On Monday, the Abele family eats pasta. On Tuesday, chicken. Wednesday is beef. Thursday is leftovers. Friday is pizza. Saturday, they eat out! Sunday, Dad grills. Back to pasta again.

In the Marks family, the key is quiche: Two giant ones which will last them for one week of hot breakfasts. They buy precracked eggs from restaurant-supply stores.

In the Forsee family, everyone has black socks. They go in a basket, unpaired, next to the shoes. Find a few that look approximately your size, and you’re good to go.

Systems make sense when you have a lot of kids. The Abeles have seven: six boys and one girl, ranging in age from twenty-one to ten. The Marks family only has three, but they’re hoping for five or six. The Forsee family already has six, the oldest a teenager and the youngest just a few months old.

“I learned very early on that kids need to know what to expect,” says Denise Abele, mom and director of Marriage and Family Life for St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Austin, Texas. Her family runs off a color-coded calendar populated with soccer carpools and cross-country practices. There’s a laundry schedule. There’s a chore schedule. On Sunday, they have a family meeting, complete with a whiteboard, to go over work commitments and travel and driving needs that the older kids can help out with. They identify who needs extra spiritual support: “Are there any big tests we need to pray for?”

Of course, the systems only go so far. “My husband and I have a high threshold for entropy,” says Colleen Forsee, who lives in the Washington metropolitan area. In addition to the black socks, she freezes Crock-Pot meals and keeps to some weekly rituals—Tuesday night Bible studies, pizza and board games on Saturdays. But she holds the routines lightly: “People go through life feeling very in control, and babies remind you of how much you’re not in control…. You capture really beautiful things in that disruption.” When we spoke, her newborn was in the NICU. Her three-year-old was “teetering” on dropping his nap. Forsee called me from her car, a fifteen-passenger Ford Transit with some of the seats removed so her kids can throw down a blanket and play Magna-Tiles when they’re taking pit stops on road trips.

In the middle of a conversation with Kendall Marks, whose family of five-planning-for-more lives in Colorado, a toddler came in needing cheese. A baby napped on her mother’s chest. “I feel like some people’s struggle with parenting is getting overstimulated. My struggle is getting bored,” Marks said. “So I actually enjoy parenting three more than one.” (In addition to having kids, she’s also starting a company with her husband: A “smarter dumb phone” AI assistant designed to cut out distractions for busy people like herself.)

The Levesque family—five kids, soon to be six, in central Arkansas—didn’t “initially plan on having a large family,” says mom Jessica. Outsiders still don’t understand how they manage. “It’s honestly because they all want to help take care of each other,” she says. (Their oldest is eight.)

But, of course, having lots of kids is also hard. One mom of four I spoke with remembered a time when she “hadn’t slept through the night in seven years” between potty training and nightmares and nursing. Another was opting out of costly extracurriculars for her kids to make ends meet. In that family, Dad drives an old car with taped-up windows.

Katie Layton of Sandy, Oregon, is a mom of four little boys: the oldest is seven, the youngest a little over a year and just diagnosed with epilepsy. The Laytons are trying to figure out next steps for his treatment alongside homeschooling plans and sports commitments. To an outsider, that might sound overwhelming. But this is what Katie has long wanted: “I was twenty-three when I had my oldest, which wasn’t that young to me. I always wanted to be a mom…. That was my calling in life.”

That calling is increasingly rare—or maybe, better put, it’s rare to fully realize it. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans favored larger families (which they defined as three or more children). Only two percent want to have five or six kids. Only two percent didn’t want any children at all. A healthy 44 percent wanted two.

But stated desires aside, the U.S. birthrate remains in a “historic slump,”  with an average of 1.6 births per woman per lifetime. According to new UN research, “the number of children born to the average woman worldwide has reached the lowest point ever recorded.” Most women—and by extension, most men—aren’t having the number of kids they reportedly want.

Explanations are legion, from the costs of housing and childcare to a lack of paid federal leave and car-seat laws. And some good things, like fewer teen pregnancies and more educational and career opportunities for women. There are also nebulous, hard-to-measure preferences like cultural shifts toward autonomy and convenience that could explain some of the trend. Now that child-rearing is an option, not a given, the decision to spend at least some of one’s time mopping up vomit and mediating tantrums can seem inconvenient, unpleasant, potentially catastrophic. Multiply that for every additional kid.

