I'm happy about the children, but I'm not going to lie and say looking at the Mrs. she looks old for her time. I am guessing if she didn't wig out like the other lady in Texas? then she must be fine. I'm sure people are happy with christians having so much children BUT no one has ever done a study of women having very large families. My parents BOTH came from large families and I can't say either of my grandmothers were very happy.
Well, obviously we can't know what role the number of children play in anyone's unhappiness in life. In our grandparents' day, though, women had a lot of children often due to lack of birth control methods. Very different from now, when the women with large families have them by choice. Health care also is a lot better now... I'm sure a lot of our grandmothers had undiagnosed/ untreated health problems related to childbearing as well. I think I read a statistic or article somewhere talking about the profound regret that the majority of women and men experienced when they didn't have children at all. Hard to generalize... but by all accounts this family seems pretty happy.
I'm certainly not in the touchy-feely-self-esteem for kids crowd, but pleeeeeease. All the cheering on this thread seems to come from the same crowd that constantly complains that taking care of 1 or 2 kids is an unbelievable burden on their sanity. So given that, how can a mom do a good job at parenting when she has been
1. pregnant non-stop since 1988?
2. has 14 other kids to mentor/raise/feed/advise/teach/?
It just doesn't pass the common sense test.
Coming from a large family, I would concur. It sounds good in theory but it rarely is in practice, for both the parents and the children. Having that many children just aggravated existing situations and issues.