In a large family, characters are molded, skills can be learned, and rough edges knocked off, says Australian counsellor and author Anne Perrottet.
Perrottet should know, she has 13 children - among them a son Dominic, the premier of New South Wales.
She's written a book about motherhood called Thriving and Surviving Raising 13 and spoke to Jim Mora about her world of raising 8 boys and 5 girls, and the challenges that came along the way.
The whole Perrottet family Photo: supplied
As a young girl, Perrottet was fascinated by a classmate who had 13 siblings. She was self-assured, confident and always seemed happy.
"I not only wanted that for my future family, I wanted that for myself because I wasn't like her."
Perrottet's own parents divorced while she was still at school - and it had a lasting impact on her.
"The scars are deep," she says.
"I was saved from being another statistic of kids suffering from divorce because I met people after school that had faith, that were encouraging, they were optimistic and they were just so understanding, I could offload on them about what I was going through."
Her faith is a big part of her life.
In fact, the whole family takes its faith very seriously, but she says it was very important that it was internalised - "we weren't Sunday Catholics".
Everyone has a different faith journey and different times in their lives they grow, she says.
She believes you need a grand narrative in life to direct you - that's what her faith provides her with.
But she and her husband John didn't just want their kids to grow up believing something because they were told to by mum and dad, or because the church believed it.
"I think for children and adults to be very confident in who they are and feel secure, they have to know not just what they believe but why they do believe it."
The Perrottet children grew up eating their meals around the dinner table and afternoon tea in particular was a very important time in the household.
They'd have butterfly cakes and donuts, things that they'd be excited to come home to, Anne says.
"I found that sitting around the table I could gauge what sort of day each one of them had and if one needed to go for a walk and have a chat about something that went wrong or something that went right or whatever."
At dinner, things were very structured.
"At one stage I thought I'm not coping with dinner, I was finding that I was dreading dinnertime and I thought, that's not very positive, it's not a very healthy attitude I have."
She decided to get a newspaper and the kids could choose what article they wanted to read from it. "But only one sports article a week because otherwise, it'd be sport every day."
Thriving and Surviving Raising Thirteen book cover Photo: supplied
Abortion, drugs and euthanasia were topics of discussion - helping the children to form their own opinions.
Strong personalities run in the family, and some don't shy away from sharing their opinions.
Raising a family, large or small, is not a small undertaking, she says.
There's a fair bit of pushing and shoving in a family the size of hers, she says. It teaches you resilience and generosity.
The family is far from perfect, she says - "We get knocked down, we just get up again."
Anne Perrottet Photo: supplied
Perottet says she was rather demanding when the kids were little but she was also very well organised. Her children learnt that there were consequences to bad behavior.
She once slammed on the breaks of the car at a roundabout, stopping dead in the middle of traffic.
"I tried to be very patient that afternoon, I went up and got those boys from school and they jumped in the car and they wouldn't stop fighting. [They were] fighting, the girls were playing, I was getting a headache.
"I asked, I bribed, I said anything, come on. They wouldn't so I said look, this is it, I can't take it anymore, so I went into the roundabout and put my hand on the horn and kept it there until there was silence."
There was silence all the way home.
A lot of teaching was done in the car, Perottet says.
During another after school one of her sons asked, and kept asking, if they could go to McDonald's. she told him they didn't have the money to go.
"I yelled out the window and said 'Hey guys out there, we don't have enough money, we can't go to McDonald's.
"He was so embarrassed, he never asked again."
