Where are all the children?

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Welcome home!

We have seven, ages 6-16. In our parish, it seems most people split Masses with little kids. A few go with mom to 1100, a couple go with dad to 5pm, some even split it out with grandparents riding herd on a few. Whenever that makes me a little sad, I just try to lremember that with my husband’s (Assemblies of God) they would have been packed off to children’s church and not with family at all.

Also, secondary infertility (the inability to conceive or carry a second or third) pregnancy has risen dramatically in the US and really, all developed nations. It’s a trial for quite a few families I know.
 
I’m guessing that many people think I contracept. We have two kids. What most people don’t know though is that I have lost 3. It greatly saddens me when people assume I go against Church teaching. I don’t. It’s very hard for me to get pregnant and even harder to stay pregnant. Several of my friends have the same situation.
 
thebookofesther said:
I don’t get it either when people are like oh they’re so devout and have two kids and you’re like whah???
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You are assuming that everyone who is open to having children will have more than two. Not everyone is so blessed. My dh and I have none, but we did nothing to prevent it. It’s not for any of us to say who is faithful to Church teachings/who isn’t based solely on the number of children they have.
Then they’ve started this NFP thing forget be fruitful and multiply even the new testament says women are saved thru childbirth.
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It is not NT teaching nor that of the Church that women have to have as many children as possible. That verse is often abused by those who want to believe it does, but we don’t go by our personal interpretation of any one verse or passage, but by the Church’s interpretation and teaching.
 
I know in our area most families tend to flow towards a particular parish. Which just happens to be my parish. Which must be why we are there since we have 5 kids.😃

A parish with more families like ours tends to have more for the family. We have the strongest and largest youth group in the area. We tend to set up the mission trips and youth outings and March for life and invite the other parishes along. All of this tends to draw more families our way. The parish I grew up in on the other side of town is now the exact opposite with the majority of their parishioners have grown children.
 
thebookofesther said:
I don’t get it either when people are like oh they’re so devout and have two kids and you’re like whah??? Then they’ve started this NFP thing forget be fruitful and multiply even the new testament says women are saved thru childbirth. God bless you and your family and welcome to the Church (broken as it may be sometimes!!!)
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Nice. :mad:

I’d give just about anything to have more kids, especially the kind that end up in my house rather than the grave. But people just look at me and think exactly what you just said. Unless you KNOW that a family contracepts, and I’m guessing you won’t know this about many people, I suggest keeping your mouth shut.
 
To the OP, we are out here, but sometimes you have to look. In our homeschool group we have at least 7 families with 5 or more kids. The median is likely 4. Now if you were to look at the Latin Mass community my wife attends and 5-7 kids are right in the middle. There is is not unusual to see families of 10+ kids. Like I said, it really depends on where you look.

Having taught NFP classes for 5 years I will say I suspect that most smaller families fall into one of 4 categories; those who contracept, those with low fertility, late marriage, those who limit family size through NFP. Where people fall in each category I couldn’t say. There are assuredly a good portion that do not follow the Church’s teaching. I simply say that based on the number of students that were out right hostile to learning about NFP durine marriage prep. That being said we also worked with a number of couples who struggle to have children.

I will say that for what ever reason I have been seeing a slight increase in the number of younger familes that have more than the proverbial 2.1 children. Wether that is a long term trend or something unique to my area, but there seems to have been a sudden explosion of families where mom and dad have their hands full with children under 5.
 
Jennifer132 said:
Hello, I am a Protestant, looking into converting. We have five children. We visited Mass (and this was no small parish by any means) and we were the largest family there. We even got a few “large family” comments, even the priest himself seemed a little surprised that we had five kids. Given the teaching on contraceptives, where are all the large families? And if it is a mortal sin to use contraceptives, aren’t devout Catholics worried about that?
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In our area, most of the homeschool families attend the Extraordinary (LATIN) Mass. This is where you find a LOT of large families that adhere to the church teachings on contraception.

Welcome to our family in Christ!!
 
Allegra said:
You can’t assume that a couple contracepts because they don’t have x amount of children. My husband and I have never used contraception and we have two children. NFP does actually work for a majority of the couples that use it and people don’t really get married in their late teens or early twenties like they used to. Also, lots of families with young children don’t feel like their young children are appreciated in Mass, so they either don’t bring them, don’t go at all, or hide out in the cry room.
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Right.

We had 2 kids for a long time and have 3 now after 17 years of marriage and hitting our early 40s. We’ve never used contraception (although I had one month on the pill to clear up some post-miscarriage symptoms).

I wouldn’t assume anything about anybody.
 
thebookofesther said:
I don’t get it either when people are like oh they’re so devout and have two kids and you’re like whah??? Then they’ve started this NFP thing forget be fruitful and multiply even the new testament says women are saved thru childbirth. God bless you and your family and welcome to the Church (broken as it may be sometimes!!!)
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Wow.
 
