London - Alison Cooper is frantically strapping her two-year-old son Luke into his car seat while urging his elder brother, Reece, eight, to hurry up and climb in beside him.
It’s 7.30pm and both boys are dressed in their pyjamas for the imminent 45-minute round trip to collect their sisters Amy, 16, and Amber, 15, from their respective athletics and theatre clubs.
Once back home again, Alison still has to cook dinner for her daughters and her partner, Mark, 43, who is at work - then there are school uniforms to iron, homework to supervise and bedtime stories to read.
The 40-year-old is, unsurprisingly, worn out. For while exhaustion is a normal effect of parenthood, Alison’s is magnified by being a mother of four. And she is all too aware of that problem.
Indeed, she has a rather different opinion to that espoused by British TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, who implored women to have as many children as possible and said: “Nobody’s ever lain on their death bed and said: ‘I wish I’d had fewer children.’ “
Because, taboo though such sentiments are, Alison does wish just that. “I absolutely adore all four of my children and don’t regret having any of them per se, but in hindsight I wish I’d stopped at two,” says the dental receptionist from Dartford, Kent, whose two daughters are from her previous marriage.
“I was perfectly content with two children. Having another two with Mark has almost ended our ten-year relationship on several occasions and remains the main cause of tension between us.”
Doubling the size of her brood meant Alison had to give up a career as a PA in London, and move the family from their three-bedroom home to a roomier four-bedroom detached house that cost £90 000 more.
Their saloon car was swapped for a more expensive seven-seater, and Alison’s weekly food shop now costs an eye-watering £170 (about R3 000). Yet since expanding her family she hasn’t been able to shake the feeling that she’s somehow a substandard mother.
“I have to spread myself so thinly between my children that none of them gets the time and attention they truly need from me, and that makes me feel horribly guilty,” she explains.
For much as Alison clearly cherishes, loves and feels thankful for each of her children, she believes that having fewer would not just have made family life more enjoyable and affordable, it would have allowed her a career and enriched her children’s lives, too.
And while such views are considered off-limits in public, privately it seems plenty of women empathise - online parenting forums are full of mothers who feel the same, repeating the complaint more commonly heard from first-time moms: “Why didn’t anyone tell me it was so hard?”
Nor is it just mothers of four children and more who are voicing regrets - many modern moms complain that having even three was a mistake.
Perhaps it is a realisation of the ramifications of large families that lies behind the shrinking size of British families. A generation ago women had an average of 2.42 children compared to an average of 1.92 today.
Now half of the 18.6 million families in the UK have just one child - predicted to be the majority family size by the end of the decade - compared to almost 1.2 million who have three or more.
Jessica Chivers, a psychologist and author of Mothers Work, says she comes across countless women like Alison who wish they’d stopped at fewer children.
“The tragedy is that they don’t feel able to admit how they feel or to ask for help, even though there should be absolutely no shame in it,” says Jessica. “Motherhood is gruelling enough as it is, and these women certainly aren’t saying they regret their children, they just wish they’d done things differently.
“Many women find having a couple of children manageable, if tiring, so they assume that adding a third, fourth or further child to their won’t be much more work.
“In fact, it alters the dynamic of everything, from their finances and their marriage to their relationship with their older child or children, and can bring with it immense feelings of failure and guilt.”
So what is the magic number when it comes to kids?
For Alison, two would have been her lot had her marriage to her childhood sweetheart - the father of her daughters – not fizzled out when she was 30. But she fell in love again, aged 32, when she met Mark.
“While he had a son, Ben, now 17, he didn’t see much of him at the time and longed for the opportunity to be a doting dad,” she says.
“Although he didn’t put me under any pressure to have more children, I knew that it would make him happy and in the end I was lax about contraception so didn’t have to make a decision either way,” Alison admits.
“But having Reece brought dramatic changes to family life which I didn’t foresee. I could no longer devote as much time to Amy and Amber and was consumed with guilt.
“Ordinarily, during school holidays we’d meet their friends and moms for trips to the cinema but I couldn’t do that with Reece in tow.
“And for the first 18 months Reece was medicated for digestive problems which meant we didn’t have our usual family holidays abroad. I felt I was depriving the girls and putting Reece’s needs above theirs.”
Alison then had a fourth child.
“Luke was an accident and a huge shock, but there is no way we could have considered a termination,” says Alison. “But having four kids is the main cause of rows between Mark and me. When I spend fun time with my daughters, shopping or having lunch, he feels resentful that he’s left to deal with our boisterous sons.
“In arguments, he will insinuate that I care more about the girls than the boys, which just isn’t true. They are teenage girls and they need a different sort of quality time with me.
