Everyone’s idea of what constitutes a “large family” is different, but whether you consider “large” to be more than two, more than ten, or somewhere in between, raising a large Family presents its own unique set of challenges.  Once you get beyond a few (whatever that means to you), juggling schedules becomes more complex, personal belongings multiply, and the “he said; she said” grows exponentially!  So large families might need a few special strategies for keeping things running smoothly.

I only have five children, which feels “medium” to me.  I know mamas with much larger families who have these skills down much more impressively than I do!  But there are large-family strategies we employ here at our house, too.

Color-Code the Kids

A lot of kids means a lot of everything else: dishes, towels, school supplies, etc.  And when everything looks alike, you never know which one left his stuff out.  (Or when something gets lost, you don’t know whose was lost and whose you still have.)

This can be minimized by assigning a color to each child and color-coding their belongings.  You can use that principle as much or as little as you want; it totally depends on which strategies work best for your particular family in particular areas of life.

For instance, some families color-code the towels and each child is responsible for keeping up with his own.  Other families have all identical towels and just dump them all into the wash together.

We don’t color-code everything, but we do use this approach for some things, like our school supplies.  And as you’ll see in that post, we found that products like colored tape can enable things to be color-coded even if they don’t come in all the right colors.

Assign Buddies

If your children are all very young, you may be taking care of everyone’s needs yourself.  But if they span a wider age range, you can save yourself some work — and worry — by pairing them up.

Assign each younger child an older child as a buddy.  Again, you can take this as far — or not — as works for you, the ages of your children, and the dynamics of your household.

It might be entirely a teen’s responsibility to help a young sibling get up, dressed, and fed, and to get him ready to go and loaded in the car when the family is going out.  Or it might merely be an 8-year-old’s responsibility to make an extra sandwich for a younger sibling when he’s preparing his own lunch or help the sibling who sits next to him in the car buckle his seatbelt.

The basic idea is to let the older ones with greater skill serve as extra sets of hands for smaller children who need more help.

Assigning buddies can also be an important part of your emergency plans.  An older child can grab his sibling’s bug-out bag as well as his own, help alert Mom & Dad if his sibling-buddy is unaccounted for, hold his buddy’s hand to help keep him close, etc.  (Use wisdom and sound judgment here.  The older-sibling buddy is extra hands and eyes to help execute the logistics of the plan; be careful not to make him the responsible party.)

Rethink Your Assumptions

Do the clothes have to be folded?  (Maybe you really feel the clothes should be.  What about the towels?)  Can a dishwasher be run multiple times?  Do the smoke alarm batteries really need to be changed?

Kidding!  Just wanted to see if you’re paying attention.  Please make sure your smoke alarms have working batteries.

We tend to get in a rut about the “right way” of doing something and forget to think outside the box when that way isn’t serving us anymore.  Sometimes with a different family dynamic, a different method is more efficient.  (Or sometimes it doesn’t need to be done at all, because priorities are different.)

Combine “Like” Actions

Admittedly, some of these aren’t purely “large family” strategies, but they do become more essential as families grow.  One way to be more efficient is to do all of the same thing at the same time, rather than cycling through the same actions over and over.  Obviously, this doesn’t work for everything, but let me give you a few examples.

If you’re making sixteen PB&J sandwiches, it’s inefficient to make one whole sandwich, then make another whole sandwich, and so on.  It’s faster to spread out all the bread, then spread peanut butter on all the sandwiches, then spread jelly on all the sandwiches, then close them all up.  (This is also true if you’re making two sandwiches, but the time savings on a single sandwich is negligible.  The time savings on fifteen sandwiches adds up.)  The same is true of tacos, or any other food that requires individual assembly — if you do it assembly-line style, you’ll save time and energy.

Browning ten pounds of meat takes little more time than browning five pounds of meat, whereas browning five one day and five another creates a whole separate “event’s” worth of setup, cleanup, etc.

If you’re homeschooling, choosing a multilevel curriculum that all (or several) of the kids can do together is more efficient than teaching six different sets of every individual subject.

So there are three basic ways you can combine “like” actions for greater efficiency:

1. Group what you’re already doing, by kind.  (e.g. all the peanut butter spreading together)
2. Do extra of what you’re already doing, so you save yourself a whole occasion of having to do the task at all. (e.g. browning extra meat or cooking an extra meal)
3. Combine similar-but-different tasks into a single acceptable alternative to all of them. (e.g. teaching a multilevel history class rather than six separate history courses)

Find Alternative Ways of Doing the Same Thing

Building on the previous point, sometimes you can take a task that usually has to be done sequentially and do it all at once — but only if you find a different way to do it.  I see this with food prep more than anything else.

If you can cook four burgers at a time on the stove, but twelve at a time in the oven, the oven might be the better way to cook them for a crowd.  Or maybe you can bake more potatoes at a time than you can boil, for mashed potatoes.  Or fix eggs for breakfast biscuits or breakfast burritos in a sheet pan rather than on a griddle.

When I went to summer camp, we used to bus our tables.  At each meal, one person had the responsibility of using a rubber spatula to scrape any excess food off the plates onto a single plate, then take it and scrape it into the garbage.  Everyone else then piled their (scraped) plates, flatware, and cups into a dishpan, which could be carried into the kitchen all together.

A similar routine in the home avoids the pileup of everyone taking plates to the kitchen to be dealt with individually, and it’s a cooperative process.

Make the Kids Work

I’m not talking about turning your home into a workhouse!  But raising a large family requires being realistic about the fact that you can’t do everything for everybody yourself.  Kids can — and should — learn to do for themselves rather than expecting to be waited on.

Obviously, common sense should apply here.  The baby can’t be expected to feed himself.  The 6-year-old isn’t taking himself to his dentist appointment.  A special needs child might not be able to do for himself everything another child would.

But kids can do more than we often give them credit for.  Even a preschooler can sort laundry, although he might not be able to carry it where it needs to be, himself.  Preteens can wash their own clothes.  All but the youngest can prepare themselves snacks or a simple lunch or breakfast.  Mom doesn’t have to be the one to get a fresh fork if a child drops his on the floor.

You get the idea.  It’s not about expecting the kids to do all work; it’s about not expecting Mom to do all the work (unless, of course, all the kids are still tiny and/or disabled).  The family is a small society, and members of a society ought to contribute to its smooth operations unless they can’t.

Set Clear Expectations

If the kids know what type of behavior is and isn’t permitted, and what the rhythms of your household are, there will be fewer opportunities for confusion that needs to be cleared up.

Hearing “what’s for dinner?” twice in an evening might be annoying.  Hearing it a dozen times might be downright disruptive to actually getting that dinner on the table!  Having to track down six kids for bedtime takes more time than tracking down two.  Kids who haven’t showered when it’s time to leave for an appointment cause a problem.

All of these things happen, because people are people.  But you can (hopefully) ensure they happen less by being clear about who is expected to be where, when — in advance.

If everyone knows bedtime is at 8, and they’re expected to gather in the youngest child’s bedroom to read and pray together, then hopefully you shouldn’t need to track everyone down at 8, even if you do end up having to retrieve one stray child!  If everyone knows meals are posted on the refrigerator, or knows that “what’s for dinner?” is a question Mom doesn’t answer, they don’t need to keep asking.

(My husband gets to ask me what’s for dinner.  If my kids ask, they always get the same answer: “food.”  Because they never use the information for any purpose except to complain, so they don’t need to know.)

Raising a Large Family is a Blessing!

Raising a large family can be a challenge — but it’s also a blessing.  Hopefully, with effective strategies in place, it will feel more more “blessing” and less “challenge”!