Why Are Women Driving All The Hate For Big Families Like Mine?

My husband and I recently flew with our six children to the southwestern United States. After landing in Las Vegas, we traveled across three states over nearly two weeks, hiking canyons and cinder cone volcanoes, backpacking to Zion’s Narrows, maneuvering through slots and lava tubes in Snow Canyon, and walking a mountain stream under the shadows of Bryce’s hoodoos.

We marveled at the Grand Canyon from the edge of the south rim and stood above the Colorado River and Lake Mead as one slipped into the other through the Hoover Dam. The terrain was tremendously beautiful, dynamic, and impressive. Every night, we shook the red dust off our shoes and reranked the trip’s adventures. We felt very blessed.

Canceling the Big American Family

As a mother of six, I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to America’s cultural commentary on large families. The controls and priorities that have succeeded in canceling the large family here have led to a population decline that has redefined the norm. And that new norm, as we all know, is well below six. Comments directed at our family have ranged from ignorant to awkward, with a particular focus on shock. Since birth control, in all its many forms, is so readily available, why would anyone have six children?

But as standard as it has become, on this particular trip west, the rhetoric bordered on surreal. Outside D.C. one evening, crossing a hotel lobby, we were pointed at by a group of seniors who loudly counted our children in shocked tones. We were called brave — but not in a generous way — and gawked at. We sat next to a tourist who remarked that she had lost count of our children and, directing her gaze at my oldest, said, “Oh, you poor thing.”

Over the years, we’ve heard “hands full” more than “blessings” to describe our seemingly inexplicable situation. There is such a poverty of language regarding the blessing of abundant life that even well-intentioned people have stumbled over their attempts to express interest in our family’s atypical size.

The collective experience of our family’s travels was that of awe, wonder, and daily compromise. This is the norm in a large family — the constant collision of expectations and needs and the creative endurance necessary to come together and ensure love is felt even when desires are not met. We ended our days tired but satisfied, knowing what we were sharing was uniquely experienced, something we could recall later and know the time together was well spent.

When I watched our children climbing those red rocks and skipping stones in canyon streams, I saw wholeness, the goodness of what we’ve been given.

The negative commentators who saw something less, announcing discomfort in our size, were specifically older women.

Cultural Failure

When I realized women were the drivers of this negative feedback, it struck me as particularly off-putting. Women are mothers and, as such, the culture keepers. We are the home builders and domestic experts. We develop and form characters with compassionate care and hearts that bleed. We were designed with the innate and unique drive to mother written into our genetic code.

But womanhood in 21st-century America, and most of the rest of the developed world, is now bizarrely out of step with that reality. Women demand full coverage for IVF and abortion, and adamantly control fertility while infertility anxiety peaks. Women have failed to protect their children from the barrage of attacks on innocence, dressing their boys as girls and standing silent as boys invade girls’ locker rooms. Women have lost their way, believing the lie that behaving as though they are men would lead to fulfillment and freedom. This abandonment of vocation trickling down through generations is evident today in rampant discontent; too many women have abandoned faith and family life to “fill in the blanks.”

Historically, a population decline has never been an indicator of good health, and that continues today. Cultural and spiritual sickness is pervasive. An errant and arrogant cultural “truth” tells us that when life is allowed to multiply, there is some sort of ignorance at play, some sort of degraded existence on the other side. I can tell you that is not the case and that women sell themselves short in believing this lie.

The Big Family Benefit

The school of life is well played out in a large family, where your neighbor is not selected but given, compromises must be achieved, and a vibrant range of character, personality, and ability creates a diverse daily community. Young men and women learn to hold and comfort babies, and are held accountable as models for younger children. Big families consider the domestic common good, invite debate, and practice acceptance. Cohesiveness is only possible through communal love and sacrifice. Dinners are long and made by many hands.

As the protection, value, and dignity of life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death are discarded, the natural, reflexive response is to question our own innate worth. That insecurity is particularly present in young women today, stripped of the dignity of the fulfillment of womanhood. It is also present in the elderly, so many of whom lack the comfort, protection, and support of grown children.

As I look at the beautiful children brought into the life of our household, I know we will never do all things well enough for them as their human parents, but we can teach them that their lives are beautiful and abundant gifts. We can be a witness to that abundance. We can pray that the next generation will once again see life as wildly generous, from a Creator who makes no mistakes. 

Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker, the Ascension Press blog, and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer, and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. She and her brilliant engineer/scientist husband homeschool their six children.