“It doesn’t help that as well as working two days a week I also go in every Saturday so we can afford the £85 a week for Luke’s nursery place. That means we only get Sundays together as a family.
“My parents, a retired teacher and a bank worker, collect Reece from school when I’m at work because I can’t afford to put him in after-school club. I love all of my children dearly, but if I’d stopped at two I could have devoted adequate time to them and had a life and career of my own.”
Fellow fraught mother Katie Bott, 37, dotes on all her three children but feels similarly that in hindsight just two would have been ideal.
Katie always dreamed of having four children, having met her husband Tom, 38, an IT manager for a law firm, when they were both just 18.
She wanted two close together, a gap in which to resume her career, then two more.
“I’m one of three kids and Tom’s one of five so he was especially keen on a large brood,” says Katie, an operations manager for a charity. She lives in Herefordshire with children Douglas, ten, Liliana (known as Lily), six, and Isabel, four.
“I had two miscarriages before we conceived our second child, Lily, and when I finally held her I felt that, with a boy and a girl, we had our perfect family. There was also a realisation that as a mother I was geared up for two kids. I only have two hands, after all.
“Occasionally I’d gaze at Lily sleeping and think that maybe I did want one more child. But when I discovered I was pregnant again I cried and wondered how I’d cope with three, especially as we’d just bought a new home as a major renovation project.”
Katie earns £2 000 a month less than on her old salary because she can work only part time. Holidays to the Greek islands have been replaced by UK breaks and visits to family in France.
“People told me that three kids would be easy but I find it impossible to give each the attention they need,” she explains.
“There is always someone left out, usually Douglas because he’s older. Lily is a typical middle child and craves attention, while Isabel is very needy and still doesn’t sleep in her own bed.
“Tom is out of the house for 12 hours a day so the childcare and chores are down to me.
“I adore all three children and juggle hard to ensure I can do the school run every day and spend as much time with them as possible. But there is no time to take Isabel to groups like I did with my older children so I feel she misses out.
“Tom would still have another one but for me that’s it now, no more children. No chance.”
Nearly three months after having her third son, Hazel Tan, 39, is also questioning the wisdom of extending her family.
“Just when I was ready to use my brain again and resume my career in restaurant and event marketing, I discovered I was pregnant,” says Hazel, who lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire, with husband Marc, 44, an account manager for a software company, and their children James, six, Hugo, two, and Matthew, 11 weeks.
“We thought our family was complete so it floored us both. My career is on hold again and I’m back to endless breastfeeding.
“Meanwhile, the demands of my other sons are changing. James is getting increasing amounts of homework which he needs my help with, and Hugo is back to soiling his nappies, having been fully potty-trained before Matthew arrived.
“I am besotted with all of them and realise I am moaning about “First World problems”, particularly when so many couples face infertility. But I have no clue how I will ever be able to give them all the attention they need.”
Hazel met Marc at a dinner party in 2000 and when they married in 2004 they both wanted a family.
“We were elated when we had James and adamant we’d have a sibling for him. But we wanted to enjoy him first so had a deliberate four-year break before Hugo.
“With James, parenting was an exciting project and I devoured books and internet sites on the subject. When Hugo was born James was starting school so I could divide my time between them more easily.
“But now I’ve got two little ones at home it’s tough. I briefly considered putting Hugo in nursery five mornings a week but I don’t want him to feel pushed out.
“He and James are fighting more because they have less of my attention, and I’m beating myself up and wondering how I can ever split myself three ways, four if you include Marc.
“Last Saturday Marc looked after Matthew and Hugo for an hour while I took James to buy some Lego and it was a reminder how important that uninterrupted one-to-one time is with a child.
“It also compounded my guilt about how I’m not meeting my boys’ needs.”
Jessica Chivers says the answer may lie in mothers looking at their own needs as much as their children’s.
“Feeling overwhelmed by the demands of a bigger family can often be eased by taking some time out for yourself,” she says.
“I’m not talking about fancy spa days, just five minutes’ peace to eat breakfast without thinking about your children, as a regular occurrence.”
For Hazel, the idea of finding those few minutes to herself feels impossible. “Going from two kids to three has been an exponential shock, more so than becoming first time parents,” she says.
“By the time Matthew goes to school I’ll be 45 and I can’t see how I’ll ever resume a corporate career again then.
“But mostly I feel weighed down with guilt that I have three gorgeous little boys all vying for my attention and I can’t give them all the time and support they need to develop.
“Despite loving them all dearly, I fear that three children may simply have been one too many.”
Daily Mail