This is true and is a proper response to knee-jerk horror at Ballerina Farm’s ninth child announcement. It mirrors my own experience, though I only have five.

I would like to gently push back at the central thesis a little bit—the central thesis being that parenting split nine ways is not a downside because the structure of the family means siblings will contribute time and attention to each other.

The large family is an organization like any other- and indeed it very quickly establishes its own ends outside of the particular goods and ends of each individual. I agree with the author here that the large family is a more natural way for kids to be raised, but that doesn’t mean there is no tension between the good of the whole vs the good of the individuals. And we see this play out in large families when the good or future plans or development of the older kids is sacrificed for the sake of helping mom out with the youngers. A little of this is good—but a lot of it is a problem.

This is simply because the family cannot remain forever as it is when kids are little. Each sibling has a calling outside the unit, whether to his own family someday or a work vocation. The little platoon doesn’t last, and this expiration date comes so much faster than any of us realize when all of them are still under 14.

The challenge for large families is to remember to think of oldest daughters as individual people once again as they get to high school age. It is to remember that older kids have an end or calling outside the family, and therefore should still get to do sports and extra curricular activities to develop skills and character for their own sake, and should be allowed to seek peer groups and socialization outside the family. Facilitating the needs of older children is often the first thing sacrificed for the large family. Older kids’ needs require going somewhere, spending money, time away from home, etc.

A mirror version of this inattention to older siblings, however, can happen when younger siblings spend their lives in the back of a van, shuttling olders to various things, and never being allowed to simply spend the day at home exploring, playing, or seeing to their own interests. It’s hard.

What is enough socialization in the family unit for an 11-year old quickly becomes insufficient for a 13-year old, and that is by God’s design. Teens and high schoolers need to connect with people outside the family. And the very large family is challenged by this precisely because it grows to be so interconnected and interdependent during the early years when all the kids are still very young, as illustrated in this article.

There are downsides to being raised by siblings, too—speech impediments, for example, because moms speak more clearly and have a higher vocabulary than siblings. Immaturity, bullying among siblings, and a less effort and attention overall given to the habits and behaviors of the younger set.