A couple of days ago, I wrote a post on the 18-and-counting Duggar family:

So the question is, for me, which would be more strange: Coming from a family like this or marrying in to a family like this? I'd say the latter. If you come from an odd family, you don't know any better. But if you're marrying in to it, you already have a somewhat normal view of what a family should look like. Then again, maybe not so much if you live in Arkansas.

To which Sammler commented:

Substitute "Idaho" for "Arkansas" in your last paragraph, and over 98% of the U.S. population will think it equally amusing.

Meanwhile, an interesting discussion on the topic has emerged over at The American Scene. A fellow named Yeselson writes:

Ross admits, tongue in cheek, that the whole thing is a bit excessive. But this is really where the rubber meets the road for conservative, cosmpolitan intellectuals and their relationship to the mass political base that has given these intellectual's a whiff of power. By which I mean this: Ross has written eloquently here and elsewhere about the need to expand theopportunity for working class kids to attend elite universities. But neither this woman nor her children will be socialized or literally have enough time in the day to realize that aspiration--in short, they will never have the opportunity to write elegant essays like Ross Douthat. Nor will the girls have the opportunity to grow and meet witty, thoughtful, perhaps slightly less fertile men like Ross Douthat. Nor would Ross Douthat likely find a woman with the values and life experience of the woman described in the article the slightest bit interesting in anything but an anthropological sense.

Funny thing.

The subject has come up at work on a few occasions. In the process I discovered that no less than two of my coworkers come from families that have children of 13 or more. Half a dozen or so come from families with more than eight. Interesting to me is that I would never have suspected it, having met them. They are, contrary to Yeselson's fears, fully functional members of society. For all I know, they may be perfectly as capable as Douthat at waxing eloquence. The one with 13 siblings, in fact, is in a high-paying service-sector job where he deals with people from all around the country non-stop.

I'm not saying that I advocate such large families, but I actually find them less conspicuous than I find only children, which I'm pretty good at spotting. Frankly, I have to question the sanity of a couple wanting to undertake such an endeavor. I'll also concede that my now-revealed real life examples may be quite atypical. And they're male (a lot of Yeselson's concerned seem to be geared at the female younglings, who lack a good role model).

But at the least, it's gotten me to reconsider my previous snarkiness on the matter.