Not all families adhere to the ideal of producing 2.4 children to complete their little unit, as a new series on Channel 4 recently highlighted. LAURA MURPHY explores the effects of living with multiple brothers and sisters - and meets a Northern Ireland man who grew up with 14
MANY of us may believe that large families - namely, those where the number of offspring has extended into double figures - are the product of a bygone era, a Dickensian feature of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ times, when it was simply the done thing to reproduce relentlessly without too much thought about it.
Nowadays, many parents like to decide that two is plenty - or even less, as suggested by a national newspaper earlier this month, when it was revealed that almost two thirds of British parents are too poor to have a second child.
Well, as Channel 4 documentary 15 Kids And Counting, which hit our screens just recently, shockingly revealed, our assumptions that today’s couples are more than satisfied with a couple of kids and a dog aren’t strictly accurate.
The fly-on-the-wall documentary has been following the lives of some of Britain’s biggest families, charting the highs and lows of life with a larger than average sized brood.
In the first of the three-part series, we were introduced to Noel and Sue Radford and their clan of 14 - with one on the way.
Mum Sue, 36, who lives with her growing family in Morecambe in Lancashire, had spent half of her adult life pregnant and over the last 17 years had a baby nearly every year.
We also met Kent couple Mike and Tania Sullivan, who refused to use contraception because of their Catholic beliefs, and as a result had nine children between them, with twins on the way.
This in spite of the fact that Tania’s age and history of eight miscarriages made her latest pregnancy a high risk one.
In the second series, the show explored the concept of sibling rivalry, following the lives of the Lewis family from Bournemouth, who had 12 daughters, and the Bland family, in which the children came from different relationships.
And in tonight’s show, we meet single mother Jo Watson, who has 13 children and is all too aware of others’ perception that she is shamelessly sponging off the state.
From the financial to the physical, the emotional to the behavioural, there are surely bound to be countless issues which can affect those children - and adults - who were brought up alongside a lion’s share of siblings?
According to Lancashire based psychologist Dr Rachel Andrew, different issues can come into play depending on your place in your large family, and your relationships with your parents and brothers and sisters.
“The main issue seems to be that older children can sometimes feel that they’re taking on parenting roles or parental responsibility, in that because there are so many children the older children take care of the next ones down,” she says.
“Some children have felt quite angry or frustrated to been given role of parent as well.
“Then a few children have felt they haven’t been able to spend enough time with their parents, or they’ve felt that by the time the parent has done all the washing and ironing and cooking and cleaning for all of them, there has not really been that much special time for them or one to one time, and they haven’t had a lot of attention.
“They feel that they have not had that special attachment with one of their parents.”
Dr Andrew continues: “The middle ones sometimes tell me about feeling that they don’t really fit anywhere - they aren’t the youngest and they aren’t the eldest, and they just got lost somewhere in the middle, so I guess they can sometimes struggle to find a little bit of an identity for themselves within a large family.”
She says that the youngest children may feel that both their parents and older siblings try to baby them, and as a result they may yearn for more freedom, and feel they are not taken seriously, or allowed that taste of independence that they want.
“Equally, they can sometimes feel a responsibility if they’re the last to leave the family home - they feel they have a responsibility to parents who might then be a little bit older, they might feel more anxious about leaving the family home because they’ll be leaving mum and dad on their own,” says Dr Andrew.
As children, one of the most harrowing journeys we will ever embark on is starting school. But Dr Andrew says that this may not be as frightening a prospect for kids with multiple siblings as those from smaller family units, as they relish in that feeling of ‘being protected’ by older brothers and sisters.
But conversely, that can also result in a lack of confidence when such children are in a “situation where they weren’t surrounded by siblings”, and a resulting shyness, says Dr Andrew.
Of course, this kind of pack mentality can have its down sides, and Dr Andrew says that some children from larger family units cannot wait to break links and be their own person.
“I’ve heard stories of young people being tired of being called ‘one of the X family’ - there are more siblings to be compared to and they just can’t wait for a bit of space on their own.”
Dr Andrew says that temperaments of each individual sibling plays a major part in the level of happiness as well.
“Sometimes you can get families where they all gel really well and everyone sees themselves as being part of a very strong family unit, and are happy with that.”
But this may not always be the case, and personality clashes can lead to conflict.
However she says that even if a child’s relationship with the parents “is not that great, there will often be at least one strong sibling bond that they feel has been really positive and encouraging.”
She adds: “It’s all down to a sense of belonging.”