I’ve been thinking a fair amount recently about family size and such, mostly because it keeps coming to my attention. I’ve had quite a few people, including random strangers at grocery stores and such, ask me how many children I’m planning on having. I always find interrogations about family size to be in rather poor taste, but it is amazing how often people decide to ask about it. I read this recently, and I think it is definitely the best sort of answer to this question I’ve seen so far. I’ll have to see if Matt and I can come up with a good answer along these lines ourselves!

The other thing people say to me rather often is, “wow, a boy and a girl, you’re set now, aren’t you!” like I had hit the offspring jackpot and I had no reason to have any more. I hadn’t realized that this was my goal, and I can’t quite figure out why a boy and a girl is considered by many to be the optimal family composition. OK, so we have one of each - so what?

I’ve tried a variety of responses to the family size question and sometimes the results are a little amusing. One elderly man asked us in the grocery store if we planned to have more children, and I said “well, we’ll see what happens” and he responded with “you know, they have a pill that takes care of that nowadays, you know”. I had a woman at Costco tell me that my children were beautiful, and asked if I was going to have more. I said “we’ll see how it goes” and she responded by saying that I should definitely have more because these two are so beautiful. Yes, Matt and I must continue to reproduce so that there will never be a shortage of beautiful children! *grin*

The conversation I really find thought-provoking though is when someone asks me the question and I respond with my usual “oh, we’ll see” sort of answer and then they respond by telling me all about their thoughts on the subject for their family. I’ve had a number of women in my Mom’s Club tell me that they’d like to have more, but since they don’t think they can pay for college for more than one or two children they are limiting their family to that size. I find this fascinating - that the thought of not being able to pay for college for a child means that they decide not to have that child at all. I’ve been so tempted to ask them - “So, I’m curious. Would you rather be alive and not have a fully paid college tuition, or never have been given a chance at life at all?” I’m sure I’ll never ask it as I think it would get me ostracized from the Mom’s Club for good (I’m the resident misfit as it is, with my sling, no TV, homebirth, and plans to homeschool) but still, I wonder what the response would be.

I probably should clarify this a bit - I’m not saying that we should have as many children as possible, as we do still need to be able to provide physically (food, clothing, shelter, basic medical care) and emotionally (namely that you aren’t so overwhelmed that you can’t give the child attention, love and affection). We also need to take care of our own health and save something for our own retirement so as to not become (too much, at least!) of a burden on our children when we grow old. (As an aside, one of my favorite pieces of financial advice is that you can borrow for college costs but you can’t borrow for retirement.) But still… I don’t see why parents feel their children deserve a full ride in college, and feel so strongly about this that they see a need to drastically limit their family size to accommodate this. Perhaps there are other reasons at work here, and they are using this as a convenient excuse… but it comes up so often there must be something to it. I can understand not wanting your children to start out their adult lives saddled with huge amounts of college loan debts, but perhaps there could be more balance, perspective, and creativity in this. There’s more I’ve been thinking about this aspect, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to write it yet.

Tangentially related to this, here’s a post I wanted to link to that I thought was really quite good. There’s some interesting comments as well. Selkie: Ethics and Family Size

And notice, I still haven’t answered the question :-)