I Guess There's Something in the Water

Stunning. She's going to have her 18th child. ::every woman in a 100 mile radius of that sentence swiftly closes their legs unconsciously::

Now, part of me thinks "You could start your own soccer league!" and another ponders "how long has she been pregnant...13 years?" and another "Woman, take a stand! Just say No!" But, in the end what I think doesn't really matter. I'm sure that they decided as a family a long time ago that they would accept as many kids as biology (God?) saw fit to give them. Their family seems happy, healthy and relatively well adjusted. It could be worse. And it used to be the standard to have large families - lots of our grandparents came from families of 8, 10 or 12 kids.

That got me thinking....what happened?

My mother and father came from families with 4 kids, I come from a family of three children and so does Cliff. We've talked about kids and agreed that three would be our max. The numbers of children that American families are having are getting smaller and smaller, many couples choosing to be purposefully childless. I don't want to get into the argument here about the rightness/wrongness of purposeful childlessness; I do wonder though about why families are smaller than they used to be. Is it because kids are expensive? Is selfishness an issue? Do married couples fear having to change their lives? Is it a time issue? Is it because many homes now have two-income holders and so the feasibility of large families is questionable?

What do you think? Why do you think families are much smaller than they used to be? Are you an 18-kids kind of a woman (or man)?