Big or small?

In a world where we continue to focus more and more on personal choice and satisfaction, I can't help but wonder how often we bother to think about the rest of this place we call home.

Granted, we often talk about politics, environment, poverty, and safety, but today I'd like to discuss one that we haven't been back to in a long time: family. Family as defined as a group of people consisting of parents and children that dwell in the same place or are legally tied to one another.

I could discuss a million things in this one topic alone, but that would steal the fun from the rest of the semester, so today I'm talking about size and timing.

People say they don't want to have kids too early or hardly at all for a few reasons. The first and most prevalent is lack of money, or other resources. The issue becomes that we frequently will not get to a point where we have "enough" and even then, we overestimate. The second is feeling unprepared. For this one, the truth comes down to a simple fact that we'll never really be prepared for parenthood. It's a trial and a challenge that is unrivaled by any other in this particular time. The best way to become good at it, is to do it, and yes, to make mistakes.

The biggest issue with both or all of these arguments is that if you wait too long or decide against, you'll never get the chance again. Very few people ever say they regretted having kids, but most say they wish they'd had more. It's an opportunity that you only get a little window to experience, and for various reasons, you probably don't want to miss it.

Personally, I come from a family of two, my 6 years older sister and myself, so I have a bias toward small families. However, in class this week, we discussed some of the science behind a bigger family.

The first and most quantifiable reason to have more kids is to prevent the decline in a population. Yes, I'm sure you've heard of over-population and the baby boom before. But science shows that while those might have been plausible before, society now is dropping beneath replacement rates. What that means, is that there will be a lot less people making our world function as highly as we are now. I promise that will be a challenge.

Numbers aside, having more members in a family can possibly have other important effects that quite frankly I've forgotten about. In a larger family, there's a bigger support system for the children in it. It may seem scary to try to keep up with more than two, or even one child, both financially and emotionally, but to some extent, the kids help.

The older ones learn responsibility, an important quality in adults. The younger ones have a wider range of role models. All of them have someone to turn to that isn't as scary as their parents.

In my family, I was the daddy's girl, and my sister was my mom's copy-cat. This did something interesting to the two of us. I became extremely analytical and despised the concept of emotion, and my sister became so emotionally needy that she turned to her friends for support where our family didn't seem to be enough.

My hypothesis is that having more siblings would have helped us both. A brother close to her age would teach her how to think and fill an emotional distance. A sister closer to me would have taught me how to care more about others. Of course, this is just a concept, but it has merit to it.

In other families, whether a follower or a leader, siblings impacted them in a way that helped them become much stronger as adults, which we are currently becoming. Personally, I think we're all just 5-year-olds in 20-year-old frames.

Lastly, and probably least importantly, the less children you have, the less people who can tell your story, the less people who can reminisce with you at family reunions, and the less joy you get in the lives of other humans around yourself.