Having a large family will by definition deny the eldest children things that other kids get. Got eight kids (as a relative of mine has)
- Forget time with your friends, you're Mum's unpaid assistant
- Forget holidays, travel is impossible
- Forget ever going out as a family as you can't afford a mini bus and there is always so many really young ones it's just too much of a chore
- Forget anything you wan't to do, there's always a baby taking precedence.
- Forget anything nice, or fashionable - it's probably a hand me down
And so on and so on
Positives are claimed by the parents but if they took time to talk with their kids (which they don't) they would see some resentment.
Don't get me wrong they love their kids but it's spread thin at times and the youngest are barely going to know the eldest, so it's not like it's going to be that closely knit a unit.
That all rings true - my mother was the youngest of 13, and often said she never had much of a childhood/adolescence as her time was split between helping her parents around the house/farm (and, by her late teens, often looking after her ailing mother), and being forced to play "lookout" for older siblings while they had a cheeky smoke. Of course everything was hand-me-downs, and I don't think she'd have ever had anything like a holiday - the fact that they lived on a farm only added to it, as her dad was always working and couldn't take time off, not even on Christmas day. She got married very young, as it was really the only way she could get out of the family home without ruffling feathers.
I was one of 4 - two half-brothers, and a twin brother, with my half-brothers being ten and thirteen years older than me. I had a lot of hand-me-downs from them (and some of those since handed down to their kids!), and one of them was often drafted in for babysitting duty. Holidays were rarely anything more than a day trip, though occasionally there would be a long weekend, though never abroad until the half-brothers had both grown up and moved out.
The half-brother that normally did all the babysitting now has 4 kids of his own, ranging from 13 to 4, and has confided in me a few times about how difficult it is to find things to do for all of them when the age range is taken into account.
A friend's sister recently had triplets, having already got two young children - end result being that she has five kids, all of them under five years old. Oldest child is in a very posh, very expensive public school - but there's no way they can keep that up and afford it for the triplets.