Today, big families draw odd questions for puzzled parents

BATON ROUGE (AP) — Rebecca Braun tells about the time she was grocery shopping and a toddler and his mother both had something to say about her five foster children.
“Mommy, she has a lot of kids,” the toddler remarked. His mother told him, “She has too many kids,” then glared at Braun.
“Are you serious?” the woman said. “Are you kidding me?”
Braun walked away. “It’s those people that make me feel insecure about this big family I tote around,” she said.
Birth mothers of large families have similar experiences.
U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that since 1970, the percentage of households containing five or more people has fallen by half. Since the 1930s, the Gallup polling organization has been asking Americans what they consider the ideal number of children to have. From 1957 to 1978, the average answer dropped from 3.6 to about 2.5, where it remains.
There are no numbers to quantify the degree to which people in public react to large families with surprise, insensitivity and even rudeness.
Such behavior is so common that when The Advocate posted a Facebook query about large families — which we defined as five or more children — dozens of messages poured in about public rudeness. What no one could answer was why.
Brad Bourgeois, of French Settlement, said comments about his five children are always made in passing, without deeper explanation.
“We can only speculate that it’s for similar reasons why we’ve received ‘concerned’ comments from friends and family about them being ‘expensive’ and ‘a lot to handle.’ Perhaps they think the world is overpopulated, and here they behold competitors for resources,” he said. “Perhaps it’s horror at their own prospect of having to juggle so much activity if they were in our shoes.”
Whatever the reason, large families cause a stir.
“I have heard so many things from people in the past five years,” said Ashley McQueary, who has two sets of twins. “Most people just stare or say something ‘quietly’ to whoever they’re with. I have been asked, ‘Are you done?’ more times than I can begin to count. The number of people who ask personal questions is absurd.”
How personal? Real personal.
“What type of fertility were you on?”
“Are you fixed now?”
“And have you or the dad put an end to this . had your tubes tied . had a vasectomy?”
“Vaginal or C-section?”
“I bet you get a lot on your food stamp card!”
Not all reactions are ugly. Most comments, our responders said, run a gamut from amazed to sympathetic to lame attempts at humor. Common comments include:
“Are they all yours?”
“You’ve got your hands full!”
“You know how that happens, right?”
“I don’t know how you do it.”
Bourgeois said, “More than anything I wish folks would be more creative.”
He might want to reconsider. On a recent grocery trip, Taylor and Hannah Birchman and their six daughters — ages 5, 3, 22 months and 7-month-old triplets — got through the store with only a few comments, and one head-shaking stare from a man in the next checkout line. But the woman checking their receipt at the exit made the trip memorable.
“Did she say, ‘You’re going to need a lot of handcuffs?’” Hannah Birchman asked her husband as they reached the parking lot.
“That’s a new one,” he confirmed.
“What does that even mean?” she said.
For Braun, ambiguity would be a relief from what she often hears.
As foster parents in Livingston Parish, she and her husband have cared for as many as eight children, usually young.
“One lady said to her friend behind me, ‘I wonder how many different daddies there are — none of them look alike,’” she said. “My son, who was picking out candy, says, ‘Because foster families don’t look that way.’”
Families do get supportive comments, too, said mother-of-six Bridgett Quinn. Older people tend to be kinder, she said.
Those who have big families of their own are especially empathetic. Bourgeois recalls a brief chat with a man at a convenience store, who asked how many children he had.
Bourgeois said. “I said, ‘Five.’ He replied, ‘That’s how many we have, too! And people would always ask me if they were all planned, and I always say, ‘Well, honestly, when it was time to do the final planning I had my eyes closed!’”