An article about bigger families

Here's an article in the Boston Globe about a new trend towards having bigger families. Since none of you will read it, it mainly talks about wealthy families having more kids
1. because they can afford to 2. because others in their community are 3. because after you have a few, you're already "in the groove"4. because women are delaying having families, so a.they often need the help of fertility drugs which can cause multiple babies and b. after a miscarrige or several, once they do have a sucessful pregnancy, children become such a gift to them that they want as many as they can have. 5. "It's so expensive having two kids, how much worse can it be with three?" 6. Some of these couples find that of all the luxuries their bank balances allow them, they get no greater satisfaction than from their kids, so they decide to have more.
A few sections I found interesting:

Traditionally, the third child has been a major barrier to both parents working full time, considering that the combined day-care costs can eat up an entire salary. So three kids are more common in families in which one parent -- usually the mother -- is at home full time or has flexible part-time work. For all the talk in recent years of women "opting out" of careers to stay at home, half of all mothers still return to the workforce before their child's first birthday, says Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University and board member of the Council on Contemporary Families. Not that there aren't lots of stay-at-home moms. It's just that they're mostly clustered at the top and bottom of the income scale. The poorer moms' job opportunities are so bleak that many don't feel they are giving up much to stay home. Many of the more affluent moms started out with the expectation that they could have it all, managing a successful career with one or two kids. But after experiencing the all-too-common work-family bind, they can walk away from the job without bringing financial pain to their families. ......I still marvel at my parents' ability to raise a big, close-knit family with aplomb. But they would be the first to admit that it was easier to swing back in the 1960s and '70s, when parents had more control over what their kids were exposed to and fewer demands to ferry them individually from one scheduled activity to another. When my two brothers, two sisters, and I weren't in school, we were out "playing," an all-encompassing category in those blissful pre-play-date days that consisted of packs of kids roaming the neighborhood for most of the day until the dinner bells started ringing or, in the case of our less inhibited neighbors, the fathers started bellowing for their kids to get their butts home. As a family, we didn't travel far, but when we did, it was pretty easy to get going. There were no five-point harness car seats to contend with. All seven of my family members could quickly pile into our 1964 Ford Falcon sedan that was built for five. My assigned seat? Lying along the back window ledge, next to the tissue box......We probably could have been just as happy -- and less sleepy -- if we'd stopped after one or two children. And by now there's ample research to rebut all those old myths about only children being misfits. But we just love the vibe you get in a house with lots of kids. As crazy as the switch from man-to-man to zone defense can be, there's not much we find as satisfying as catching a glimpse of all three girls sharing with one another, unprompted by us. Or seeing the entirely different routes they each take to make us laugh. We like the idea of our daughters learning, early on, how to work things out with one another, and being able, later on, to lean on one another. With more kids, the lessons usually start sooner. Staffers at the Wellesley Nursery School in the Hills say the most consistently polite kids to have gone through the school are the eight in Owen's family