by Pamela Sosnowski

Created on: August 24, 2009

One only needed to watch the Nadya Suleman, or "Octomom" special on Fox to know that without a doubt, it is quite possible to have too many children. In a taped interview for Radar Online, which made up the bulk of the Fox show, Suleman confessed that by having eight babies at once by in vitro fertilization in addition to her first six children, she "screwed up" her life, as well as the lives of her kids. She was also shown struggling to feed her numerous wailing offspring on her bed, by balancing one bottle under her chin while attempting to quiet the others with the only two arms that God gave her. It was pretty obvious to see that any grandiose delusions Suleman had at the time her freak show of a story hit the news had finally turned into a very harsh wake-up call.

While most people who plan on raising a family would never dream of having as many children as Suleman, Jon and Kate Gosselin, or the Duggars (who had their 18 children without the help of fertility treatments) it still stands to reason that it is possible to have too many children, and recent indicators are showing that large American families may be getting popular. We live in a very baby obsessed nation, a social phenomenon that seems to have accelerated after 9/11. Multiple births receive a lot of media attention, as do female celebrities under "baby bump watch" by entertainment news sources. Some women, like Suleman, take this baby hoopla to the extreme: according to an August 2009 Women's Health article, there are women whom psychiatrists have termed "bumpaholics", because they are addicted to the attention they receive while being pregnant. The article also points out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered that more than a quarter of American women who gave birth in 2007 were having their third or fourth child. One woman quoted in the piece said she grew up "in a relatively large family and always loved having lots of people around," and therefore wanted to re-create that big family experience in her own household.

This all means that a reality check may be in order for some families who are thinking of adding to their brood. When it comes to having kids, there's no magic number that automatically tells you "when"; it could be one, three, or eight - depending on the parent's circumstances and household. There are, however, a few factors that anyone planning on having children (or parents deciding on having more children) should take into consideration, to avoid feeling

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