Economist and father of four Bryan Caplan trusts the data behind baby bonuses and loosened car-seat laws; he thinks policy changes would encourage more kids. But the real culprit, in his thinking, is helicopter parenting, which requires surveillance and overinvolvement that make parents and children alike miserable. (See his 2011 book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids for the full argument.)

Still, with the birthrate continuing to crater, Caplan thinks the problem is mostly inertia. Don’t have peers with kids? That makes it harder to imagine starting a family. “Normal human beings are very conformist,” he says. “One of the worst things for fertility is talking so much about how low fertility is; it normalizes it and makes people think, Okay, well that’s what everybody else is doing.” That’s partly why Caplan is “having so many kids when other people aren’t; I’m very nonconformist.”

Today’s big families live in a constant state of nonconformity. Even in religious contexts, where one might imagine a more explicit “be fruitful and multiply” ethic, there’s skepticism. Too much fruit is just weird.

Gallup’s definition of “large families” as three or more children is telling in itself. Consider how many families of five you grew up with a mere generation ago. Three kids wasn’t “large.” It was normal. And a generation before that, four wasn’t anything to look twice at, either.

Consider the difference between growing up in a household of five—with just two other siblings sharing toys and attention—versus being one of seven, like the Abeles. Losing actual big families—the kinds of families that require multipassenger vans and operate on a hand-me-down-jackets economy, where older kids fill their siblings’ sippy cups and simple food is cooked in enormous batches—is a loss of a culture. And a loss to our culture. Everyone else, with families of one or two or three or maybe four, just doesn’t know what to make of a home with that much chaos.

“The first thing that a lot of people said was, ‘Well, isn’t it irresponsible not to plan and be on birth control and limit your family size?’ There was a spirit of control,” says Denise Abele. She’s heard it all: “Oh, you’ve got seven kids, wow, you didn’t know how to control yourself.”

“We had kids close together, and people are like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re crazy,’” said Colleen Forsee, the mom calling from her car. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, maybe a little bit.’”

When you’re doing something different, the social stakes can be costly. Zach and Shelby Hendricks have five children—twin girls (age eleven), a son (nine), another daughter (four), and a youngest son (three). “When you walk into a space…we’re a lot,” says Zach, a worship pastor at a Seattle-area church. “You encounter lovely people,” but “you can tell we’re butting up against their capacity.”

Her children, Shelby says, are not an inconvenience—they’re a “gift through and through.” Even so, it can be hard not to feel sheepish when they get invited to someone else’s home for dinner, or to apologize as they drop everyone off for Sunday school.

Katy Harris, a mom of five in California with three kids now grown and out of the house, recalls one harrowing shopping trip when all of the children were little. They happily entertained themselves in the aisles, hopping on different colored squares of linoleum. “This lady came up to me, and I thought she was going to say something nice!… She looks at my kids with utter contempt, and looks at me, and says, ‘I feel so sorry for you.’”

It all raises the question: With friends and neighbors having fewer children, and strangers sometimes sneering in the grocery store, why are these big families—families in that two percent, who want to have more than three kids—choosing a different way? What’s at stake for them?

Some are motivated by a vision of the future. Caplan, the economist, grew up Catholic but raised his kids outside of organized religion. In fact, he says he never heard a pro-child message in church. “My mom, who was the Catholic parent…. She was very much in the school of ‘You’ll see, when you have kids, how horrible [it is].’”

Instead, his creed is the work of another pro-child economist, Julian Simon, who quotes a rabbi in his book The Ultimate Resource. “Who now dead could have been the next Einstein and Michelangelo?” the rabbi asks as he officiates a military ceremony, presumably lamenting the loss of young soldiers. That line “stuck with me quite a bit,” said Caplan. “The possibilities of what a person can be…the gift of life.”

Kendall Marks, who grew up as one of seven children, has a vision of the future too, though hers is more personal than world-historical. “I got to go to my grandpa’s ninetieth birthday, and he was surrounded by his eleven children and their spouses, forty-five grandchildren and their spouses, and at the time, ten or twenty great-grandchildren. It all added up to more than a hundred people that came from him and my grandma, either by marrying in or by being born,” she said. “He just sat there happily, surrounded by this massive family…. And we had a big dance party. We’re all dancing around him…. That is my life goal.”

For Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, a writer, rebbetzin, and mother of four living in Manhattan, having kids is about hope for the future. “I’ve seen a stark difference in the last two years in this [Orthodox] community’s attitudes towards having children post–October 7, very similar to post-Holocaust,” she says. “People are committed, frankly, to having more Jews…. We are literally at one bris or baby-naming a week, at least, if not more.”

Orthodox Jews and the Amish are two of the few demographics whose birthrates are on the rise. In Rabbi Simcha Weinstein’s Hasidic community in Brooklyn, his four children make him “an outlier in the other direction, to be honest—it’s not uncommon to go double figures.” (He wrote a book called The Case for Children back in 2012.) In short, for families in these communities, it’s not nonconformist to be a big family. There’s infrastructure. The culture of large families hasn’t been lost.

“You can bring a child to synagogue,” says Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who with her husband leads a congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “You go to an Orthodox wedding and you will see kids climbing off the rafters…. In our synagogue during services, adults are not allowed to speak, but children are welcome to make noise.”

Child-friendly services and celebrations make a difference. Still, while data does show that religious people in the United States who regularly attend services have higher fertility rates than nonreligious people, most committed Evangelicals, Catholics, or Reformed Jews aren’t having more than two or three kids. So what distinguishes those who are?

Big religious families don’t necessarily share beliefs about birth control or other health choices. (Nor do secular families—the Levesques in Arkansas, for example, reach for natural medicine before Tylenol and Motrin, and practice natural family planning between babies.) None of the religious families I spoke with espoused a stereotypically Quiverfull worldview—more kids means more favor from the Lord, a kind of cut-and-dry pronatal prosperity gospel.

What these large religious families do share—with their secular counterparts and, presumably, with their smaller-family coreligionists—is a fundamental, “image of God”–style value on human life, the sense that each individual child is unmistakably precious. (Caplan calls his view “pro-conception”; Levesque says kids are “a blessing.”)

The families also share a tolerance for sacrifice. “Jesus loved people so strongly that he was willing to be inconvenienced,” says Colleen Forsee. “We’re willing to be inconvenienced because this matters…. This is the crux of our faith. Love is costly.”

Chizhik-Goldschmidt agrees: “I think back to my life before children, and it was incredibly self-absorbed. And don’t get me wrong, I think back with nostalgia sometimes to that time in my life. But God willing, I’ll get back to that state, that time where I have more time to myself.”

Sacrifice doesn’t have to be masochistic. “We are able to parent a larger family and still get to do our work, do our hobbies,” says Marks, who describes her Christian faith as “orthogonal” to her desire to have a large family. (She wanted lots of kids even in college, when she identified as an atheist.)

The real commonality between big families? It’s less an ideology or a worldview than a temperament. A passion. They take out fleets of kayaks and form ready-made volleyball teams and play cards. They suffer. And they have fun.

These parents like spending time with children. Not every adult does, but they do. To them, kids are funny and imaginative and precocious. Bryan Caplan “much prefer[s] shopping with kids than doing it alone…. It’s like, okay, now I can talk to the baby” while pushing a cart through the aisles. Kendall Marks takes her kids on her hikes—a recent one was seven miles, 1,000 feet of elevation.

Last fall, Katy Harris lived Sherman Marks’s dream: a cabin vacation with her teenagers, grown kids and their spouses, and now grandchildren. They played games. Teams signed up to cook meals. There was always someone to watch the younger children while the adults played rounds of pickleball.

Denise Abele often opens her home to more people, any time one of her seven kids invites a friend or two to stay over for those chicken dinners: “It doesn’t bother us in the least to have twenty people in our house at any given moment.”

“My oldest is my best friend,” says Rabbi Weinstein. “We got to watch The Godfather movies together…honestly, the one thing better than watching Star Wars for the first time is watching it with your kids for the first time.”

Maybe these parents are the ones who always would have had more kids, countervailing social pressures and birthrate trendlines aside. Maybe they would have wanted crowded tables and cars in the 1950s, too. And in those days, maybe that would have meant not six kids, but eight or ten!

Or maybe not. Maybe the fact that what they’re doing is radical now gives it part of its appeal. Maybe there’s something satisfying in having a home overflowing with noise and color and sickness and growth and emotion. Shelby Hendricks, the mom of four in Washington, says it best. “The punk rock thing in this day and age,” she proclaims, “is to have big families.”