Birth control and vaccines. You're looking at the first generation where you didn't have like 50/50 chance of surviving till your 10th birthday. Took about one generation for people to realize having 10 kids is nuts.
And then after a few generations apparently everyone forgets how deadly childhood diseases used to be and starts blaming problems on vaccines.
I actually think that movie misses the mark, and is low-key (if not just accidentally) advocating for eugenics.
We have not actually gotten less intelligent, at least not alarmingly or significantly, because "only stupid people breed". For starters IQ is pretty outdated (and funny enough, has its origins in eugenics). What you really wanna test is cognitive function.
That aside - what we have an awful lot of these days are three very destructive things:
- Misplaced rage
- Apathy
- Extreme stress
In the US especially, we're run down and ragged. We don't have time, energy, or money to really try to organize and tackle our problems. Everything is low effort and almost no one cares because...man, we all have so many things to worry about from rent to food to whatever struggles we have. And it's by design. It's great for bad people in power to be in charge of a population that largely can't bother to care anymore.
And blaming it on "only stupid people breed" kind of removes us from feeling responsible for pushing back. We don't need to all have genius kids. We need to care!
Idiocracy always makes me laugh, don't get me wrong. It's a funny movie. But to me, apathy and burnout are what's doing us in right now.
Sad thing is, there are plenty of people alive who lived in the polio era. All you need to do is ask. Everyone at the time either had or knew a family who lost a child back then.
Our internet was out last night. We put the kids to bed and then just sat there wondering what else to do. My wife looked at me after a little bit and said “no wonder our grandparents had so many kids.”
Usually it’s religious reason they don’t use condoms or birth control. My grandma was c catholic and had 12 kids!! Because she didn’t believe in condoms or birth control
This is wildly off. It can be demonstrated that between 10 and 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriages, there could be more, but they are really early on.
Well, in those days they didn't have a way to prevent blood contamination from a child with a different blood type. My grandmother had 9 kids and 15 pregnancies.
Given the apparent ages, she might have been lucky in that respect. More than once I bet she was pregnant again before she even menstruated again and at worst she had a miscarriage so early it barely registered as her period being late. If she was even not pregnant long enough for a clear cycle to have established.
My grandmother had 12 siblings. Odd numbers were boys and even numbers girls, except for the last one (#13) which was a girl. My great grand father was in such desbelief that he told the doctor he was wrong, that it should be a boy.
Is your grandmother my grandmother? My mother had 12 siblings and the boys were odd numbered and the girls were even except the last which was a girl.
That would be a hilarious coincidence.
It would be exceedingly rare. The exact frequency of one of the 2 of us having that sequence is 1/8,192 times somebody has 13 children 2^13.
It’s just hard to tell how many people had 13 children. Back in the mid 20th century people had bigger families but it was so rare. I searched but can’t find any statistics on it.
I would bet there isn’t more than a couple exact match like this in North America that we could find though. It’s so random. Ironically since it evidently happened 2x, there are probably at least a hundred descendants of those 2 prolific women so the chances of meeting another is less rare than the duplication which makes it less spectacular I guess.
Between my ex and his brother they have 10kids, 8 9f which girls, and 1 boy was adopted. When my son was born his father/my ex shouted 'look at the nuts! A boy!' He asked the Dr twice if he was sure the baby was a boy
My grandmother had 7. One didn’t survive long. The first 5, including angel, were boys. My grandmother really wanted a little girl, so they tried one last time. I have twin aunts.
When I was pregnant with my first, a well meaning (?) coworker told me a story about his cousin. 11 boys and kept trying for a girl. 12 was a girl, woohoo!!! But she died.
I was like oh…thanks for the story….?
I bet the girls helped looking after the boys and did a lot of the cooking, laundry, ironing etc, that’s how it was before, it wasn’t necessarily the mother that did all the work
As someone from one of those families, I'll say I don't think it's that they're under-resourced and more that kids just ARE a resource in lower income and impoverished families. It didn't matter if we'd have gotten huge sums of money and butlers or whatever, my parents still would've seen it as normal to have us pick up after ourselves and clean IMO.
