<p>The Thompson kids have been courteous and polite in the face of any critics of their family life. They graciously contributed to this thread to give a picture of the family beyond the scope of the article. This answered any questions I had.</p>
<p>Sue, your journal is rude. </p>
<p>And to all who disagree with the parenting techniques and tone, that is ok. You can feel that way and form an opinion on it. You can speak against, but have some respect.</p>
<p>Thompson family, I also appreciate your insight into your family life. Your dad is proud of you and your successes, a wonderful thing. The photos of your pyramids and so on were a fun share, and am impressed that you found this thread and were able to comment. </p>
<p>Folks sometimes become opinionated and argumentative on this site, as seems to be the nature of the online experience at times. Apologies if it turned hurtful.</p>
<p>I think for those of us who don’t have a lifestyle with external structure, have a harder time seeing the appeal.
Both my sibs chose a life * with* a great deal of external structure, which I did not, but I can see the appeal of having many decisions already made for you, that can paradoxically be freeing.
But I’m an argumentative gal, to me, hardly anything is black or white.
;)</p>
<p>Being argumentative does not excuse unnecessary and disrespectful mockeries of the Thompsons’ lives. I’m sure half the disrespectful things that were said about their family would not be said to their face. Why? Because I’m sure many of the posters that posted such things know those words would be hurtful.</p>
<p>CC would be a much nicer place if there was this kind of outrage every time a thread gets nasty.</p>
<p>I think I spend too much time on the Internet. When I read the reference to attending kids “FB games” I was trying to figure our wha kind of Facebook games parents would miss work to watch. :). In my defense, my kids go to a weird high school without a football team…</p>
<p>The article struck me as smug too. But i bet my own father would be just as smug if he was writing about his parenting experience, and I’m an only child. So smugness comes in all family sizes.</p>
<p>I agree that some of the comments here have been uncalled for and unnecessarily sweeping, but I still take issue with some aspects of the original piece. As a whole, it seems like this is a loving family that raised happy, successful kids, but there are less extreme ways of getting there. If you can learn the material and get an “A” with five hours of studying, I’m not going to pat you on the back for putting in 10, which is compulsive, not productive, behavior. You don’t get extra points for overkill. One can inculcate healthy eating habits without forcing children to always eat every single food placed before them, never mind dictating the order in which they do so. One can have hard-working and educated children without making them take every AP class possible. And so on. </p>
<p>The article also seems to ascribe virtue to rather arbitrary values. Why is it better to go camping than to go to Disney, as long as your kids are generally physically fit? Why is it so important to be able to fix your own car - or why is that more important than any other useful but generally unnecessary skill one could acquire? I don’t think the judgmental behavior is all on one side, in this case.</p>
<p>See, I read it quickly and didn’t get smug at all. I got matter of fact. It was about what he thought worked so, of course, that’s what he thought worked. He wasn’t saying we would all be better off if we did it his way. But, apparently that’s what some heard and got insulted. CC is a funny place.</p>
<p>I don’t care how smart, athletic, thin, healthy and well-adjusted I thought my kids turned out, I can’t imagine in a million years writing an article sharing my child rearing techniques with the world. Forget smug. How about the the bragging aspect of the whole thing? I’m a old-timey New Englander, raised to believe that bragging about your kids is unseemly and tantamount to bragging about yourself; bragging about the how well your child rearing techniques worked would really be considered beyond the pale. </p>
<p>This father put himself out there with a list of what he knows are unorthodox “rules”, and surely didn’t expect that only kudos would follow. (I have to wonder if the offspring were asked if they were willing to have their childhoods become page view fodder.) If the kids who are posting are offended by the comments, I’m sure they can find a Mormon or fundy child rearing blog that will sing their family’s praises–no one made them come here or stay here. But given what their dad has told us about their intelligence and accomplishments, I would hope they’d be interested in reading a breadth of opinions, and maybe even chuckle a bit at Sue22’s very funny piece.</p>
<p>I didn’t get smug either from the article. My mother could have written a few points in the article - sounded more matter of fact (but I’m pretty live and let live so…)</p>
<p>But of course, all the comments about how much more virtuous it is to adopt, or have fewer children rather than give birth to a large family weren’t smug at all. And all the stuff about how large their “carbon footprint” must be with all those cars the kids built?
