still do to be honest. Getting together as a large family is incredibly good fun, yes it's noisy and busy, kids everywhere but I love that (in small doses!)

Now I'm a parent I realise my own parents have a natural aptitude for it, and get real enjoyment out of raising children. They always say the more the merrier and they truly mean it, even in their 60s they have endless energy, creativity and enthusiasm for their children and grandchildren (there's now 15). This is in spite of the death of one of their children as an infant.

Not everything was perfect growing up, life was simpler and we were a lot poorer than now, but I simply do not agree that parents automatically don't have time, energy etc for a larger family. Some parents absolutely can manage, and children can thrive in that scenario.

@Puckishly

God, yes, *@employeewoes* — all I wanted as a child/teenager was quiet and privacy, even occasionally. My siblings and I have all become adults who like our own space to an unusual extent.

This surprised me - I’m not from a big family but several friends are and they seem incapable of being happy spending time alone. One of them would rather go to work on her day off than spend a day at home alone.

One other thing about only 2 is that when a pair of siblings don't get on there is no dilution of that.

I know a fair few people who only have 1 sibling & don't get on with them at all & sometimes that includes their parents. Families are complex!

1 of 4, middle child (one of twins). Fine with 3 of us, then younger sibling born. Fuck knows why, she's awful. We were all out at 17 while baby spoiled and stayed with mum.
Totally ruined our family dynamic having 4. Mum couldn't cope with that many and as we're older it was our fault.
Now, I only speak to older sis as she's lovely and been bullied by younger sis and twin too.
None of us have large families, 2 of us have 2 by different dad's, 2 of us have 1.
I do get on great with mum and dad now as they've apologised for past.
But mum still favours youngest.
Meh.
That's my experience, I look at folk like the Radfords and my heart breaks for their kids. I focus on my child and always remember how lonely I felt as the quiet, insignificant one.

I have 4Dc but I only wanted 3 - we are both one of three and thought that okay
We have twins at the end so I have 4 now

Is there anything any of you who grew up in large families would want parents to know as to how to mitigate this?

I think it must come down to parents rather than number of children

Completely agree with this, I am 1 of 4 and never felt a lack of parental attention, mostly because DM was a very involved and loving parent. Three of us have larger families now (5DC, 3DC, 3DC). Youngest sibling has unfortunately not been able to have children, rather than it being a deliberate choice.