People with 6+ kids - how do you manage living arrangements at home?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Benjinho
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
We had several arrangements growing up. Ultimately, my parents built a three bedroom house, but added two rooms in the basement as we got older. When we were younger, we didn’t spent much time in our rooms anyway, so it was better to have a large play space in the basement. As we got older, they cut the rooms smaller so that some of us could have our own rooms as teens.
 
Yeah, my mom is one of 6 and they lived in a house with 2 tiny bedrooms and one bathroom. The larger of the two bedrooms could fit a queen bed and a dresser with only enough room to crawl into the bed from the foot.

Of course, the oldest was 18 when the youngest was born, so I’m not sure there was a time when they were all there at the same time. And they had a walk-in attic and a basement that they were able to convert into bedroom space. Otherwise, I’m not sure how they could have managed.

I knew a girl who was one of 11 and they had a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom house. As with many of the above replies, it was divided as girls’ room, boys’ room, parents’ room (with babies). The girls’ room had two bunk beds with a 5th bed that went across between the two top bunks (so that they could put dressers beneath it. You have to get creative.

Generally speaking, though, our culture today is much more focused on accumulating “stuff”, and that stuff takes up a lot of space. When it comes down to it, we don’t need nearly as much space as we think we do.
 
Where my husband grew up, most families had one room, maybe two at most, an outdoor kitchen, an outhouse, and an outdoor shower. Everyone regardless of age, gender or family size sleeps on either woven palm mats on the ground or beds pushed together. It isn’t unusual for families to have 8+ kids. Culture and societal expectations have so much to do with what families find acceptable.

It is best to find what you personally as a couple are willing and able to make work. Don’t let outside voices dictate what you need or should be doing. As long as there is no abuse or neglect, there are many different ways to raise a happy and successful family.
 
lot of answers are from older times… Now conditions changed and people has more clothes, materials goods etc cultural norms too. It is not the same now to have 4 kids in a same sized bedroom than before.
 
Somewhat true. Many families make it work very well though in modern times. The family in my parish that just had numbers 11 and 12 for instance are in a 3 bedroom house. It is quite small and they have 8 at home still. It is girls room with 4, boys room with 4. Another family has 10 (5 girls, 5 boys) all living at home. They also own a 3 bedroom home.
 
I am the oldest of six. We had a 6-bedroom house with 2.5 bathrooms (the 0.5 was the master bath and it had a shower, sink, and toilet only - no bathtub). There wasn’t any bathroom-hogging issue, for whatever reason. Maybe it was because only two of us were girls and we had a mirrored dresser.

We lived in Brazil when I was 12. That was a 4-bedroom house with 3 bathrooms. One bedroom we kept as a guest bedroom. My sister and I shared a room. All four boys had one bedroom, but it was the largest and they had two twin beds and a set of bunk beds.
 
It’s true about stuff. I saw a family on TV once that were minimalists and lived in a camper with three children. They did have a storage unit for out of season clothes and things, but both of the two older kids had a laundry basket that fit under the bottom bunk and that’s the space they had for their clothing and shoes. They had a “closet” that was about the size of a high schooler’s locker for their toys and school supplies. The baby had a pack n play with a changing table attachment and all of her clothes and things fit in a plastic tote underneath. I don’t even get how that’s possible! My babies went through so many clothes in a week and I assume this family doesn’t even have a washing machine!
 
(name removed by moderator), if it was good enough for the Brady Bunch, it’s good enough for all the rest of us!

I have Catholics friends growing up who had many siblings, and I remember that they had four daughters in one bedroom and four sons in another bedroom! I thought that looked fun! (I just had one brother and we each had our own room).
 
Pattylt said:
I want to know is how do you keep all the toothbrushes straight? They don’t come in that many colors!
Click to expand...
Mix two bands of colored electrical tape around the handle. A “standard pack” has red, blue, green, yellow and white, so if you discount white you get up to 16 combinations (10 if you avoid color sequence confusion). 😉

While only a partial joke, it does raise the first way to raise a large family; be flexible and be creative in problem solving.

