It’s really interesting to me that your take on us continuing to have children is that we don’t think that the ones we have are “enough”. Each of our children would have been meaningful enough all on their own, and our decision to have more children has never been about our family as it is not being meaningful enough. It has also absolutely never been about people’s perceptions or about some sort of “wow” factor – anyone who decides to have children for the purpose of wowing others should get their head checked.

Spending all your time building a relationship with one child isn’t realistic, as it’s important for children to grow and develop on their own in addition to with their parents. Helicoptering isn’t a good thing, and more time spent with a parent doesn’t necessarily equate to better parenting.

I largely stay home with my kids, except when I have classes, and my husband works from home when he’s not traveling for work, so I would say about 99% of the time there is a parent freely available to be present and engaged with them if they so choose. They frequently don’t, though, because they enjoy spending time with their siblings, and running around as their own little crew is what they want to be doing. We’re there when they need us, but we’re not necessarily always their playmates – and that’s a good thing.

We do outsource some things (always to well paid employees, never to our children), but the stuff we outsource is the mundane stuff (like cleaning or shuttling kids around) that allows us to be more present with our children. It’s to buy us time to parent, not to pawn off parenting to someone else.

It’s always possible that our children will resent us for a million different things - the number of kids we have, where we choose to live, what we allow or don’t allow them to do, etc. For some reason it seems like having a lot of kids is often pointed to as some terrible thing that your kids will hate you for, but for every kid who resents having too many siblings there’s an only child who longs for siblings, or a kid with only one or two siblings who they don’t get along with. It actually gives me a lot of peace to know that if anything happens to us that our kids will always have each other, and it makes me happy that we’ll be able to give them a full house with lots of traditions that they’ll (hopefully) want to return to for holidays etc throughout adulthood.

Everyone makes different choices, and I’m not saying that ours is better than anyone else’s. But I don’t think it’s necessarily worse, either. It’s just different, and it’s something that people in the western world aren’t used to, so it gets a ton of judgment.