There are also many women (like my wife) that hormonal issues which require medication. My wife must be on a particular birth control pill because she receives a very bad period which causes her both physical and mental pain. It’s also not uncommon for us to go without sex for 2+ years due to her hormonal issues.

My cousin on the other hand only has 2 kids because she has a tiny frame and needed a C-Section twice. Something happened and the doctors have told her that if she has another, she will be putting her life at risk. They are not the most devout Catholics, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they use contraception, but I also know she wanted more kids (she was one of 5).

I also know of one family of 8 in my parish where its very rare to see all the kids together at Mass. When they are all at home (some are in college) they still tend to go to Mass at different times: some like to go to a Sat even Mass, some like to attend a teen mass at another parish or a college mass at one local catholic colleges, or they like to attend Mass with their boyfriend/girlfriend. However, I know that all 8 of them go every week, but again I rarely see them all together.

Point is, there are many reasons why you don’t always see the kids.

But the one issue that concerns me more than anything else is when the kids go to CCD but the parents don’t take them to Mass on Sunday.
 
It also may have something to do with the time of the Mass you attended.

My parish has a mix of seniors and young families, so the 4:00 p.m. Saturday Mass and the 12:00 p.m. Sunday Mass tend to be very heavy with seniors (actually, virtually no kids on Saturdays).

The 8:00 a.m. Sunday Mass has more kids…and then 10:00 Mass is Kid Central.

If you went to the 4:00 Saturday Mass, you’d think the average age of our parish is about 80. On the other hand, if you went to 10:00 on Sunday, you’d think every family had four or five kids (or at least it sounds that way).
 
9:30 am Sunday Mass at my church is a writhing, seething “mass” of children!
 
Jennifer132 said:
Hello, and thank you for your reply. I just wanted to point out that I wasn’t “judging” anyone. I was just wondering where all the large families were given that contraception isn’t allowed, I had assumed I would see more large families than in the general population. We have a large family quite by accident, both through adoption and biological.
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You want to see large families, I bet if you go to a trad mass you will find plenty. My brother has 12 kids. many families at this parish have large families like this!
 
First off, GOOD FOR YOU! And yes, I agree with Utah Rose; it all depends on the parish. My parish is absolutely tiny, and it’s mostly made up of my family (6 kids) and another family (nine kids, most grown up now, though). And yet, a few blocks away, our sister parish has a huge outreach to the local Hispanics, and WOW their mass is hoppin’! So, all the kids are somewhere, just not where you are now. It’s sad to me to see parishes without a large amount of kids, but I think that’s the life cycle of parishes. They start huge, then dwindle down to “grandparents”, and then they bounce back, and then dwindle…the law of undulation, if you will. You’re probably just the beginning of this cycle. 🙂 Don’t give up on where you are; big families are a huge encouragement to any parish. The youth are the life of the church!!!
 
You might also take into account how many Masses that parish has to spread the families across. My parish has 5 every weekend, which spreads families out considerably (and not evenly).

We normally attend Sunday evening Masses at our parish and there are always some children there, though not normally the larger families. Larger families tend to go to the Sunday morning Masses, which have nursery services, children’s liturgy of the word, and children’s faith formation. The Mass we attend is geared more towards the teens (Life Teen is immediately after this Mass) and I’ve started to notice a few more families creeping in to support their teens. (Side note - it has been wonderful to see all the teens who actively participate in making Mass happen!)
 
Maybe it’s your church, as others noted.

With three children, we’re one of the smaller families in our parish. A lot of the others have 4, 5, 6, 7, even 8.
 
OP here: thank you to all the posters who have been so gracious in their responses. You have enlightened me! We went both times to a Saturday night Mass. This parish has 5 Masses each weekend. I know the kids weren’t in the nursery, because there were only six kids in the nursery, and 3 of them were mine! I suppose maybe Saturday night is not the popular Mass to bring your children.

My heart goes out to those who experience infertility. I myself lost a little one to miscarriage 4 years ago, on my birthday. 😦

Maybe we will try a different Mass time. It would be an encouragement for my children to see that there are other large families there to make friends with. It’s so rare to find large families in the regular world who can relate to the unique family dynamics of having lots of kids. We are leaving a very small (about ten families) Protestant church where most of the families are large, homeschooling families (like us). My older children feel a little like we are ripping them away from their normal.
 
Jennifer132 said:
OP here: thank you to all the posters who have been so gracious in their responses. You have enlightened me! We went both times to a Saturday night Mass. This parish has 5 Masses each weekend. I know the kids weren’t in the nursery, because there were only six kids in the nursery, and 3 of them were mine! I suppose maybe Saturday night is not the popular Mass to bring your children.
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Ah, I think you may have accidentally gone to the old people Mass. There are also parishes where that is the teen Mass slot, though.

5 PM is definitely not the little kid Mass.
 
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