Having A Half Dozen Kids Is Interesting
Having multi children was not always such a phenomenon, yes having multi children at once is a phenomenon and always was, but, there was a time when having ten kids to a family was necessary for a few different reasons. First it increased the chances of the families survival due to a high infant mortality rate, and childhood illness if you had ten kids maybe five would make it to adulthood. Than of course if you were a farming family it was important to have a large family to keep labor costs down.
The large family trend seemed to die down after the nineteen forties, by the fifties the goal was two point five kids, preferably a boy and a girl. Suffice to say by the eighties having more than three kids was considered crazy.
Six kids is a lot of kids for one family no doubt, especially during the me generation of the eighties and the early nineties. It was kind of frowned on to have such a large family, amazingly it would seem people could not help but comment on a family that large. A six pack of kids really drew attention, not so positive attention. Assumptions were usually made when the family size disclosure flies off the handle in both casual and professional situations, it would seem that people just had to point out the obvious about the size of that family, and make comments regarding the availability of television to the parents. Amazing that what seemed to be such normal respectable people would feel the need to pry into a parents choice when they had a large family during this time.
Fast forward twenty years, large families are celebrated , oh not in the traditional manner but in a freakish side show type of way. As with any media hype only the largest families are portrayed as an anomaly, as if they are a mystery to solve. This strange phenomenon of hyping up extra large family has inspired other families to increase their family size, whether it is just a matter life imitating art or a new trend it is hard to say. To think twenty short years ago having a six pack raised so many eyebrows. My how times change, yet stay the same.