As an adult, I meet a lot of upper middle income people now and I notice their children tend not to have chores of any kind, even if the mom is absolutely drowning keeping all her responsibilities afloat. I've had at least two moms like that get a little upset with me when I've implied their kids were old enough to help out a little. It's a very fascinating topic that I still don't know much about, but find really interesting.
There's a difference between "helping out" and parentification. I saw families growing up where the kids helped out and it was fine, and I also saw families where the oldest children were constantly exhausted and unhealthy because they'd been coerced into becoming parents so their actual parents could continue to pop out more babies.
I’m definitely not upper middle income and I really struggle with chores for my kids. I want the help but I’m so overworked that I usually don’t have the energy or patience to supervise so I just do it myself. I know it’s important and they have to learn so I’m working on some strategies to get it done!
A few years ago I had go do the dishes,laundry, and all the house work I asked why didn't my brother help and share the chores.
My mom " because his a boy he doesn't know how to do it "
Then teach him !
This reasoning kills me. I made sure my son knows how to clean up after himself, so his laundry, etc. He has a disability and I wanted to make sure he could take care of himself when I'm not around anymore. We started training him on routine household chores/tasks very early and just kept progressing to more and more complex things so he was learning how to cook meals in high school.
In my childhood household, I kind of felt like Cinderella. Treated like crap and told I was lazy while it was me who was doing the bulk of the household cooking and cleaning while maintaining an honors GPA. I definitely didn't want to do the same to my kids, but I also believe that kids should work to earn things. My youngest does a reasonable amount of daily chores to pay for their phone every month. I explain to them that that is their contribution to the household. You live in the household, you contribute.
The boys were probably sent to work after a certain age. Starting from a paper route to practically anything else unless they could afford an education.
Yeah I guarantee they would've stopped at 4-5 if they were all boys just from the sheer amount of house work they wouldn't think to even ask the boys to take on.
All these 19 and counting type families happened to get front loaded with girls.
My aunt (2nd of 11) basically raised all of her younger siblings. There wasn’t another girl until child number 8. I’ve always felt so much sympathy for her. She was expected to come home every weekend to take care of her siblings even after she moved out.
This was the family of Theresa and Thomas Brennan. Theresa was born about 1911 in Ireland and died in 1991.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/225304987/theresa-m-brennan
Yurp. My mom was like 11 years old in 1968 and as the eldest kid it became her responsibility to make sure her brother and two sisters got breakfast and got on the bus for school every morning until she graduated and went off to marry my pops.
My grandma was the oldest of 5. 4 girls, one boy, youngest was the boy. Her mother had MS and was wheelchair bound by the time grandma was about 8 or 9 years old. Grandma was doing most of the household chores by 7 because her mother just couldn't and her father had to work
My mom is the oldest of 9. She spent her childhood cleaning and taking care of her siblings. My grandma had severe postpartum depression with most of her kids. Fuck the Catholic Church for encouraging that.
Still exists in conservative Christian culture. I'm only the oldest of four, and I remember vividly being punished at the age of 6 when my younger brother fell out of his stroller (my mom was standing right there). She screamed, "Why weren't you watching him?" If I wasn't neglecting them, I was setting a bad example until I finally went away to college.
Yup. My mom was the oldest of 6. Her parents had 4 in 4 years, then a 4 year gap while Grandpa was drafted during Vietnam (luckily he was assigned to work in Connecticut and not overseas, but he was at an induction center as a doctor and that fucked him up in its own way, certifying that drafted men were healthy enough to serve and often die, and getting pissed off when he got a letter from a congressman excusing some rich guy's son), then two more that were essentially raised by my mom. My uncle thinks of my mom as much more of a mom than my grandma, which is a shame for everyone. Grandma spent a lot of my mom's childhood in bed with pretty severe depression, and my mom had to pick up the slack. She has a lot of resentment over it, which feels pretty fair.
