From The Atlantic Monthly. I'm not sure what this says about my family of seven children, but it's interesting:
[Researchers in Israel] found that the presence of a third child (or more than three children) had little effect on the long-term educational attainment, adult earnings, and marriage and fertility rates of first- and second-born children; the only noticeable difference was that first-born daughters tended to marry sooner if they came from large families–perhaps, the authors speculate, out of a desire to escape the crowd. They also speculate that parents may adjust to additional children by cutting down on luxuries and leisure activities rather than on time with their children–or, alternately, that large families may be more likely to have stay-at-home moms, who make up for some of the otherwise scarcer parental attention.
