The Goq,
Avram you did not address what i said about loss of individuality do you want your child to be a individual or a robot is part of the collective?
Your original parable spoke to a safety issue. Then it became about government assistance. Next personal debt. Then unfairness to older/younger siblings, and now individuality. If I respond to individuality, perhaps you will move the goalposts again and talk about living space and how unfair it is that children can’t have their own rooms, etc.
I get it. You think having too many children (which you seem to define as 10+) is bad. You have lots of reasons. My responses to your reasons are largely the same: you are describing poor parenting, poor decision making, and poor planning; factors that are not exclusive to large families.
To respond, individuality comes from within each child and can be encouraged or discouraged by parents, friends, teachers, siblings, and relatives, no matter how many children are at home, school, the park, or anywhere.
Someone can easily start a thread decrying families where both parents work, using many of your same arguments (latchkey kids are not supervised which is dangerous, older siblings must look after younger ones, or in the case of an only child, s/he has to look after her/himself, they are ignored, they frequently have to prepare their own meals which means poorer nutrition, etc. etc.). Is it fair to label all working parents’ families like that?
In my opinion, unpopular as it may be, we have an epidemic of unsupervised, unguided and inadequately parented children in this country, non-Jewish and Jewish, poor and rich, government assisted and tax paying, Borg and Starfleet, 10 kids and 1 kid. Parents are missing out on opportunities to connect with and raise their children or don’t even know how, and instead the kids are raising and learning values from each other in the streets and schools, which has resulted in a horrendously toxic youth culture. Everyone’s going to come to the table with different causes for this, and we all need to work on it.
Family problems are going to manifest themselves differently in different families, so you may see one set of problems more common in large families, and another set of problems more common in small families. But by pigeonholing the problem and stating that all ills are traced to too many children, the core issues risk being missed.
Can you really say that parents neglecting 6 kids would do better with 3? Or that parents raising a great family of 9 should not have a 10th, because that is just simply “too much”? I’m curious to hear your response.
Have a good Shabbos!