Are large families better or worse for children? There was a really interesting firestorm that

erupted on X this week looking at this tradeoff between having fewer children or having

a large family. And I am really interested in trying to understand how this topic is framed because it does appear like people have a single frame when it comes to thinking about family.

And this is one of the enormous blind spots.

So I want to talk a little bit about how this happened.

This started when Rebecca Reed responded to a e-news post about Hannah Nealman.

So Hannah is known for her tradwife blog, The Ballerina Farm, and she announces she is pregnant and expecting her ninth baby.

So how do you react when somebody has a ninth child?

How do you think about that family?

And Rebecca describes what she says and what she's thinking. She said, you cannot give nine children adequate time, attention, and connection.

You are unquestionably with nine children spending less time with your children than a working

parent with two kids.

So one of the blind spots that was pointed out by many people when Rebecca Reed posted this

on X was that she is thinking about how to raise a family from a small family frame.

And so part of what's occurred is that we started having smaller families. We developed a parenting style that is unique to small families. She describes

it here about how to have time, attention, and connection from the adult to the child. Then all of a

sudden you observe somebody having a large family and you say they can succeed because they can't use a small family parenting style in their situation.

You see the trick here?

The whole problem is that large families have a completely different kind of culture that she is not familiar with.

Rachel Wilson pointed this out.

She says she doesn't understand this

because she doesn't have a big family. I didn't either. But once you get past three kids, the whole

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