Why Are We So Obsessed With Enormous Families?

It all started with a video of a woman making her own cheese.

I have no idea how, but at some point last year, my screen-swiping finger led me down one of the internet’s more fermented rabbit holes. That’s right: I got it into my head that I’d like to try to make cheese. Sour my own milk. Queso my own fresco, if you will. And suddenly, I was in my kitchen, watching a woman with a blonde ponytail making mozzarella from scratch beside a green Aga range. But what struck me more than her skills with dairy were her children. Crowds of them—with their own blond hair and subtle pastel outfits and cherubic smiles—started coming in and out of shot, tugging at her waist and playing with her measuring spoons.

I blinked. I was having the inverse of an experience my Irish Catholic friend once had while watching Delia Smith on TV in his youth. Seeing Delia, apparently alone in a big house, cooking food without any children to feed it to, he started to feel uneasy. Who was this woman? Where were her kids? Who was she baking for? Was she a witch? Only in my case, with my single child on the sofa next door reading Garfield, I started to wonder… Who was this mozzarella woman? Where had all these children come from? How was she getting them all to behave so well? Was she, in fact, a witch?

Since I watched that video, the great internet algorithm has decided that what I really care about are large, white, wealthy American families. Every time I pick up my phone, they’re lining up in their backyards or bouncing on trampolines or standing in formation in matching clothes. Which is all very lovely and interesting, but also—let’s face it—a bit strange.

With birth rates falling in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, large families are becoming increasingly rare in wealthy countries. In Britain, the average fertility rate (i.e., the number of children a woman has) is 1.56. In Ireland it’s 1.63. Which makes a family photo of six, eight, or 10 children somehow striking. When those families have big houses and matching pajamas and access to a field, Instagram casts them in an “aspirational” light.

It wasn’t always this way. My mother-in-law was one of six children (as was my father, in fact), with an Irish immigrant mother. When they rolled up at their new house in Essex, they were called hillbillies by their neighbors and treated with suspicion. Even in the 1970s, a large, working-class family was met with a degree of wariness that middle- and upper-class families rarely are.

There’s also a problematic racial element to this pumpkin-patch-going, matching-yoga-pants-wearing phenomenon. I just searched #bigfamily on Instagram, and of the first 30 results, only five included any non-white people. According to the United Nations, in 2022 the average household in Senegal was 8.7 people. In Gambia, it was 8.1. In Palestine, it was 5.1 and Pakistan, 6.8. Those families aren’t being described with some combination of the hashtags #dreamteam, #bigfamily, #familygoals, and #cutekids on social media with quite the same frequency as their American counterparts.

In the curious, curated world of social media, then, large families are starting to feel like a very specific metric of a certain kind of wealth. The sibling groups sitting on picnic blankets and lining up on wide, freshly painted stairs are all proof of parents that can afford to keep having children in the face of a cost-of-living crisis, climate uncertainty, and political anxiety. They are aspirational as well as atypical.

Some of them even have time to make their own cheese.