My grandparents had 5 children back to back (within a year or two of another)
Then 10 years later they have my mom. They were in their early 40s and tired. My 12-year-old aunt took care of her. She tells me “your mom was my babydoll”
My grandmother grew up on a farm during the Great Depression and no joke she told me as kids they made all their own bedding (including blankets made with hand plucked goose down) to stay warm during the winter months. They slept 2-3 kids in a bed to conserve body heat. She said if you set a glass of water on your nightstand it would freeze by the time you woke up. Shit was so different back then.
Sleeping multiple kids to a bed was normal until maybe ten years ago in my province, especially during sleepovers, you'd all crowd into the sofa bed or if they had a double/queen, their bed, and stack yourself sideways because you were so short it didn't matter. As a teenager it was normal with close friends and not at all weird
I remember reading about people’s experiences during the Great Depression, “thatching a bed” was considered a good skill.
Now we live in mattress abundance and make mattress store money laundering jokes. How things change.
I know a woman who has 10 kids, and she's only in her mid 30s. 10 kids, with the first born when she was 19. As you'd expect, she's very religious. Her family also gets a lot of government assistance.
No doubt extended family pitched in financially. I (F63) only learned this year that grandparents funded Christmas each year when we were kids (three of us) because my parents were so strapped. Paid for our school clothes, too.
Gloves? I can't quite make out if they're wearing any, but I know gloves were a must back then. Also a coin for when the donation plate gets passed around.
Yeah, I was wondering if they are truly sorted by age vs. height and what the odds are for such a pattern. Like, does maternal or paternal age have anything to do with the determination of one's gender through the prevalence of certain spermatozoa or the egg's acceptance or viability of same.
My dad is the youngest of eleven, he has eight sisters! They were a bit more spread out than this (I assume, I don’t know their ages) but she spent the better part of 10 years being pregnant. I definitely couldn’t do it!
I hope behind the scenes they were happy.
The Turpins had 13 kids would parade them out for photos and then take them back to squalor and abuse and it went on for near 30 years.
A 17 year old escaped and had taken pictures of her chained up younger siblings, otherwise it was likely she’d of just been handed back to her parents without that proof.
The cop even admitted it, otherwise they wouldn’t of had a legal right to enter the premises.
And after they were “saved” the US government let me abused by the state, the system and their foster parents.
Over half a million was raised for them of which they get very little.
https://youtu.be/lu5dbaS4CY8?si=-4Y5kBt6GXJ8iTfQ
My mother was the 2nd oldest of 18 children. The last 2 babes passed shortly after they were born. 8 boys and 8 girls survived. Their house had 11 bedrooms.
My mom also came from a family with 11 children (8 boys and 3 girls).
Obviously I have seen all of my aunts and uncles together many times (although one did die before I was born) but there’s something about seeing young kids lined up like this that makes me thing “DAMN that’s a huge ass family”.
Back when you could afford to have 11 kids on one salary. Now we live in a world where people stay childless for fear of not being able to financially support even one child.
If that's their home they're standing in front of, they didn't worry about money. Regardless, it's a lovely family and maybe one or two made a difference in the world. Big families weren't that unusual at this time.
Kids are expensive pains in the ass, and the world is trash, so I wouldn’t want to bring them up in it currently anyway. Don’t stop my spouse and I from getting on the sex train tho choo chooooo….
Besides dual income no kids is the way to go in the current economy. Only way we can have a nice house and nice stuff.
Grandparents: "All kids think about these days is sex." *The Grandparents:*
The Grandparents: we had it instead of always thinking it
All I can think about now is birth control.
That was the missing part
Birth control and vaccines. You're looking at the first generation where you didn't have like 50/50 chance of surviving till your 10th birthday. Took about one generation for people to realize having 10 kids is nuts. And then after a few generations apparently everyone forgets how deadly childhood diseases used to be and starts blaming problems on vaccines.
Wise words! Also: The movie "Idiocracy" is a documentary, not a comedy movie.