To the OP question, we have 3 bedrooms (in addition to the master bedroom) with 7 kids. Each bedroom has bunk beds (2 of them are single over double). While each kid has an “assigned” room in theory, we really have 3 kids that always sleep in the same bed and 4 floaters that change rooms at random. When you get a large number of kids you get to a point that you don’t care if they are in “their bed”. As long as they are quiet and sleeping, life is good. 😃
 
Peeps said:
I have Catholics friends growing up who had many siblings, and I remember that they had four daughters in one bedroom and four sons in another bedroom! I thought that looked fun! (I just had one brother and we each had our own room).
Click to expand...
I can tell you, for the most part, that kind of a set up is not fun. Especially, if as a child, you are an introvert. The lack of privacy on that level is a trauma that will stay with you for life unless you are keenly aware of it and deal with it as an adult.

The grass is always greener on the other side, I guess.
 
Last edited:
It was fine with my family growing up. We shared a bed not just a room. What is not fun about it? The only people I know who feel that way are the ones that never shared a room until marriage. The rest of us enjoyed our lives sharing rooms and space with the people we loved. Even sharing a bed and only having one bathroom (5 girls and 3 boys growing up), we had plenty of quiet spots we could go to if needed. Bedrooms are for sleeping, not hang out play areas.
 
I wonder why you require advice from people with 6 or more. This feels a little horse before the cart.
 
13pollitos said:
It was fine with my family growing up. We shared a bed not just a room. What is not fun about it? The only people I know who feel that way are the ones that never shared a room until marriage. The rest of us enjoyed our lives sharing rooms and space with the people we loved. Even sharing a bed and only having one bathroom (5 girls and 3 boys growing up), we had plenty of quiet spots we could go to if needed. Bedrooms are for sleeping, not hang out play areas.
Click to expand...
I grew up in a big family and there was a lot of bedroom sharing. I have no objection to sharing with another person. When four people are sharing a bedroom that is reasonable for two, problems arise. As a more private person, that component of my personality was comletely disregarded. So, for example, when I got my period everyone in the family knew. Not only did they know, they knew when I had an accident on the sheets as a result of it. That is just one example. There were no private one-on-one conversations to be had, so there was a lack of healthy intimacy. Again, it impacted emotional growth and development and delayed certain aspects of that until I was able to escape and live on my own in a reasonable environment with one roomate.

I realize living like that is possible. I am just saying, for everyone, it isn’t a huge ball of fun like some here portray. I would advise all of us, as parents, to realize these choices can have negative impacts. No two children come in the same package.
 
Yes in many ways it is. However, if a young couple is deciding to marry with no intentions of controlling their fertility, and they are not interested in fertility awareness, chances are pretty high they will have 6 or more. It’s also becoming more common again in society in general to have larger families. At least in certain regions of the country. So if a couple is deciding they would like to have as many babies as God sends them (as stated in the OP but limited knowledge of how large families actually function, it is good to seek advice in advance. They may need to change course slightly instead of plunging straight in. Or they could decide it is most certainly within their capabilities.

I would prefer they take it slow, one baby at a time and not fret for their future. I think it is wise to look ahead with knowledge gained from those who have been there already though.
 
My Dad built a number of carefully crafted double-bunk beds, with a removable safety board to be slotted in for the top bunks.
 
Couldn’t you just have private conversations somewhere else beside the bedrooms? I never minded sharing a room with my siblings, but if I needed alone time, I just went for a walk or hung out in the basement. If we wanted to have a private conversation, we would go for a walk/bikeride/drive to Quik Trip and get a soda. I do remember some awkwardness as we went through puberty, more from sharing a bathroom than bedrooms, but nothing any of us was traumatized by. The biggest issue I remember was trying to have private time on the phone. Nowadays, kids all have their own phones, or at least can borrow a cellphone from their parents and go make a call in the garage.
 
My parents had an attitude that there was no need for privacy. The environment reflected that.
 
That’s unfortunate, but I think its certainly possibly to share a room with a few siblings while still respecting privacy. Maybe the issue wasn’t sharing space, but lack of respect?
 
My siblings were actually very respectful. It was my parents. No respect for privacy, and especially for kids. Had no idea about what was normal, in that regard. I think they did the best that they knew to do, though. None of us is perfect. But that is why I raise it as a concern when I see these threads talking about how great it is to pack 6 kids in a two-bedroom house. It is not without consequences. And sometimes negative ones.
 
Last edited:
JMMJ said:
It is not without consequences. And sometimes negative ones.
Click to expand...
It is unfair to compare a home where parents are disrespectful to a home in which parents do care. That doesn’t have to do with number of occupants or amount of space. There are parents that don’t respect their kids privacy and the kids don’t even share room.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top