Why Do Big Families Get Such a Bad Rap?
In the video, my siblings and I stand with our mother on the large porch of a house somewhere in Virginia, before a small crowd gathered across the street. We’re dressed plainly, except for my mother, who wears a festive sweater and headband. And we are singing—“The 12 Days of Christmas,” “Carol of the Bells,” my grandpa’s arrangement of “Hey Ho, Anybody Home” with “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” For most of the performance, my mother conducts us from a music stand, pitch pipe in hand. Only during “Hodie Apparuit,” a somewhat intricate three-part Latin carol by Orlando di Lasso, does she leave her post, to sing “firsts” with me. I was not the youngest child in the family. But in choral matters, I always needed the most help.
I am not a musical person. I do not play any instruments. I can’t read music or write songs, the way some of my siblings do in their spare time. And I have never described myself as a singer. (Although here, my mother would interject to reassure readers that I have a “lovely voice.”) I don’t generally sing at all unless I feel well assured that, shrouded in protective layers of other voices, no one can hear me, or at least not me in particular. The second those voices fall away, my voice breaks. I may be able to sing a tune, but I can’t carry one.
Nevertheless, I sing a lot—even now, because that is what my family does when we get together. I often find this dynamic, in which music remains an enormous part of my life despite my ineptitude, tricky to explain to people. But it also encapsulates what I consider one of the undersung advantages of being raised in a big family: It can draw the best out of you by drawing you out of yourself.
[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]
I am the middle of five children, all of us born within the span of seven years. Growing up, I rarely stopped to consider whether I liked being in a large family, perhaps because in the Catholic circles in which my family ran, we were hardly the biggest. I would not describe us as any chummier than your average lot of sisters and brothers. We played together and have about a million inside jokes. We also fought a lot. Over the years, our relationships with one another have at times been deeply strained. But I am and always have been fiercely defensive of my siblings, which is why I find it difficult to know what to make of the research indicating that I’m worse off for having them.
A significant body of evidence suggests, for instance, that kids with more siblings do worse in school than their counterparts from smaller families, across a variety of educational outcomes: math and reading scores, high-school graduation rates, college enrollment and graduation, and overall educational attainment. The relationship between number of siblings and achievement shrinks after researchers correct for factors such as parental education and income, Douglas Downey, a sociology professor at Ohio State University, told me, but it doesn’t disappear. A 2015 study found that as family size increases, children score worse on cognitive tests and exhibit more behavioral challenges; it suggested, too, that kids from bigger families are at greater risk of experiencing criminal conviction and teen pregnancy, and are more likely to earn less as adults.
Yet research also indicates that coming from a big family can offer benefits. Some studies have found that, on average, the more siblings you have as a child, the less likely you are to divorce as an adult. “That’s suggestive that maybe you learn some interaction skills growing up that then translate into building long-lasting relationships later in adulthood,” Downey told me. Other research has found that quality sibling relationships can be a meaningful buffer against loneliness in adulthood.
[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]
Still, kids in big families do tend to struggle in a variety of ways. The prevailing explanation for this, initially put forward by the sociologist Judith Blake in the 1980s, is commonly referred to as “resource dilution.”
The resource-dilution model notes that parents have finite means; the more children they have, the thinner those means are spread. And although reasons exist to question this theory—it’s possible, for instance, that the relationship between family size and educational outcomes isn’t actually causal, Downey said—I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something to it. To be honest, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t. Particularly in the United States, where so much of a child’s welfare is determined by their parents, the notion that those parents’ time and income would go further on two kids than five doesn’t seem far-fetched.
In fact, I don’t think resource dilution quite captures how having siblings alters the divvying up of family resources. The term makes it sound as if each kid just gets a smaller cut of the family funds. But in my experience, it isn’t so simple. My parents weren’t poor, but even with help from my grandparents, they didn’t have enough money to send five kids to college, for example. Minimizing the amount of debt each of us had to take on meant we all had to compromise. I doubt I could have gotten into a really prestigious school, but it didn’t occur to me to try, because in my family you didn’t go to the best school you could get into, or even the best you could afford with one-fifth of the family college fund. You went to the school that gave you the most money, to maximize what was left over for your siblings. It was the opposite of meritocracy: The person with the highest SAT scores got the smallest slice of the pie.
The scarcest resource was our parents’ attention. I saw my parents plenty, but my individual needs often got lost in the shuffle. I was constantly showing up to school without whatever form or costume or special hairdo kids were supposed to have that day. My brother—not my parents—dropped me off at college.
[Read: Are siblings more important than parents?]
I’d be lying if I said I haven’t occasionally wrestled with resentment for the inevitably unfair way my parents’ resources have shaken out. If I can overlook such grievances now, it’s because—I know I’m lucky to say—my most basic needs were never in jeopardy. I also can’t exactly blame my parents: I’m under no illusion that having a bunch of kids is a breeze. I myself became so overwhelmed with just two children that I felt the need to hit pause on having more until I could come up for air.
Nevertheless, I think that in many ways my life is richer than it might have been had all my family’s resources been poured into me. And coexisting with all those people pushed me to try things that I likely wouldn’t have if I’d been an only child or one of just two. Which brings me back to all that singing, and the deep joy I’ve experienced as the only unmusical member of a sibling choir—descendants of a family with a long musical history.
My great-grandfather was a violinist in the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra. His daughter, my grandmother, earned a scholarship to the Metropolitan Opera. Her husband, my grandfather, was not only a composer who wrote liturgical music, motets, symphonies, and string quartets but also a beloved music teacher who believed that music was as crucial to the development of the mind as math. An attempt to live out this belief drove my mother to teach me and my siblings to sing together from an early age. She started with simple rounds, such as “Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening.” Then she taught us to sight-read using solfège (the do-re-mi system memorably rendered in The Sound of Music), so we could tackle (or, in my case, stumble through) more challenging polyphonic tunes.
My siblings took to music with ease. Today, if you hand any one of them the sheet music of an unfamiliar song, they’ll be singing it within the hour. If they mess up, you probably won’t know. They’ll wander from a given tune while maintaining harmony with it, then meander back without drawing notice. Then there’s me, the one whose lack of innate ability seems to have defied both nature and nurture. To perform a song halfway confidently, I have to drill it into my neural pathways through rote memorization, as if I’m hammering down a railroad. If I get knocked off track, forget correcting course. I’m a train wreck.
And yet, at every opportunity, I’ve kept singing with my family. We sing when someone graduates, marries, or welcomes a new child. We still carol for neighbors, fellow churchgoers, and perfect strangers at every chance we get. My parents eventually divorced, but when my dad died a few years ago, my siblings and I gathered with our aunts, uncles, and cousins, and, with my mother conducting us as usual, sang as his coffin was lowered into the grave.
By one view, this part of my life—the 10,000 hours I’ve spent honing a craft I do not have the talent or passion to master—is a missed opportunity. Perhaps, had I grown up in a smaller family, I would have devoted that time and energy to some other skill to which I was better suited. Yet that prospect only saddens me, because singing with my family is among my most cherished pastimes. It’s what I’m homesick for when homesickness strikes.
Life in a big family is all about making do—with the hand-me-down winter coat that only sort of fits, with the sport that you only sort of like, with the fact that you will always be the worst singer in the group. You could see this as indignity. But I see it as a reason to be grateful. I get to sing because my family chooses, over and over, to make do with me.