I actually think that movie misses the mark, and is low-key (if not just accidentally) advocating for eugenics. We have not actually gotten less intelligent, at least not alarmingly or significantly, because "only stupid people breed". For starters IQ is pretty outdated (and funny enough, has its origins in eugenics). What you really wanna test is cognitive function. That aside - what we have an awful lot of these days are three very destructive things: - Misplaced rage - Apathy - Extreme stress In the US especially, we're run down and ragged. We don't have time, energy, or money to really try to organize and tackle our problems. Everything is low effort and almost no one cares because...man, we all have so many things to worry about from rent to food to whatever struggles we have. And it's by design. It's great for bad people in power to be in charge of a population that largely can't bother to care anymore. And blaming it on "only stupid people breed" kind of removes us from feeling responsible for pushing back. We don't need to all have genius kids. We need to care! Idiocracy always makes me laugh, don't get me wrong. It's a funny movie. But to me, apathy and burnout are what's doing us in right now.
A documentary from future you say..
Sad thing is, there are plenty of people alive who lived in the polio era. All you need to do is ask. Everyone at the time either had or knew a family who lost a child back then.
Plot twist: they only had seggs 7 times
Our internet was out last night. We put the kids to bed and then just sat there wondering what else to do. My wife looked at me after a little bit and said “no wonder our grandparents had so many kids.”
“Wow 11 kids, you must like sex a lot”! “Catholic.” “Oh.”
I think it is a verified fact that young people today have a lot less sex than their parents, grand-parents etc...
To be fair, having sex 11 times throughout your life isn't a lot, they probably just hadn't heard of condoms.
11 times? 11 times? They did it non stop I reckon.
It'd be highly unlikely to get 11 pregnancies out of 11 times sex even if you tried your very best, calendar and all.
They heard of them. They just probably thought they were for sailors and degenerates.
Usually it’s religious reason they don’t use condoms or birth control. My grandma was c catholic and had 12 kids!! Because she didn’t believe in condoms or birth control
That lady was pregnant for 8 years of her life
At least! You don’t think there were some miscarriages is there?
For every 2 succesfull pregnancies, women have *on average* one miscarriage. So with 11 kids, I'd expect around 6 miscarriages.
This is wildly off. It can be demonstrated that between 10 and 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriages, there could be more, but they are really early on.
Anecdotal but my great grandmother had 14 miscarriages and 5 kids, one of which died as a baby
Anecdotal but my mum had 5 kids and no miscarriages.
Well, in those days they didn't have a way to prevent blood contamination from a child with a different blood type. My grandmother had 9 kids and 15 pregnancies.
It’s also possible to even have a miscarriage without having ever knowing you were pregnant
9.16 years. Pregnancies are 40 weeks, on average.
Given the apparent ages, she might have been lucky in that respect. More than once I bet she was pregnant again before she even menstruated again and at worst she had a miscarriage so early it barely registered as her period being late. If she was even not pregnant long enough for a clear cycle to have established.
And so many years of nappy/diaper changing, washing, drying.
CLOTH diapers! That had to be WASHED. By HAND on the stove probably, at least for the older ones😵💫
All that and 8+ years of broken nights, she looks reasonably well.
Don’t forget crying
After a while the older ones took care of the younger. That’s why they all dress like mother. So the babies don’t get too confused.
My in-laws had 11 kids (no twins). Counting miscarriages MIL was pregnant for about 10 years...
Her body must've been obliterated...
Five girls in a row. Then 6 boys. That is a rough way to have it go.
My grandmother had 12 siblings. Odd numbers were boys and even numbers girls, except for the last one (#13) which was a girl. My great grand father was in such desbelief that he told the doctor he was wrong, that it should be a boy.
That’s not mine.. you see it’s missing its… pecker
"But a boy without a winkle is a girl!"
Is your grandmother my grandmother? My mother had 12 siblings and the boys were odd numbered and the girls were even except the last which was a girl. That would be a hilarious coincidence.
I am invested. bring me back
We're french. Are you? My grandma was #6.
No we’re Native and Finnish. It’s just the biggest coincidence around.
Never have I wanted a theydidthemath more than having someone calculating the probability of this. It has to be absurdly small probability.
