A Kansas-turned U.K. mother of eleven children is once again pregnant and saying that triplets would be right up her alley. The full time mom announced her latest pregnancy on TikTok.
Britni Church, 32, and her 29 year old husband, Chris, welcomed triplets Oliver, Asher and Abel just about a year ago. Her current pregnancy, provided only one baby shows up, will be baby number twelve. Before she revealed the news online, Britni had her TikTok followers guess what the announcement could be. With eleven kids, there would seem to be good money to put down on "pregnancy".
Church has a goal. She wants 15 kids and she hasn't been shy about saying it. She is hoping for another girl this time around.
"I hope we’ll try to have another girl still," Britni told The Sun. "I don’t think I would ever have more than 15 kids but then again I never thought I’d have 11 kids."
Britni's larger than usual family has garnered plenty of critisism from the same online community she shares so much of her life with. The mutli-time mom has defended her tribe and her choices for as long as she can remember. For Americans, the average amount of children in a family has been on a decline. In 1960, the average home in the U.S. had 2.33 kids. Fast forward to 2019, and that number is down to 1.93 children under the age of 18 per family in the United States.
Compare that to Britni who had her first child, Crizman, six days after her sixteenth birthday. She ended up having four children altogether with her ex-husband. Today, Jordan is 14, Caleb is 13, Jace is 12, and Cadence is ten. the couple divorced in 2010.
From there, Britni went through "a carefree phase", as she puts it, after a night of self-decribed partying, she became pregnant with her sixth child, now-8 year old Jesalyn. For three years after that, she lived as a single mom raising six kids alone. That's when she met her new husband, Chris, in 2014. Since then, they made five children. This upcoming birth will be number six for the pair.
Is a big family bad? Well, of course there is a study for that. A University of Houston and London School of Economics research team recently looked through 26 years of data from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The findings were that siblings had lower cognitive abilities and higher frequency of behavioral problems for every added child in the family. Girls had higher risk of pregnancy. Also, those impairments in youth turned into difficulties as adults. According to The Washington Post, those from large families tend to have lower levels of education, lower earnings, and more criminal behavior.
Statistics like that won't stop The Churches. They're moving forward with an eye on the big 15. They do it all with pride and know that the outside world can sometimes judge them.
"People assume a lot of things about us that just aren’t true," Britni told The Sun. "We are just like everyone else."
Sources: The Sun, The Washington Post, World