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“Five is the new ten” when it comes to Knoxville’s Catholic families
Posted By katie allison granju
Local Catholic mom of five Leslie Sholly talks about raising her large family in a small family world:
When Emily started kindergarten at St. Joseph School in 1996, the largest family at the school had four children. I wondered what had happened to all the big Catholic families. It was a far cry from my days there, where in my class alone were representatives of families of seven-, eight-, nine-, even 10-child families.
Big families have been making a comeback, although five seems to be the new 10 these days. Our family of five children is not the biggest at St. Joseph: offhand I can think of families who have six, seven, and nine kids.
When I tell strangers I have five children, they say, “I couldn’t do it. Two [occasionally three] is as much as I can handle.” I’m not making judgments on anyone else’s decision concerning family size—only you can know what is best for your family—but I wonder whether people give themselves enough credit. There’s nothing special about me or my husband that makes us able to handle more kids than most people. Any additional noise- or chaos-tolerance we have has been acquired “on the job.” I tell people, “If you have three, you’re already outnumbered. After that, it just gets louder.” Going from one to two is the hardest adjustment. Once you’ve figured out how to divide your attention between two kids, adding a few more is not that hard.
Why do it, though? Why have a large family? I’ll answer that question from our family’s perspective this time and from the church’s perspective another time, but I have to say that I wonder the opposite: why would anyone not want to have lots of children?
May 20th, 2008