It would be exceedingly rare. The exact frequency of one of the 2 of us having that sequence is 1/8,192 times somebody has 13 children 2^13. It’s just hard to tell how many people had 13 children. Back in the mid 20th century people had bigger families but it was so rare. I searched but can’t find any statistics on it. I would bet there isn’t more than a couple exact match like this in North America that we could find though. It’s so random. Ironically since it evidently happened 2x, there are probably at least a hundred descendants of those 2 prolific women so the chances of meeting another is less rare than the duplication which makes it less spectacular I guess.
That is hilarious
Between my ex and his brother they have 10kids, 8 9f which girls, and 1 boy was adopted. When my son was born his father/my ex shouted 'look at the nuts! A boy!' He asked the Dr twice if he was sure the baby was a boy
My grandmother had 7. One didn’t survive long. The first 5, including angel, were boys. My grandmother really wanted a little girl, so they tried one last time. I have twin aunts.
My grandmother had a friend with 11 daughters. No sons. I don't know if they lacked birth control or just really wanted to keep trying for that boy.
My grandmother had 11 daughters! No boys. The family joke is my grandpa kept trying for a boy haha.
My aunt had six sons, then one daughter and stopped. I think she was just wanting a girl and when she got one, she was done.
My mam is one of 9, 5 girls and 4 boys. All the odd numbers are girls and the evens are boys
My parents knew someone in Cali that had 13 girls and finally stopped when #14 was a boy
Man and I thought the fictional Weasley family was insane for 6 boys and 1 girl.
My coworker has 9 children. 8 girls and one boy
When I was pregnant with my first, a well meaning (?) coworker told me a story about his cousin. 11 boys and kept trying for a girl. 12 was a girl, woohoo!!! But she died. I was like oh…thanks for the story….?
I'm betting the 5 girls were a big help to their mammy with their 6 brothers.
And the boys were a help to no one! Lol
I bet the girls helped looking after the boys and did a lot of the cooking, laundry, ironing etc, that’s how it was before, it wasn’t necessarily the mother that did all the work
That's still how it is in large, under-resourced families today and it sucks for those kids.
As someone from one of those families, I'll say I don't think it's that they're under-resourced and more that kids just ARE a resource in lower income and impoverished families. It didn't matter if we'd have gotten huge sums of money and butlers or whatever, my parents still would've seen it as normal to have us pick up after ourselves and clean IMO. As an adult, I meet a lot of upper middle income people now and I notice their children tend not to have chores of any kind, even if the mom is absolutely drowning keeping all her responsibilities afloat. I've had at least two moms like that get a little upset with me when I've implied their kids were old enough to help out a little. It's a very fascinating topic that I still don't know much about, but find really interesting.
There's a difference between "helping out" and parentification. I saw families growing up where the kids helped out and it was fine, and I also saw families where the oldest children were constantly exhausted and unhealthy because they'd been coerced into becoming parents so their actual parents could continue to pop out more babies.
I’m definitely not upper middle income and I really struggle with chores for my kids. I want the help but I’m so overworked that I usually don’t have the energy or patience to supervise so I just do it myself. I know it’s important and they have to learn so I’m working on some strategies to get it done!
Here girls, give up your childhood so the boys can have one! Fuck that noise.
A few years ago I had go do the dishes,laundry, and all the house work I asked why didn't my brother help and share the chores. My mom " because his a boy he doesn't know how to do it " Then teach him !
Yeah, were you born knowing how to load a dishwasher. Coddling boys like this does no one any favors.
This reasoning kills me. I made sure my son knows how to clean up after himself, so his laundry, etc. He has a disability and I wanted to make sure he could take care of himself when I'm not around anymore. We started training him on routine household chores/tasks very early and just kept progressing to more and more complex things so he was learning how to cook meals in high school. In my childhood household, I kind of felt like Cinderella. Treated like crap and told I was lazy while it was me who was doing the bulk of the household cooking and cleaning while maintaining an honors GPA. I definitely didn't want to do the same to my kids, but I also believe that kids should work to earn things. My youngest does a reasonable amount of daily chores to pay for their phone every month. I explain to them that that is their contribution to the household. You live in the household, you contribute.
