Having ten children is

surely irresponsible now? 

There was a "human interest" story about a family with ten children in yesterday's paper. It was about how hard they found it to "make ends meet". The mother spoke of the size of the grocery bill, not being able to afford new clothes for any of them, that they had not been on holiday for two years and more.

I do not quite know what the point of the story was because of course ten children would be expensive to feed. I also wondered how well they were being fed because apparently she only buys 15litres of milk a week. That is only just over a litre each in a week. That is not much for a child. Even if the adults go without it is not much for a child. Yes, they have a vegetable garden but the mother also talked about buying 80c packets of cake mix to feed them. I wonder how much food value there is in cheap cake mix? Do they, even with the kitchen garden they claim to have, get well fed? 

My paternal grandparents came from large families, eleven on one side and nine on the other. In the late Victorian era this was considered quite normal but should it be considered normal now? I think my paternal grandparents ate well for the times. There was a lot of fish available for my paternal grandfather. He and his brothers may have caught most of it.  Great-grandma, if the recipes handed down to us are any example, also knew how to make use of everything a sheep or cow had to offer. She knew about potatoes, pumpkin and carrots too. She grew beans and peas and more. There were no "takeaway" meals available. My paternal grandmother came from a farm and there was clearly no shortage of food at Spring Farm. The Senior Cat could remember many meals there as a child. One of his jobs when he was there was to churn the butter. Milk came straight from the cow. There was a vegetable garden and fruit trees. Feeding all those children was possible because of those resources. Yes, they bought other essentials like flour and rice but most food was there on the farm.

This would not be possible with ten children on a small urban block without access to something like free fish. 

I have a distant cousin with six children. They were "home schooled" and I sometimes wondered how easy it was to feed them. I knew something about how much they could eat because they would descend on us once a month for woodwork lessons with the Senior Cat. I would feed them with some help from their grandmother. The first thing I would do was supply them with a mid morning milk drink and six milk drinks plus tea for five adults was an extra two litres of milk alone. They were nice, well behaved children who have grown into nice, responsible adults but I did wonder what they missed out on sometimes.

Brother Cat and Middle Cat and their partners made the decision to stop at two. "Replace yourselves," they said. Their children have a sibling. By modern standards they were not given much spoiling but they were given opportunities and they used them. They have appeared in films, on stage, played sport, work in medicine, law and education and built a multi-million dollar business.  Many people describe them as "lucky" but in reality they were made to work for what they have. They could not have had the opportunities which laid the foundation for these things if there had been six or ten children. Their experiences would have been not necessarily better or worse but they would have been different.

I really do wonder though about people choosing to have ten children now. Yes, they are getting a considerable amount of government assistance to feed the children they have chosen to have. Was it really a responsible choice though? What was acceptable 120-150 years ago relied on a different sort of lifestyle altogether, one that most people no longer live.