Planning a Big Family? Read This and Think Again

I know a lot of people who come from large families and because of that I was very interested in a recently published study done by researchers at the University of Houston and the London School of Economics. The highfalutin title -The Quantity-Quality Trade-off and the Formation of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills- belies the more down to earth information it provides.

The study takes a look at the relationship between the number of children a family has, and the resulting quality of life those children experience. They also compare the cognitive abilities of children from smaller families.

Bottom line? The more kids a family has, the lower their quality of life. In other words, the more siblings you have the more difficult your life is going to be. Cognitive abilities decrease and behavioral problems increase.

To distill this down further; girls from big families suffer most from impaired cognitive abilities and boys suffer economically. Of course there are so many other factors they took into account, but lack of time spent with children, lack of money spent on children and an overall lack of resources with which to raise them all played an important role in the study.

Perhaps this only pertains to large families elsewhere, (like those creepy Duggars!) because almost without exception every person I know from a large family has not only survived, but thrived. Of course that is just my perspective.

(Statistics provided by Cheat Sheet)