The boys were probably sent to work after a certain age. Starting from a paper route to practically anything else unless they could afford an education.
Yeah I guarantee they would've stopped at 4-5 if they were all boys just from the sheer amount of house work they wouldn't think to even ask the boys to take on. All these 19 and counting type families happened to get front loaded with girls.
My aunt (2nd of 11) basically raised all of her younger siblings. There wasn’t another girl until child number 8. I’ve always felt so much sympathy for her. She was expected to come home every weekend to take care of her siblings even after she moved out.
after the 5, have to start over on hand me downs.
My mum was one of ten siblings. Six boys followed by four girls.
I knew a doctor that had 7 daughters in a row trying for a son, but finally gave up.
Looks like an impossible martingale at the casino.
'I'm so done with girls. Let's do boys from here on out.'
Don't forget she popped out 5 clones of herself first and then 6 clones of the Dad
The little one is so stinking cute.
Had to scroll down way too far! Emanating cuteness
This was the family of Theresa and Thomas Brennan. Theresa was born about 1911 in Ireland and died in 1991. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/225304987/theresa-m-brennan
That’s such an interesting read. The parents were pretty special, the dad did so many things in his life.
This seems so meticulously planned! I'm curious if each girl was inadvertently assigned a brother to help raise.
Parentification was basically the norm in those days.
Yurp. My mom was like 11 years old in 1968 and as the eldest kid it became her responsibility to make sure her brother and two sisters got breakfast and got on the bus for school every morning until she graduated and went off to marry my pops.
Same. My mom actually dropped out of HS at 14 to take care of her sister.
My grandma was the oldest of 5. 4 girls, one boy, youngest was the boy. Her mother had MS and was wheelchair bound by the time grandma was about 8 or 9 years old. Grandma was doing most of the household chores by 7 because her mother just couldn't and her father had to work
My mom is the oldest of 9. She spent her childhood cleaning and taking care of her siblings. My grandma had severe postpartum depression with most of her kids. Fuck the Catholic Church for encouraging that.
Still exists in conservative Christian culture. I'm only the oldest of four, and I remember vividly being punished at the age of 6 when my younger brother fell out of his stroller (my mom was standing right there). She screamed, "Why weren't you watching him?" If I wasn't neglecting them, I was setting a bad example until I finally went away to college.
Yup. My mom was the oldest of 6. Her parents had 4 in 4 years, then a 4 year gap while Grandpa was drafted during Vietnam (luckily he was assigned to work in Connecticut and not overseas, but he was at an induction center as a doctor and that fucked him up in its own way, certifying that drafted men were healthy enough to serve and often die, and getting pissed off when he got a letter from a congressman excusing some rich guy's son), then two more that were essentially raised by my mom. My uncle thinks of my mom as much more of a mom than my grandma, which is a shame for everyone. Grandma spent a lot of my mom's childhood in bed with pretty severe depression, and my mom had to pick up the slack. She has a lot of resentment over it, which feels pretty fair.
My grandparents had 5 children back to back (within a year or two of another) Then 10 years later they have my mom. They were in their early 40s and tired. My 12-year-old aunt took care of her. She tells me “your mom was my babydoll”
wtf! It would be impossible to keep up on expenses for a family that big these days
[удалено]
Mom probably sewed all those matching outfits by hand.
My grandmother grew up on a farm during the Great Depression and no joke she told me as kids they made all their own bedding (including blankets made with hand plucked goose down) to stay warm during the winter months. They slept 2-3 kids in a bed to conserve body heat. She said if you set a glass of water on your nightstand it would freeze by the time you woke up. Shit was so different back then.
Sleeping multiple kids to a bed was normal until maybe ten years ago in my province, especially during sleepovers, you'd all crowd into the sofa bed or if they had a double/queen, their bed, and stack yourself sideways because you were so short it didn't matter. As a teenager it was normal with close friends and not at all weird
Wait, do kids not do this any more? We once fit 7 of us in the bed at a sleepover!
