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My wife and I are expecting our third within a matter of weeks. For us part of it was just the joy of larger families and the new sibling relationships you get with each one. I sorta think of it like the formula for an undirected complete graph - with 2 people you have one relationship. With 3, you now have 3 (parents with each other, each parent with child). You have 3 kids right now, so you have 10 edges, adding one more kid will increase that by 50% to 15!
Maybe this is a weird way to think about it, but I feel like families I knew that had 4 kids always had the most fun family dynamics. You don't have the natural rivalries of two, the self-centeredness of one, or the ganging up that can occur with 3.
I don't think your other concerns are trivial though.
I don't think it's a weird way to think of it and you've reminded me of another reason I want a fourth. Three kids feels like it invites weird sibling dynamics with both lots of triangulation and more rigid fixation in the roles of "oldest", "middle", "youngest" whereas larger families I know seem to have more fluidity in the roles.
Although I don't think the rivalries go down at all with 3 or 4 or 5. You're still fighting over what share you get of a limited resource (parental attention). Although I don't think it gets noticeably worse even with more fingers grabbing at the same pie... So maybe I'm wrong, and the natural decrease in resources allotted to each child actually does lower the tension as well? Now I'm second-guessing myself.
Yeah I think it's hard to look at society writ large right now in the US (or Korea...) and think that increased parental attention is doing a lot of good for the median family (or even the 85th or 95th percentile family). I'm sure there's some Bryan Caplan's out there who are giving their kids a lot of good experiences but in general I think self sufficiency and learning how to entertain yourself without parental impact is generally quite good. I think you have good reasons to be wary, but I also think worrying about impact on your kids from a 4th is not it (kids like having little siblings too!)
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