Shirley Harrold has 16 reasons to give thanks this Thanksgiving.
She has 16 children. Fourteen are her biological children, and two are stepchildren. Seven girls and nine boys. All are healthy.
“My husband used to always say he wanted a football team,” Harrold, 57, said of her large family. “But I never thought to myself that I wanted to have all these kids, and to this day I still think to myself, ‘Did I really have this many kids?’”
Their approach to family planning was simple: let God determine the size of their family. To their families, this was nothing unusual. Shirley and her ex-husband, Frank Jr., themselves came from families of 13 and 10 children, respectively.
“I would ask God why he gave me all these kids when there were people who wanted to have kids but couldn’t,” Harrold said. “After a while, I said, ‘Don’t know what his plan is for these children, but I’ll stop kicking.’”
Life in the Harrold household was no fairy tale. The family did at times struggle.
Their monthly budget exceeded $500 in groceries, requiring 200 diapers and 60 cans of baby formula. Just to make ends meet, they purchased clothes at thrift stores and picked up food from food pantries. They almost never ate out as a family. Space in their three-bedroom home in Ferguson, as one could imagine, was tight.
“There was never any privacy,” said the third-oldest child, Chervonia Andre, 36.
So how did they make it work? Faith.
“If it had not been for God in my life, I could not have did that mentally,” Harrold said.
They adhered to a rigid schedule that included going to church and studying the Bible. All the children sang or played instruments, which made for a pretty noisy house, Harrold said.
The girls did most of the cleaning, and the boys took care of the yard work.
While her husband worked at The Boeing Company, Harrold stayed at home to look after the children.
Harrold rose every morning at 5 a.m. to cook breakfast and prepare the older children for school. She cleaned the house and took care of the younger kids during the day. By the time the children got home from school, dinner would be prepared and they were ready to do their homework.
All of the kids would be in bed by 10 p.m.
“I never, never got in the bed before midnight,” Harrold said. “I would take a bubble bath and just meditate.”
She found support from older people who encouraged her to see her children not as a burden but as a blessing from God.
Today, all of her children, except for one, are grown and have become quite successful. One is in the U.S. Marine Corps, one is a registered nurse, two are in college, one is in public relations, and the others are musicians.
At 12 years old, Ashoena Outlaw is the youngest of the bunch.
“They led us in the right direction,” said middle child Albert Harrold, a schoolteacher and wrestling coach at Ferguson Middle School. “There are none of us locked up in jail, on drugs or dead. That’s a blessing to have so many kids and nothing like that happen.”
Harrold met her husband when she was 15 years old. He had two young children, whom Harrold raised and counted as her own. The couple married and shortly thereafter had their first child, Frank III. Twelve children later, Harrold remained healthy. She and Frank Jr. got divorced seven years ago after 35 years of marriage. Shirley later remarried and had her last child.
Harrold’s recipe for parenting was to teach her children to stick together, to never give up, to act right and to respect authority.
“We could mess with each other, but we didn’t want anybody else messing with other family members,” Albert said.
“I never had any problems out of them, even at school,” Harrold said. “The teachers would say you got a lot of kids, but they are well-behaved.”
When asked if she wants to have a family that large, Andre said, “No way.”
“I have four kids, and I don’t see how she did it,” Andre said. “There’s no way I could do it.”
The holidays are one of the few times that all 16 of the Harrold children and their children can get together. Three sons live in New York, Tennessee and New Jersey, respectively. Frank III, 43, lives in Edwardsville, Ill., but leaves for Iraq for six to eight months the day after Thanksgiving.
Despite the hardships of having such a large family, Harrold said she would not want her life any other way.
“I am so blessed,” she said.
