NYTimes Mag on kid counting

I read my Sunday New York Times in this order: Sunday Styles (pretty much front-to-back, with a skim of the weddings), Week in Review (never get through it, but always take a stab), the magazine (almost always cover-to-cover), and then the Book Review. If time permits, which it rarely does, I read through one or two of the front page stories. I also always scan the photos in the Travel section, as a reminder of where in the world I might be able to go once I can swallow traveling afield with an undetermined number of children. It's a fantasy flip through for now.

This week, however, I never made it past the magazine. When I reached page 14, I was stopped dead in my reading routine by the article headline: "Family-Size: TV shows about huge broods are a favorite for online gossips." "Chris, look at this!" I shouted from where I was hunkered down at our kitchen table, trying to get through as much of the paper before Ben arose from his afternoon nap. My alarmed husband shot back from the sink, thinking I'd discovered an even larger species of ant than already inhabits our house on the moister days of the spring. "It's my story!" I wailed.

I'd been scooped! I felt immediately threatened by this piece, with it's accompanying aerial photo of a table set for 18 -- and yet I hadn't read word one of it. So I got a glass of orange juice, a handful of fresh strawberries, calmed myself, and started in on the two-page spread by Virginia Heffernan.

I'll let you link to the article yourself to get the full extent of her analysis, but the take-away of the final paragraph is that TLC and Discovery Health -- the two cable channels that air reality programs on mega-families, like "Jon & Kate Plus 8" and "Duggars' Big Family Album" [the Duggars are a family who was featured on "Kids by Dozen" -- they are currently planning for their 18th child; what exactly this prep entails is unclear. I imagine readying a nursery or buying a double stroller would illicit laughs of mockery from the Parents Duggar] draw their audience from a group of viewers (who I can't help but assume is largely female) with exponentially fewer children who are struck, perhaps knocked down flat on their fannies, by the fact that these families exist and function in a country where the average kid count is 2.1. Heffernan quips in her last line: "Now get back to your own families and stop complaining."

I am not threatened by Heffernan's piece, as I thought I would be -- I am inspired to blog away by it. There's a clear interest in family size -- the New York Times is on to it, and so am I. Heffernan mentions a number of websites where vocal advocates and critics go to voice their opinions on controversial parenting topics like kid count, a few which I've never visited myself, but will this week. The article also reminded me that I should make clear here, as I mentioned in my long original essay, that the definition Chris and I have for a large family is more than three kids. That means four kids makes a big family; not 17. Seventeen kids makes a huge, off-the-radar, insane-asylum-inducing family (that I'm happy to voyeuristically check in on via reality TV, but have no interest in recreating in my comfortable four-bedroom home). And, in truth, it's not the degree of kid count I'm interested in covering on this blog. Though it does, as Heffernan astutely points out, make great fodder for the many other online gossips out there.