A Friendly Article

Someone e-mailed us A Full Quiver, an ABC News Nightline story. I enjoyed it. It was a nice story on the countercultural lifestyle that I grew up in. Our story doesn't parallel the family in the article- many of my mom's pregnancies were very difficult. But we share a lot of common ground, and I enjoyed the positive coverage.

I don't know what the writers were thinking, though, when they let slip that line about an American phenomenon. Valuing children is the norm, and not the exception in many parts of the world today (as in, all of the nations registering more than a four-children-per-family average). And in some zero-growth nations, churches were embracing children long before American churches caught the vision. In Russia as early as the 1970s, where the average family numbered two children or fewer, families in the underground church commonly had seven children or more.