Extreme Moms and Why We Love Them

The final episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8 [2], the now-infamous TLC reality show about a Pennsylvania couple with twin daughters and a set of sextuplets, aired Monday night. After the spectacular implosion of the Gosselins’ marriage was covered in tawdry detail by the tabloids, one might assume that Americans are sick of hearing about the inner-workings of a super-sized family. But apparently we haven’t had our fill yet. TLC has found another enormous brood to take over from the Gosselins: the Hayes family [3], stars of the new show Table for 12. Betty and Eric Hayes outdo the Gosselins by seeing their sextuplets and raising them an additional set of twins.

The Gosselins and Hayes feed our fascination with what could be called extreme parenting, and more specifically extreme moms. A string of women have recently become famous or adored by collecting children like Imelda collected shoes. Nadya “Octomom” Suleman and her 14 children [4]. Angelina reportedly on the brink of adopting her seventh kiddo [5]. Michelle Duggar on the Today show breathlessly announcing she was pregnant with her 18th child [6], to the shock of the previous 17. (But that’s already quaint history. Duggar is expecting No. 19 in March [7].) At first, as the tabloids started showing women with baby bumps under stylish dresses in the early aughts, it seemed as if they were part of our newfound adoration for the hallowed mother-child relationship. Here’s Angelina Jolie breast-feeding in W [8], like any good mother would. Look at Jennifer Garner pushing wee Violet on the swings—she’s so devoted!

But as the phenomenon moves into freak-show territory, something different is taking hold. The more children a woman collects, the less her relationship with any particular child counts. Now, it seems, we are fascinated with the extremes because we suspect they are the opposite of the ur-moms who oppress on the playground. It is impossible to imagine Kate Gosselin having quality flash-card time with any of those sextuplets, or Michelle Duggar worrying that Jinger isn’t getting enough out of her private art lessons. Maybe we are fascinated because they offer a vision of liberation, avatars from the approaching age in which overparenting is dead, as this week’s Time magazine heralds [9].

Sometimes their freedom takes the form of total chaos, a sense that the mom is failing miserably, as with Kate Gosselin or Nadya Suleman. This makes other moms feel less guilty about sometimes feeding kids Kraft Mac n’ Cheese instead of a strict diet of organic fruits and vegetables and the occasional, humanely slaughtered meat. Suleman, as portrayed by John Bowe in the New York Times Magazine in a recent profile [4], truly loves her children and is trying her best. But she is completely ill-equipped to deal with her prodigious offspring. Kate is another sort of parental disaster, so distracted by her growing fame and the collapse of their marriage, that these days, their eight kids seem like more of an afterthought. Suleman's and the Gosselins’ televised failings serve as a kind of “pride-relief for the rest of us as we try, lamely, stumblingly, to raise families, pay taxes, make house payments,” Bowe writes.

Sometimes we’re intrigued by the sense of control that these families seem to have over their offspring. Michelle Duggar’s household appears to run like a mini-factory, with each of her attractive, well-mannered children doing their proper chores without any backtalk. Watch as the Duggar teenagers happily take a trip to the ostrich farm without mocking their parents or rolling their eyes! Observe them make dinner, while the older ones look out for the younger ones without demanding money for their baby-sitting time! So desperate are parents to get a modicum of power back from their kids that they’ve started employing the techniques of another reality TV star: The Dog Whisperer’s Cesar Millan. [10] According to a New York Times article from this weekend, parents have started using canine training techniques on their children because “[u]nlike modern parents … dog trainers don’t think discipline equals being mean. They understand that dogs are happiest when they know their position in the hierarchy.”

Either model—the Suleman chaos or the Duggar iron grip—offers blissful relief from the current oppressive parenting ethos. In the futuristic world where the extreme moms live, you no longer need to devote all your waking hours to your child’s happiness, whether it be carting them to and from hockey games, or quizzing them on the quadratic equation when they’re still in diapers. You just need to trick yourself into acting as if you have 19 children when you only have two.