I’m reminded of the South Park episode where the entire west coast was choking on the cloud of “Smug” produced by all the Prius drivers there.</p>
<p>Smugness is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.</p>
<p>I just don’t get all the bitterness at a family which seems to have produced so many solid, productive adults who in turn are producing healthy children who are likely to be contributing more to society than they are taking? We need more people like this in our society, not fewer. I thought Sue22’s “journal” was pretty nasty and MommaJ; your hostility is especially odd. It seems out of proportion to the article as written. Is it the family religion that brings out all the meanness?</p>
<p>I just am not sure why it’s notable. They wanted a large family, so they acted accordingly and carried it out. Other people want small families, so they act accordingly and carry that out too. Some people want to raise their kids in the middle of the city, so they do that. Other people want to raise their kids in the country, so they do that. I don’t think anyone deserves either praise or censure for simply doing what they wanted to do in the first place</p>
<p>I think many of us admire when we see others “go beyond” the norm. We admire the single mom who works 2-3 jobs to put food on the table. We admire the athlete that gets up at 3am everyday to train. We admire the volunteer who feeds soup to the homeless on a daily basis. So, we’re going to admire the folks who manage to raise a large respectable family.</p>
<p>We tend to admire actions that “go beyond” what most of us are doing.</p>
<p>
+1 JoBlue. I brought up the double standard much earlier in the thread, but the person who it was directed to didn’t understand how praising large families of adopted or fosters kids but eye balling large families of biological kids is a double standard. </p>
<p>
I’m sure no one will admit it if it is. I don’t see why the fact that they’re Mormon is so important. They’re Mormon. Ok. That lady down the street is Muslim. Some of the Mormon families I know have 10+ kids. Others have around 5. Others around 1 or 2. Wait…hmmm sounds like their numbers vary just like any other family.</p>
<p>There actually are several posters that tried to stay on topic. No beef or gripe with large families, no mention of religion. They have spoken to specific points they didn’t understand, or didn’t agree with. </p>
<p>The rest of the noise here, both the harsh off topic comments AND those shaming the posters they find objectionable, is indeed distracting from any meaningful debate.</p>
<p>I don’t care about their religion and I don’t have a beef with large families. Just don’t get why they are supposed to be appealing.</p>
<p>One of the visiting adult kids wrote this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And aha, this is something that has changed enormously in the last few decades. It used to be expected that you put in a good full 40 hour week and that was that. With rare exceptions, your evenings were your own. Your holidays were your own. Vacations meant that you were out of contact with your office. </p>
<p>It’s a very rare high-powered career these days where one doesn’t have a longer work day and work that bleeds into weekends or even holidays or vacation. That’s even without the impact of smart phones and constant availability via email and text messages. I’m sure there are exceptions. Overall, though, there’s more of a push to spend more time at work.</p>
<p>When we were 1st married, H had very predictable hours. He would leave after breakfast for work and then get home before me nearly every day, no weekend nor night work. That started to change, as he absorbed more and more jobs when people left or retired and their positions weren’t filled. He ended up doing his job plus all of their jobs and at the end was working nights AND weekends and treading water because he was doing 5-6 people’s jobs. </p>
<p>It is wonderful when people can have great jobs that are 40 hours a week and STAY 40 hours a week so they can have good quality of life. H is now really enjoying his retirement, where he sets his own hour sand pace. His workplace is getting even more challenged, as they tried to have 4 or 5 military folks and several contractors do parts of the job he used to do alone. They are also having increasing retirements and NO ONE replacing those people leaving.</p>
<p>When you are working nights and weekends, it is difficult to have any decent family life. Glad this family was able to have a decent family life WITH both their parents. That’s very nice.</p>
<p>“And yet people do it (take credit for being lucky) all the time, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong”</p>
<p>I think that it is wrong, in the sense of being misguided, no matter how often people do it.</p>
<p>If you explicitly present a list of “things we did right,” and the lives of your children as “the results,” you’re claiming that A led to B. In my reading, the article would have come across a little better with more expression of gratitude for the unearned grace that also played a role in the family’s success. I wish that every family that tried to do right by the children got to enjoy so much health and happiness.</p>
<p>I think the way the original story was presented is a good part of why many of us reacted as we did. For example “I encouraged each of my children to do a sport, and I arranged my work schedule so that I was able to attend as many competitions as possible, and before they could drive, drove them anywhere they needed to be.”</p>
<p>That sounds a lot different from what the father actually wrote, which was that the kids HAD TO do a sport, and never said a word about watching any of them play.</p>
<p>The military precision of mealtimes, homework, etc. sounded very different from, for example, “Because we had such a large family, we tried to eat each of our meals at the same time every day. It worked well for us, and I tried to be home for dinner every night, no matter how hectic my job was.”</p>
<p>Or his story about the junk cars (and I admit, I still don’t get this) would have sounded different if he’d said, “For each child’s 16 birthday, they got a fixer-upper car that I helped them rebuild. I never had to worry about them breaking down on the road because they’d know what to do.”</p>
<p>See the differences? The kids write about an involved, caring father who put his job second, but was still quite successful. The father made it sound like he was the dictator in chief, barking out demands. As with almost everything, the truth was somewhere in the middle.</p>