Jon and Kate plus eight. The Duggars.  Octomom. The new family on TV with their sextuplets.  What kind of message are we sending to the nation, to our children, to the world?

Back when we were a mainly agricultural society, having a large family was a bonus; you were breeding your own help, you didn't have to hire anyone to help on the farm. There would be plenty of heirs to help take care of you in your old age. Infant mortality was high, so you had many children in hopes that some would survive to adulthood. In countries we consider third world, this practice is still common.  Of course, lack of reliable birth control also was a factor.

Now we live in an industrial world, a world based in technology, where you aren't growing computer chips out in the fields, and the need for a large family no longer exists. In fact, the large family has become a luxury that only the very well off can afford. Or so it should be.

Over the past 12 years, every family that had a large number of multiple births got a great deal of social support - in the form of money, cars, material items, baby stuff, even houses from the public in general. All because they managed to be pregnant with multiples, usually due to fertility drugs.  We acted, as a society, like they should be rewarded for putting the life of the mother and the lives of the babies at such high risk by choosing to have them all.

First that comes to mind is the McCaughey family in Iowa in 1997.  They were given pretty much everything- from a house and cars down to the smallest diaper pin.  Seven babies at once.  We acted like it was a miracle and rewarded them for it.  They were in the media  few times, but (and you have to hand it to the parents for making this decision) they were mainly kept out of the limelight.   The children are now 12 years old, and haven't been seen in the media much past their second birthday. Their parents chose to raise them as normal, regular children.

Other multiples have been born in between, and while they were again gifted by society, they have also been allowed to grow up as normal children, out of the limelight. Then along comes cable TV. Let's glorify this happening, let's create a media frenzy.  Apparently, along the way, a very famous and popular case regarding multiples and celebrity was forgotten - the Dionne Quintuplets.

The Dionne Quints - all girls - were born May 1934 to a poor family in Ontario that already had five other children.  They were tiny, and the doctor who delivered them didn't think they'd survive. But survive they did. They were taken away from their parents on the assumption that they wouldn't be very well cared for, and made wards of the province. Their parents were denied access to them for a while, and then only had limited contact. The girls were put on display for the public to come see them, and people from all over the world came to view this unique event - quintuplets who all survived and thrived. For the first nine years of their lives, they were a SIDESHOW, a $500 million dollar industry for Canada.  The parents finally were allowed custody of their children, but the women had problems all through their lives due to their having been put on display.

The three surviving Dionnes, when the McCaughey sextuplets were born, wrote a letter to McCaugheys, warning them that "Multiple births should not be confused with entertainment, nor should they be an opportunity to sell products."

Yet TLC has done just that. First Jon and Kate plus 8, now Raising Sextuplets, 18 Kids and Counting, Table for 12- all of these families put on television, their every moment of their lives potentially on display for the those who come to view the sideshow. T shirts and tours and books all being sold.  And the parents have agreed to this form of exploitation.

You wonder why Jon and Kate's marriage broke up? I don't - where is their privacy? Where is the time for them to be just themselves, have a bad day, spank one of their kids when they need it without millions of people trying to second guess their parenting skills, their intelligence, their everything?

In fact, these shows have inspired others to try for multiple births and huge families, without having a clue as to what they are getting into, because the shows are so edited, they don't show you the times when the Duggars are having a hard day, or when Kate breaks down and cries because all 6 toddler are being toddlers.  It doesn't show you the details like the number of nannies and other helpers that are around for most of these families. It doesn't show you how deeply in debt each family was just from the births alone, or how hard they struggled the first time all of the babies were home at the same time. (I will make exception for the Duggars - they were self sustaining long before they were ever on TV)

TV glorifies this lifestyle, without showing the reality of it - and then we wonder when people like Nadya Suleman-  the Octomom - surface. Yet we are all too willing to criticize her, all too willing to decide that she must be crazy or trying to freeload or something else - because she doesn't have a TV show.

It's time to stop glorifying a lifestyle that is almost impossible in this economy. It's time to stop telling our young people that all they have should have large families and turn them into media circuses. It's time to let Jon and Kate be the human beings they are, with their own problems, without commenting on every second of their day in every form of media.

It's time to say enough and turn off our TVs.