The large family is rapidly becoming extinct in our society. Gone are the days when one family had enough children to field their own football team (11 kids), baseball team (at least nine) or even their own basketball team (a paltry five).

It formerly was far from unusual to see the number of kids in one family crack double digits, and this was the old-fashioned way when having 10 children meant giving birth nine (one set of twins) or ten times, instead of the current age of fertility drugs where it is only a matter of time before some poor women hit double digits in just one terrible nine-month stretch.

Just like the typical age at which people get married and the average age at which women give birth, the number of children in the average family has changed considerably since our parents’ generation. In many families, there are only one or two children. They don’t even know what they’re missing out on.

Families are getting smaller because people are getting married later in life. They’re smaller because in many families both parents work and because taking time off for a pregnancy can often hinder a woman’s ascent in her career choice.

There are fewer children because children cost money, a commodity that seems to control our lives. Studies estimate the cost of raising one child until he or she finally is on his or her own at over $200,000. With statistics like that, the thought of having to spend a million or more just to support a larger family no doubt often seems less attractive to today’s families.

I’m one of six kids. Yeah, six kids. That means I’m a member of one of today’s “big” families. I have five younger siblings — two brothers and three sisters. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Sure, there have been plenty of times when I’ve cursed at them under my breath. I hated the days when I had to play chauffeur, shuttling them to baseball practices, school, friends’ houses and the mall, only to have to run two hours later and retrieve them all again. There have been tons of shouting matches and even the occasional fist fight.

There have been dozens of mornings (essentially, every time I make the voyage home) when I dropped into bed in the wee hours of the night only to have my little brother and sister, who are twins, turn my chance at sleeping in into a three-hour night of rest by jumping on me as I lay asleep.

I can’t count how many times I wished I could have once had my own bedroom, or longed to be able to find some sanctuary in my own home where I wouldn’t be bothered by somebody every two minutes.

Now, this is going to perhaps sound fake, corny, even trite, but I’ve had a chance to have five good friends in my brothers and sisters. They are people I can turn to if I ever really need to talk.

I’ve been able to do a thousand things because I have this large family that so many other people haven’t had a chance at. For example, sharing a room for years on end with my little brother (even if I hated that fact at the same time). Or trying to explain to my six-year-old brother that the dance his class is doing for a school performance is not a “girlie dance” and that he should stop refusing to do it just because he’s a boy.

Even things like passing on what little I know about the world, from how to egg on certain teachers to dealing with my parents when trying to get some extra curfew time to the best way to deal with the cops when you get pulled over for speeding yet again. Feeding and holding the twins when they were just born and advising my brother on girl troubles and trying to prevent my sisters from having any boy troubles, ever.

Another offshoot of the smaller families is the dying of large family gatherings. Both of my parents are from fairly large families (seven and nine kids), so the holidays are always full of cousins, aunts and uncles. If there’s only a couple of children in a family, the holiday gatherings years down the road will be pretty bare: the grandparents, their two children, each married and with only one kid. Eight people. Not exactly the warm, robust Christmas many of us are used to.

But nonetheless, the family size continues to drop. Whether it’s the upward trends in marriage and childbirth age or the economics of raising children, the undeniable fact is families are having fewer children. The only child is no longer a rarity, but threatening to become the norm, and I think that’s a shame.

Though I may sound like a Hallmark card, it’s sad to know that so many parents and children will be missing out on the happiness and love that abounds in the large family, especially in a world that increasingly seems to be in short supply of both.