It’s hard to see how the children will receive the parenting they need–Let’s forget the ethical issues surrounding the octuplets, the medical, legal, financial and religious ones, and focus on the day to day lives of the children. My experience is that children thrive with a certain amount of attention, they look, they observe, they mimic, they seem to be sponges for the love around them, being loving back, responding to cuddles, hugs, to what is said to them. Neglect them and their little brain shuts down, or at least stops opening. That’s why protective children services are concerned about this kind of neglect. How is one mother going to attend to fourteen children in a 24-hour cycle? How much time can she give to each, how much attention, more importantly how much energy will she humanly have for each? Let’s say she gets help. Fine, but isn’t the idea for them to bond with the parents, the anchor, thread, continuity in their lives when everything else changes? And in this case since there is only one parent, isn’t that even more important? And what happens to the others when one is ill and needs more attention? Often babies like to be held when they are not well. Even if the mother is the best in the world, I don’t understand how there can be the kind of parenting the children need.
That’s my concern now that those children are here–that and the fact that this mother ought to have realized this.
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