I don't think it's weird at all. My dad had like....13 sibs. My mom about 7. My aunt has ten kids alone. I think she's still having babies. Her oldest is...30+ and her youngest is maybe under 10. Having a lot of kids in a village community isn't bad because you have more hands to help out with farming and taking care of younger children or elderly.
But in the states, I think it's ridiculous because things don't work out that way.
You'll agree that having more hands to work is an awful reason to have more children. Children aren't, like, robots - oh, let's make a few more, they'll come in handy.
My grandfather had seven or eight of brothers, and so did my grardmother - reffering to two of my grandparents whose families I'm familiar with. But you have to compare what their families took like to see the real picture. My great-grandfather was an uneducated, lazy, patriarchal man whose children hated him so much that some of them wouldn't attend his funeral. My great-grandmother was a housewife whoused to get beaten up on a regular bases, a woman who hardly had time to do anything but cool, work around the house, and carry a baby in the stomach. I'm sure that any normal woman would like more of life than this.
The times were such, people thought that all you had to do was bring a baby to the world, and your parenting duties are over. The child was lucky that you kept him in the house until he's 18, even though the child deserved his loaf of bread by working in the field ever since he/she was able to walk. Oh, and also, at the dinner, a father would sit and eat as much as he could, and only when he's done, children and mother were allowed to sit and eat. When a baby died at birth due to unproper medical care, father would just shrug shoulders and say "God gave, God took away". Allegedly, my grandfather had more siblings who never got to day two, though it's one of no-no topics in my family.
I dunno about others, but this sounds like dark times to me. I'm glad that we're over that mentality, and I see families like this as some sort of remaining anachronism from those times. Today we know that parenting doesn't end when a baby leaves a stomach and that child needs care, attention, good role model, not to mention fair amount of money, from it's parents.
I saw a program about them on TV the other night. While I'm sure I disagree strongly with them about, well, most everything, given that I'm a liberal atheist with a decent background in science, they seemed like very happy people.
They're not my family, and not the family I'd chose, nor the names and clothes I'd like, but they seem happy with their lives and their choices, which means they're doing better than a hell of people out there.
Are the kids getting a lot of attention from their parents? Well, they're homeschooled, they live with tons of caring relatives, and their parents don't spend all day watching TV. I'd venture to say that these kids actually get more time with their parents than I got with my parents when I was a kid. (Of course, when you have a single working mom and split most of your time between school and nanny/daycare, that ain't saying much.)
Just because there's a bunch of you gathered around your mom as she reads to you doesn't mean she isn't reading to you...
I'm recluctant to believe that all the problems that plague one family, especially the ones unspoken, under the surface, would be evident in a tv show about them. You don't expect a ten-year old kid to come to camera and speak up: "I'm not getting enough attention I need to develop as a healthy individual."
Also on that last paragraph I have to strongly disagree. I've had some experience with kids in a hospital for homeless children, and I've seen how they're craving for attention. They have no financial problems as hospital is always getting a lot of donations - thechnically, they're well-situated; but there's never enough volunteers to give children all the attention they need. When we were called to volunteer, we were said "you don't need to do anything, just spend time with those children" and indeed it was true. As soon as you enter their ward, they start fleeing toward you, pulling your sleeves, tryng to get your attention from others, and in a matter of minutes they already see you as a parental figure, since they desperately need one.
And yeah, when you're reading to such large number of children, you're not reading to each of them. From their perspective, you're reading to everyone else but them.
I plan on homeschooling my kids at least for elementary school because A. I'm smarter than most elementary teachers and can certainly teach my kids to read, and B. I have no happy memories of elementary school, just memories of being pushed around by bigger kids. I didn't know it then, but I was literally half the size of many of my classmates, not to mention socially awkward as all crap. So was my husband, and therefore likely so will our own kids, so that's years of shittiness I'd rather not inflict on them.
When I attended grammar school, I was living in a village about twenty miles from school, and myfather was driving me to school. Naturally, I couldn't play with my school mates after school, since they all lived nearer, in the town, while I lived in a huge house with a huge backyard and no children to play with for miles around, except for my olded sister.
Though I partly attribute this situation to my interest in comics, I also blame them for my problems with interaction with people, introvercy and shyness, which became acute some years later. It's the problem I've been dealing with all my life and I only started overcoming it when I was about 20 and abruptly shifted to college enviroment. All my life I've been dragging some issues that are, I believe, at least partly due to that I didn't have the fair level of interaction with other kids.
i'm not into sex personally
Why, what's wrong?
I'm not all for wild rampant sex with everyone you meet, I just figured I'd throw this interesting view point out there.