Jon and Kate Are Evil, But Supersized Families Aren't

If there’s one point of cultural agreement right now, it’s that Jon and Kate Gosselin, who return on Monday from their television hiatus, are the worst parents in America.

As the unhappy parents of eight shot from basic-cable obscurity to tabloid mega-celebrity this spring, ratings of TLC’s Jon & Kate Plus 8 rose in inverse proportion to their marital contentment. The couple appeared on the cover of US Weekly for a record seven weeks in a row. By the time they announced their divorce in June, their public images as a shrew (Kate) and a cad (Jon) were in place, with their “litter” of twins and sextuplets in the role of unnaturally conceived victims. Gawker called them “child-rearing maniacs,” Babble accused them of turning into “over-tanned, wealthy, cheating bar-hoppers,” and the Times said they had “disappointed us all.” Barbara Walters tut-tutted on The View that “if you have more than five children, you shouldn’t be allowed to get divorced.” We loathe the Gosselins for their tackiness and their immaturity. But what we really just can’t understand is why they had so many children to begin with.

The Gosselins are one of several supersized families who have earned supersized public ire. Single, unemployed Nadya “Octomom” Suleman became a tabloid and television fixture after giving birth to eight babies via in vitro fertilization in January. The most infamous mother on earth is probably Angelina Jolie, whose brood increased to six with the birth of twins last year. The Duggar family of Arkansas, stars of TLC’s 18 Kids and Counting, is by all appearances cheerfully functional, but their commitment to the extreme Christian anti-birth-control movement Quiverfull has drawn disgust on the web.

Since when is having an extra-large family in itself grounds for universal condemnation? There was a time, not so long ago, when these constellations of parents and children were to be envied rather than scorned. When I was a young girl, I spent most of my private playtime pretending to be a slightly harried single mother of 11. I had named them all, including twins, Jenna and Kenna. (I should note that this dream remains blessedly deferred.) Feeding my fantasy was a stack of children’s literature classics, relics of an era when large families were seen as boisterous, perhaps a bit messy, certainly chaotic, but also fundamentally happy.

My favorites included Little Women, of course, along with Margaret Sidney’s The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, which came out a year later in 1881. The simperingly well-behaved Peppers and their widow mother went on to star in 12 novels, and a few decades later, in four films. In 1926, Honoré Morrow, wife of publisher William Morrow, debuted On to Oregon!, the chronicle of seven resilient children left orphaned along the Oregon Trail; columnist Nicholas Kristof recently put it on his list of “the best kids’ books ever.” Sidney Taylor’s 1951 All-of-a-Kind Family, which also became a series, featured a happy Jewish immigrant family with five daughters, and later a son, living in close but tidy quarters on New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the century. The wildly successful Stratemeyer syndicate, best known for creating Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, contributed the Bobbsey Twins (1904) and the Happy Hollisters (1951) to the genre, with families of four (two sets of twins!) and five.

The children in all of these fictional families are well-adjusted, pleasantly mischievous, and self-sufficient by both training and necessity. They do chores together in appealingly organized fashion, they play together (sometimes in teams), and everyone babies the baby. The Brenner family of All-of-a-Kind Family breezes through dusting and tidying, while the little Peppers plan elaborate Christmas decorations together using materials they find around the house. The consistent message—which no one with only one measly little sister could ignore—is that a large family means a larger portion of the best ingredients of family life: security, independence, laughter, playmates, and adventure. The siblings occasionally jostle for their parents’ attention, but it is never in doubt that they’re loved.