How did you decide to have a 4th child?
Hi parents, would be curious if any of you have 4 children, and if so how/when you decided to have a 4th. We have three wonderful kiddos ages 3-9 and have often contemplated a fourth but really not sure. There are obvious challenges: figuring out childcare, logistics (even getting our kids now to their activities etc. is like a huge puzzle). But I think about it often and really am not sure. We have enough space in our house to accommodate another child in the future so that would probably not be an issue. I am 40 so I would need to decide soon(ish)..but (fortunately) have frozen embryos from doing IVF in the past several years ago. My husband and I both work - he works remotely and has a fair amount of flexibility. I work 3 days per week, out of the home.
There are of course many factors to consider...but how did you decide about having another child if you have a large family, and any advice one way or another? Thank you.
Parent Replies
We had our fourth baby a year ago. Kids are almost 9, 6, 4 and 1. We always said we'd have four so I'm not sure I can really talk about how we decided to. Though I guess at any point we could have stopped, but we both liked the idea of a bigger family (I'm one of 3 but my dad was one of 5. My husband only has a distant brother but his dad was one of 4.). It also helped that we had three boys first and so the excited of possibly having a girl was an encouragement to keep going. :) We had our first when I was 30 and our last when I was 39.
My husband works full time in tech in a job that has pretty reasonable expectations and I work part time in a flexible job. We're able to do part-time preschool and childcare and our older kids go to public school. It did take a while to find a big enough house in the area of Oakland we wanted to live, but it sounds like you've got that covered.
I have to say that the sheer amount of noise, laundry, dishes and logistical items that 4 kids, 2 adults and until recently a dog create is a lot! For example, someone has a doctors appointment every day this week. And the public school kids have minimum days for parent teacher conferences. And someone had a field trip. And I've got to get our taxes done. And buy Easter basket stuff. And fit in work somewhere. Etc. Etc. For us, the transition from one to two kids was the roughest and the addition of a fourth was not as much of an increase as before.
Our kids are loud and rambunctious and so our energy and noise level in addition to our high numbers does bring a lot of attention when we go places. The minivan is a must. The logistics of all of us fitting in a hotel room or similar can be hard. We max out the allowed number of people on our zoo membership. Sometimes it just feels like the world is not built for larger families but there's never a dull moment.
Make sure you have your answers for "how do you do it?" questions from strangers ready to go. My favorite is "Lowered expectations, economy of scale and momentum." :)
Hi,
We have four children and ultimately we decided to go for it because we just wanted to. Sure we weighed the pros and cons and tried to decide logically, but there weren’t really any logical reasons to have another. It does make everything more complicated. It does make it hard to get everyone else where they need to be. It is more expensive. And yet, we both had this underlying sense that our family wasn’t complete yet. We’re really happy with our choice and our kids love having a large family. They’re now 21, 19, 17 and 14. I think everyone has to decide what is right for them, but we are really happy that we have our four.
We have 4 kids and had them relatively close together - they are 9, 7, 5 and 3. It feels like we’re just coming out from what we refer to as “the dark years” which spanned from when our first was born until our youngest turned 2.5. For us the physical part of young kids was the most draining but we are LOVING this age where they have more independence and sibling relationships to rely on, and they physically need us parents less and less. We planned on 4 kids but really paused and questioned this after 3 and the motivator for us was wanting an experience for our family where they are surrounded by a lot of personality, love and close relationships. I knew logistics would be challenging but those types of things are not draining for me as a person. I enjoy and get energy from parenting work (and I also work full time in a paid job) which makes even the harder times manageable for me. Tbh my husband is someone who prefers more structure, is more rigid and can get overwhelmed by too many things happening at once so he had a harder time adjusting once we had more than two kids. That being said, he’s really grown as a parent and as a person and is finding more joy and ease as the kids get older! There will be hard moments but like another poster said, low expectations, momentum and a dose of “letting go” helps you really enjoy the ride as a parent to four.