The Many Blessings of Growing Up in a Big Family

It’s a growing concern that world leaders, economists and religious leaders are warning about: people aren’t having enough children.

In many countries, birth rates are plummeting below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman — the minimum needed to maintain a stable population.

In the United States, women now have about 1.6 children on average, down from about two 30 years ago. Japan and much of Europe are lower still, at about 1.2 and 1.3.

Economists warn that as birth rates fall, workforces shrink and populations age. Aging societies have higher pension costs and medical bills with fewer young people to fund them.

Bigger families would produce more young people, who invent, work, generate tax contributions and look after their aging parents.

Religious leaders say another gain is that big families teach children selflessness and sharing — virtues that benefit societies far outside of the home.

I couldn’t agree more.

Only Son with Five Sisters

I was raised as an only boy with five sisters, which was at once a blessing and a curse.

When I was 12, the neighborhood bully was constantly picking on me, but I had no brothers to teach me to fight. My sisters taught me. I looked the bully dead in the eye and said, “You are soooooooo immature!”

Despite having no brothers, my father, always tight with a buck, made me wear hand-me-downs. It wasn’t too bad most of the year, but Easter Sunday was unpleasant.

Do you know how hard it is to outrun the neighborhood bully with your pantyhose bunching up and your bonnet flopping in the wind?

Though my sisters loved and doted on me many times, other times they complained to my parents that I was stinky and gross, which meant I was forever banished to the third seat in the back of the station wagon.

Just as often as the squabbles broke out, we’d sit around the dinner table laughing. I was a frequent target of the laughter. My sisters loved to tell stories about their stinky, sweaty, mud-caked brother.

One of my fondest memories was going grocery shopping with my father every Thursday night. We hit the Del Farm grocery store, the beer distributor and the butcher, and we arrived home just as “The Waltons” theme song was playing on television.

Like a Red Cross operation, everyone in the house unloaded and packed away our weekly supplies, then we joined together for some potato chips and orange and cherry soda pop as we watched John-Boy and his many siblings show us what life was like in a big family during the Great Depression.

Benefits of Big Families

According to the National Catholic Register, Pope Leo XIV has said families are “the cradle of the future of humanity.”

He has described the family as the “first cell of society” and the “original and fundamental school of humanity.”

“It is within the family,” he said in a speech to Catholic legislators, “that we first learn trust before calculation, generosity before competition, dialogue before division and love before power.”

In other words, it’s a lot harder to grow up to become an arrogant, self-centered jerk when you’re surrounded by lots of siblings.

I found this to be true.

My parents’ house was a wonderful, raucous place, filled with laughter, chaos and lots of love and joy. You had no choice but to interact.

Our front door was never locked. Family members, neighbors and friends came and went at all hours.

Someone was always laughing somewhere in the house — the kitchen, the living room, the back porch, the downstairs game room.

Like it or not, everything was “shared” — especially my oldest sister’s fruit-flavored yogurt cups, which I couldn’t stop myself from devouring. She was the only one with the money to buy such treats, once she got her driver’s license and a job.

Of course, my sisters knew they better hide their Halloween candy from their only brother — or, better yet, spit on it, which was the only surefire way to keep me from raiding their candy stash.

Childhood Loneliness

I can’t help but wonder how many of today’s kids — without siblings and isolated with their smartphones alone in their rooms — are missing out on the childhood I was blessed to have.

According to a 2026 surgeon general advisory, released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, children and adolescents now spend as much or more time on screens as they do sleeping or in school.

In an HHS news release announcing that advisory, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr said children “spend more time on screens than sleeping, exercising, or engaging face-to-face with family and friends — and we are seeing the consequences in rising rates of anxiety, depression, obesity, and developmental challenges.”

Being part of a big family would help solve that problem. You simply can’t isolate yourself with so much commotion going on all around you.

And if you attempted to hide from the rest of the family, one of your siblings would demand you come out of your room or risk the greatest punishment that can happen in a big family.

Someone would threaten to brush their teeth with your toothbrush!

Find Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos of his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.

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