The Buller family of nine goes out to dinner once a week. When they pass by other tables, “their eyes kind of speak volumes,” Kyla Buller said. “You can see them counting.”
“There’s a lot of people that just assume,” Buller said. “They say, ‘Oh, you must be churchgoers. You must be religious.’ ”
The Bullers are like many parents whose decision to have large families has nothing to do with God. They’re not Catholics who oppose contraception or Mormons who see it as a sacred duty to procreate.
By choosing to have many kids, they’ve found themselves faced with assumptions about their faith.
“Not at three. But as soon as we had four, people assumed we were very religious,” Lindsay Bartleson said. Now she and her husband, who describe themselves as a secular humanist and an agnostic, are up to five kids.
The only religious group in the U.S. that is far more likely to have large families is Mormons. The Pew Research Center provided data, based on its 2014 Religious Landscape Study, on how many children a person has had by the time he or she is 40 to 59.
Fifteen percent of all U.S. adults have had four or more children, Pew found.
Members of some religious groups are more likely to have had at least four children: 17 percent of evangelical Protestants had at least four kids, and 18 percent of Catholics. Some are less likely: 9 percent of mainline Protestants had at least four children, and 12 percent of Jews. Mormons are by far an outlier with 46 percent who have had at least four children.
How do the nonreligious compare to religious people? Not so differently. Twelve percent of the rapidly growing group of Americans who identify their religion as “nothing in particular” have had at least four children.
But if large non-religious families are getting more common, Tracey Stoner hasn’t noticed it yet. “It’s hard to find support as a large family that’s not religious,” she said.
Raising seven children ranging in age from 6 months to 16 years old, Stoner has sought advice in Facebook groups for large families. But the members seem to be “95 percent Christians,” she said, with fundamentalist ideologies.
“Sometimes I’ll post a photo of my family. They’ll see a picture of my daughter where she’s wearing shorts and a shirt. They’ll blast me for that,” Stoner said. “Because she’s not wearing a dress.”
Stoner has to schedule everything. To be interviewed by phone by a Post reporter, she had to hide in the bathroom. Unsatisfied with the public schools in Mechanic Falls, Maine, Stoner, 36, and her husband Sean Stoner, 40, now homeschool all seven.
“We have a party every day,” she said. She and her husband had four children between them from previous marriages when they got together. Since then, they’ve had three more.
“It really is chaos, but it’s so much love,” Buller says of her household of seven children, ages 1 to 14. “The love I feel that we have in our house is so overwhelming. All the different personalities and all the different strengths.”
There’s also an overwhelming amount of laundry. And a daily grocery trip to spend $50 to $60.
From previous relationships, Buller, a professional photographer, had four children and her husband Timothy Buller, a retired Navy serviceman, had two. They had one together and have decided to try for another, Buller said.
“Going out in public, our kids are so well-behaved,” Buller said last week as she drove their nine-passenger vehicle to pick three of the children up from school.
To help families navigate logistics like what transportation could work for a family of 10, Stoner now helps run a Facebook group specifically for nonreligious large families. It has drawn parents from all over, including Bartleson.
Bartleson, 39, and her husband Richard Bartleson, 51, left Washington, D.C. for York, Pa., because of the expenses of five children in the District.
She always loved children and worked as a preschool teacher. Her identity as a secular humanist and his as an agnostic didn’t have much to do with their decision to have children.
People make crude comments about the couple’s choices, though. “We hear, ‘Oh, you should stay away from your wife.’ ‘Don’t you know how they’re made?’ ” Bartleson said.
Stoner said she hears the same.
