meagan francis's Profile

interesting...I just got done writing a book about raising larger families (we focused on parents of four or more, but there are communities where three is quite large, and some where four or even five is just average, so it's very subjective). I, personally, heard over and over again from the parents I interviewed that they have big families because they love children and enjoy having a lot of them around. That was true whether they lived in the city and had a nanny (though very few of the parents I interviewed had that kind of lifestyle) or lived in the rural or suburban midwest and stayed home or worked and did their best to patch together child care they could afford (much more common). Anyway, I guess my point is that it's just silly to attribute the number of kids somebody has to something like competitiveness--there could be a lot of reasons wealthier families are more likely to have big families, and maybe some of them really DO see their kids as "fashion accessories"--hey, there are rotten apples in every bunch, big and small families, rich and poor alike. But I simply don't believe that most sane women would actually create new lives simply to keep up with the Joneses.