Feel like having 6 kids?

Man, the fun things you can find by trawling through the ABS statistical series. When I was going through the numbers for Bogabilla, I found a spreadsheet showing the number of kids born by each female. 27 indigenous women in Bogabilla, out of a total of 98 indigenous women, had 6 or more kids.

Fuck me.

Which is probably what they said, 9 months before the had kid number 6. Remember, that is the statistic for 6 or more kids.

Now 1/3 of those mums were over 65, meaning they had them back in the days of large families. Both my parents, and both J's parents, come from families like that, where there were 7 or 8 kids.

But 3 women are in the 25-34 age group, and 6 are in the 35-44 age group. The chart above is a picture in contrasts.

I'm not against large families - my sister-in-law has four kids, and wanted seven. Some people like them big. And most of all, they all have the same father, and they are married and all that.

However, given the terrible social problems a lot of these Aboriginal families have, it would be interesting to see if there is any correlation between family size and disfunction. We know that kids with a single mum are more likely to run amok, but if a single mum has lots of kids, are they even more likely to run amok? Does amok-ness increase with family size? Does it get worse if the kids all have different fathers?

If so, what the hell are we going to do about it?