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I'm in your court on this. I can fully empathize with the difficulty of raising children. The first 3 were exposed to a very materialistic life. The last two as they were becoming teens saw my return to the Church. They have been much easier to raise.

I am the oldest of seven. For much of my childhood, we were just getting by. Never suffering, but just getting by. We lived in an old big drafty frame house that my dad just kept adding on to. After I left home, my dad's income exploded. He built a new house and the spending went wild. Well, the family was not near as close-knit during that time. I recall families with 6, 8, 10 or more children living in 3 br houses of maybe 1500 sq ft. They all got by. Children went to college w/o govt assistance.

We can do it again.

I understand your concern about telling someone not to use birth control. We can never make that decision for them. We can only explain birth control is an objective evil. That certain methods are never permissible. The choice from that point is theirs.

We can do it again.

I hope so. I grew up pretty conservative in a very modest neighborhood and I loved it. Everybody lived about the same except when I went to school, I saw lots of the kids were worse off than that. People tried harder then and didn't give up on their marriages like they do now and they made it.

Even so, I had a lot of extra things because there were only two of us children. I used to wish for more (a brother). I don't think my mother wanted any more because she was almost menopausal when she married and having two kids with the father away defending the country for four years, her health started to deteriorate rapidly. But nobody talked about those things then. I never knew about lots of things because people didn't talk about it.

That was one of the few things my mother said bad against the church. Priests tell you how many children to have. That was a euphemistic way of putting it, I now understand. Some of her friends were catholic. We weren't. Some times I think it was a good thing. I was a happy child and didn't have a lot of guilt piled on me about my sins. That came later and was self-induced :-). It got really bad after I became a catholic. The guilt. Not that I didn't carry a lot before that.

I'll bet you have a lot of happy family memories even if your parents had to struggle while you were growing up.