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Living Large: Having Many Children
Big families are back in style. What's it like to raise one?
It’s a typical Saturday morning in the Paquette household in Lansdowne, Ont. Sixteen-year-old Amanda mixes up waffles in the kitchen. Mom’s upstairs helping six-year-old twins Claire and Saige find their clothes.
Teagan, three, pours five pounds of Duplo onto the floor. Dad jogs through the house collecting the garbage. Fourteen-year-old Emma unloads the dishwasher while the middle kids, Maddison, 12, and Jonah, 10, bump elbows setting a very big table for breakfast.
It’s not every day you meet a family with seven children (not to mention two or more foster kids at any given time — plus three dogs, two cats and two horses). But for Kerri Paquette, whose doctor once told her she might never have children, every one of her seven babies was a blessing.
Big broods like the Paquettes are becoming a bit more commonplace in Canada than they have been for years. We’re not exactly living another baby boom; households with four or more children are still the exception, not the rule. But after a decade of decline and an all-time fertility-rate low in 2000 of 1.49 children, the number of babies born to Canadians has started inching upward.
That’s a surprise to many of us, especially when juggling just one or two children can make us feel like we’re going off our gourds. So, when we meet a parent with four or more kids, sometimes the first thing that rises to mind unbidden is the burning question: “Why?”
Cultural, social and economic influences (see Baby bonus) aside, sometimes there are gut reasons why couples expand their clan. Some come from large families themselves and, to them, four or five children feels right. Others were lonely onlies who yearned for a household spilling over with siblings. But many have no reason at all. A Vanier Institute of the Family survey found that as family size increases beyond two kids, parents are more likely to report they didn’t plan the births of all their children. Take divorced dad David Turner, who lives near Halifax with his party of five kids. “Quite frankly, we just started having kids and didn’t think too much about it.”
So what’s it like to head up a busy household? Here’s a taste of the good, the bad and the ugly.
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What do you think?
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