How Having More Than Two Children Affects Your Parenting Style
Once you learn the basics of parenting, you might feel like you’ve conquered the world. However, psychologists confirm that raising more than two children will make you a completely different parent.
Experts shared with Parents several changes that occur in parenting when you have more than two children, including:
Lowered Expectations
When you only have two children, you can feed them and get them ready for school in under an hour, while taking care of your own tasks. But with a larger family, you’ll need to prioritize each task, and you simply won’t be able to accomplish everything within the same timeframe.
You might manage to feed five children breakfast or dress them, but you won’t be able to handle your own tasks as well.
No Need for Parenting Books
Who needs specialist advice when you have experience raising five or more children? Now, other parents come to you for advice because you’ve “been through it” more than most of them.
An additional benefit is that you feel more confident as a parent with many children. You possess the knowledge needed to make reasonable and wiser decisions.
Frugality
Having a large number of children won’t automatically turn you into a stingy person, but feeding, dressing, and providing housing for more than two children is not a minor financial burden. Regardless of how careful you are with your budget, as the number of children in your family increases, you will start losing money significantly, and thus frugality begins.
Changing Standards of Good Parenting
Before having children, you declared you would never be the type of parent who does this or that. Now, after having more than two children, you become fully aware that good parents come in all shapes and sizes.
You might leave dirty dishes in the sink for 48 hours, and that won’t make you a bad parent. If your children are wearing mismatched shoes, it won’t label you as an irresponsible parent.
Outsourcing
You only have two hands, and they are usually occupied with caring for and raising all your children. So, there’s no way you can cook, clean your house, entertain the little ones around the clock, do all the shopping, or handle laundry and transport children to and from activities by yourself.
Here, you will realize that you need help to complete tasks and that outsourcing some household chores is the only way to manage the never-ending to-do list.
Less Concern with “Fairness”
You might manage to maintain some semblance of equality in your home, but once you have more than two children, your parenting strategy will focus less on what’s “fair” and more on what’s necessary.
According to experts, another way “fairness” is sacrificed for necessity is in how each child is disciplined individually. If you have five children, you have five completely different personalities living in your home, and each might require a different approach when it comes to discipline.