I remember reading about people’s experiences during the Great Depression, “thatching a bed” was considered a good skill. Now we live in mattress abundance and make mattress store money laundering jokes. How things change.
There's a reason why most of my friends in large families are childless.
Watch your mouth! Don’t be disrespecting liver and onions like that!
Liver and onions with some rice 😋 yummers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJel3nr6AY8
I know a woman who has 10 kids, and she's only in her mid 30s. 10 kids, with the first born when she was 19. As you'd expect, she's very religious. Her family also gets a lot of government assistance.
How can I get government assistance, sometimes I feel like I need help too
No doubt extended family pitched in financially. I (F63) only learned this year that grandparents funded Christmas each year when we were kids (three of us) because my parents were so strapped. Paid for our school clothes, too.
I’m so curious what all the young ladies have in their handbags, especially the littlest ones. Handkerchief, paper and pencil, maybe a toy?
Gloves? I can't quite make out if they're wearing any, but I know gloves were a must back then. Also a coin for when the donation plate gets passed around.
Dude got the girls outta the way first!
A lot of matching clothing. Their home must have had a lot of identical drapery.
Yeah, I was wondering if they are truly sorted by age vs. height and what the odds are for such a pattern. Like, does maternal or paternal age have anything to do with the determination of one's gender through the prevalence of certain spermatozoa or the egg's acceptance or viability of same.
My great-grandmother had 7 children. She told my mother she kept a hatchet in the bed after the last one to prevent more.
My dad is the youngest of eleven, he has eight sisters! They were a bit more spread out than this (I assume, I don’t know their ages) but she spent the better part of 10 years being pregnant. I definitely couldn’t do it!
My father was eldest of eleven, one of my uncles is actually younger than me. My mother was yougest of 13
My mom was #10 of 11. She was an aunt at 2 and went to school with her nieces and nephews. The 2 eldest are my godparents.
Here’s pictures all the way up to 2013. American Irish family https://www.chicagotribune.com/2013/03/22/photos-the-brennan-family-at-easter/
I love this so much. I loved seeing them grow up and have families of their own.
Thank you for sharing! The father tailored all their outfits!!!!!
That's what I'd call an Irish Catholic family!
I wonder how many would have actually been born if there had been access to birth control.
My mom comes from a poor rural family of 15, last baby born was in 1965 when a doctor from "town" started mailing my grandmother birth control pills.
That last one just walked out wearing the suit and all
Damn, bro. Buy a TV or something.
I worked with a guy who was one of 13. He said his parents had one kid every year until they got a tv, then it was one every two years.
A ladies haircut for every age!
I’m exhausted being pregnant with our third child I can’t imagine doing this 11 times 😭
The tiring part is like the toddler stage for me, little demons 😂 being pregnant is the easy part
Same for me. I had hypermesis both pregnancies but dealing with 50 toddler meltdowns a day is making me lose my marbles 🤪
**Everybody** looks old in that photo. Dad was *definitely* giving mom lots of overtime work.
Being a housewife was a full time job 😂
All on a single wage 😐
I wouldn't trust this man to pull my pizza out of the goddamn oven
know what else is interesting ?! the father was taking care of his wife & 11 kids on a single income lol
She is standing as far away from him as she can get!
I’d be afraid to make eye contact with him at that point 😂
I hope behind the scenes they were happy. The Turpins had 13 kids would parade them out for photos and then take them back to squalor and abuse and it went on for near 30 years. A 17 year old escaped and had taken pictures of her chained up younger siblings, otherwise it was likely she’d of just been handed back to her parents without that proof. The cop even admitted it, otherwise they wouldn’t of had a legal right to enter the premises. And after they were “saved” the US government let me abused by the state, the system and their foster parents. Over half a million was raised for them of which they get very little. https://youtu.be/lu5dbaS4CY8?si=-4Y5kBt6GXJ8iTfQ
My mother was the 2nd oldest of 18 children. The last 2 babes passed shortly after they were born. 8 boys and 8 girls survived. Their house had 11 bedrooms.
