I'm blessed with eight children - though I'm talking about eight adults now.
I have an enormous family because I'm from Montreal and my family's Catholic, so my dad has eight siblings and they all have kids and we all grew up in the same property on weekends and summers.
My son has one parent who's 50. I want him to have a family of young people, too!
I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.
My husband and I had to raise five of my younger brothers and sisters. They lived with us. We sent them to school.
I guess if you're lucky enough not to have to pay your rent, then you or I take much more seriously the kind of work that I do, what it takes for me to leave two teenagers of my own and six stepchildren and a husband and four grandchildren.
My mom's one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.
I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles - an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been.
My mom, how she raised me, my brothers, my cousins, when I was a kid with one bedroom for 12 people... You think about all that, and God blessed me to get somewhere and do something I love and do something I've done since I was a kid. And blessed me with the talent to do it.
I live in a joint family with 17 members under one roof. My father is an MA, but he didn't get a job, because all his certificates got destroyed when our house caught fire. So my father took up farming - fish farming and vegetable farming.
We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Northwest D.C. I was essentially raised by a Panamanian man and a Jamaican woman. That's why I have such a fascination with Jamaican food.
I grew up in Decatur, Georgia. We had three boys in the household; actually, it felt like four of us. My pops sort of raised my uncle, too. So, it was four boys and, later, a younger sister.
I was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a poor family that shared a rented four-room apartment with two additional families and their children.
My grandmother raised her nine kids and raised my mom's three.
It has to do - I think - with growing up in an apartment, with my aunt and my cousins right next door to me, with the door open, with neighbors walking in and out, with people yelling at each other all the time.
Both my parents were doctors, and my mother had her surgery in the house. There were six children.
There were nine children in my father's family and eight in my mother's. My grandparents did the best with what they had. After the Depression, they were scratching out a living and working hard. They kept the family going.
I grew up in a flat with my brothers and my cousins. My brothers were in the same bed.
He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
My children range in age from 5 to 31. We adopted the 5-year-old, but people are often impressed with my wife before knowing that.
I have three grandchildren and am hoping for 20.
My grandma told me, don't get into trouble. I know how hard she worked to take care of her own nine kids and my mama's three. And I just never wanted to hurt her. I never wanted to do something that would embarrass her.
I'm from a big family - I'm the youngest of seven - and my wife is one of four. So we always wanted a lot of kids. It's what we're used to, and for us it's what life is all about.
I have four grown children and two tiny grandchildren.
