Jon & Kate divorce not typical, say parents of multiples
BY SHANNON PROUDFOOT, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE
When Gail Moore heard Kate Gosselin, star of the hit reality show, Jon & Kate Plus 8, bemoan that she and her husband hadn't beaten the marital odds stacked against parents of multiples, she cringed.
"I was listening to it and I went, 'Oh, God,' " says the mother of 16-year-old twin boys and an older son and daughter. "I know why she would say that, because definitely, there is a lot more stress, so it feels like you're two to three times more likely to have marital problems -- but there's nothing that proves that."
Gosselin's comments came during a heavily promoted special episode of TLC's show about her Pennsylvania family, which includes eight-year-old twin girls and five-year-old sextuplets. After months of reported marital struggles, Gosselin, 34, and her husband Jon, 32, announced they were separating, but hours before the show aired Monday night, news broke that she had filed for divorce.
"Parents of multiples have triple the divorce rate," Kate said on the program. "I was thinking we were going to beat that. I don't know if I can say that anymore."
Moore and other Canadian parents of multiples take exception to that.
Moore, the chair of Multiple Births Canada, says the organization was inundated with calls from reporters after the show aired, but they combed through international research and found nothing that showed an elevated divorce rate among parents of multiples.
"She's blaming it on the multiple births," she says of Gosselin. "Maybe it has something to do with having the cameras on you."
According to Statistics Canada, there were 11,034 children born as multiples in 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, up from 9,118 in 2000. The agency doesn't break those numbers down into twins, triplets and so on.
Moore, who lives in New Liskeard, Ont., argues the teamwork required to parent multiples brings many couples closer together.
"It makes them a stronger unit, because they realize the children need them, and they work as a team to be able to handle all of the physical things that need to be done for the children," she says.
Lynda Haddon of Perth has been teaching pre-natal classes to parents expecting multiples for 20 years, and she encourages her students to tend to their marriages as carefully as they do to parenting. "You're doomed" is the last thing they need to hear, she says, but people are often only too eager to share horror stories.
Haddon is about to celebrate her 30th anniversary with her husband, and she says raising their 28-year-old daughter and 26-year-old twin girls strengthened their bond.
"I'm very saddened, because it's very hard on the rest of us when this is out there," she says.
TLC announced on Tuesday that a "retrospective of Jon and Kate's first 10 years" will air on June 29, then the show will go on hiatus until August, giving the Gosselins time to "regroup" before resuming a modified schedule.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
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