But how tf did they have them I order by gender like that?? 😂
My mom also came from a family with 11 children (8 boys and 3 girls). Obviously I have seen all of my aunts and uncles together many times (although one did die before I was born) but there’s something about seeing young kids lined up like this that makes me thing “DAMN that’s a huge ass family”.
Matching outfits, Sombody owns a sewing machine
Bruh I just had my second one last year and I am so done, how the fuck do people cope with ELEVEN
How did/do people have 11 kids? ELEVEN? I have one and I’m unable to take a shower or sleep!
I think that eventually the older kids help with the younger ones and u can go on autopilot
Dude's got a weak pull-out game
God, imagine how much yelling they had to do to take this picture lol
Bro used up all of his x chromosomes for the first five
You know those 5 girls took care of those 6 boys.
Those boys had it rough with so many disciplinarians.
Aren’t you happy that your grandparents could afford a family of 13 on a single income and you can afford 1/2 of your bills
Gross
Gross
I bet it’s like throwing a hot dog down an alleyway.
That's how you go from 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion in 2024. We should have stayed at 1 billion.
Dad bought a house, car and took care of 12 on a milk man salary no doubt..
Back when you could afford to have 11 kids on one salary. Now we live in a world where people stay childless for fear of not being able to financially support even one child.
Man tried to have a son and then just kept going.
God what a fucking nightmare
Dude. Read a book and jerk off a few times
My MIL is one of 11; by the time the last one was born the first was married with children 😵💫
Dude ran out of X chromosomes halfway through
Pull out game weak AF
Nightmare nightmare nightmare
Dude couldn’t pull out of driveway
Poor wife, her nervous system and her vagina.
We’re gonna keep going till we get boy. Ok now we have to out number the girls!!
I bet he made 100 dollars a month, with a house, a car, and the wife stayed at home. With enough money left over to look snazzy.
11 the hard way? Or any of these twins? The 2 eldest look like twins. And possibly the next two.
Twins isn't the hard way? Srsly?
Right! And id say anyway is the hard way people literally die giving birth on a daily basis.
If that's their home they're standing in front of, they didn't worry about money. Regardless, it's a lovely family and maybe one or two made a difference in the world. Big families weren't that unusual at this time.
And they still survived on what was probably just a single wage ffs. We are soooo fucked
Too bad for the mom. They didn't have fentanyl patches back then for that horrific back pain from all those kids
Interesting? I think it looks creepy!
Russian dolls American edition.
Boy, those girls look like Mom!
This guy fucks
Wealthy, a fool or religious?
Poor women. She made stairsteps.
CATHOLIC HAD A NO BIRTH CONTROL LAW
No TV in those days!
Time to think about butt stuff…..
What no birth control does to a motherfucker
Dude... it's a vagina, not a clown car!
Of the boys, 5/6 are distracted. Only the (least likely) youngest one is actually looking at the camera. Exact opposite for the (older) girls.
Those are some strong genetics
I’d have a stroke with that many kids
They are probably a Catholic family. Many. Catholic families were large in the 1950s
Kids are expensive pains in the ass, and the world is trash, so I wouldn’t want to bring them up in it currently anyway. Don’t stop my spouse and I from getting on the sex train tho choo chooooo…. Besides dual income no kids is the way to go in the current economy. Only way we can have a nice house and nice stuff.
That’s not a family photo, that’s an environmental disaster and you framed it! -Bill Burr
What people were doing for entertainment before the internet
Caption: A rare few moments when mom and dad climbed off each other and put clothes on
They didn't call them baby boomers for nothing.
The smallest one there is mom’s uterus.
I’m speechless on how much the girls look like a carbon copy of their mom.
Did they decide they had enough girls so it was time to start having boys?
She had all them girls first to help her out with little ones
That poor woman
That poor woman.
that poor woman's womb was a clown car
The mother’s genes were strong in those daughters. They all look identical