RECENTLY, a parenting dream halfway across the world went terribly wrong.

American quasi-celebrities Jon and Kate Gosselin, and their brood of eight kids – a pair of twins and fraternal sextuplets – have been appearing with alarming frequency in the tabloids as their family is wracked by scandal, gossip and rumours of affairs and divorce.

The reality-show stars, whose lives are chronicled on TV in Jon & Kate Plus 8, airing on the Discovery Home & Health channel (StarHub Ch 70) here, have increasingly been criticised for being selfish parents by even their close relatives, and pilloried for putting their young children under unrelenting media scrutiny.

While Jon has been painted as a philandering C-lister by talkshow hosts and comedians, Kate has been castigated for supposedly denying one of her daughters water and spanking another as paparazzi cameras clicked.

And, of course, the post-modern ethical debate about whether it is healthy to subject the eight kids to a fishbowl existence, and whether it constitutes exploitation, rages on.

It’s sad that the public seems to have a perpetual need for a less-than-perfect mother who’s in the public eye to be cast in the role of Bad Mummy.

Even Madonna is not being spared these days, as a child psychologist disapproved in British tabloid the Daily Mirror of how Madge has exposed newly adopted daughter Mercy to the public glare by taking her to a Kabbalah meeting and on tour.

With her blonde highlights and tummy tucks, coupled with a dominant and sometimes-abrasive persona on the show, Kate might just have landed herself the ignoble title of Latest and Greatest Bad Mum.

But it is all too easy to forget that, as intrusive as the reality -TV cameras can be, what viewers see is only the surface of every family’s complicated story.

And people forget that there’s nothing normal about Jon & Kate’s family in the first place – even if you take away the cameras and reality-show notoriety.

Few children grow up with so many siblings of the same age, while having to share their parents’ attention so many ways.

I was – and perhaps still am – a fan of the show.

As a mother of a three year- old son, I would sink gratefully into the sofa at the end of an exhausting day and watch the family’s domestic adventures with relief.

Whenever I felt stressed out by mothering my only child, I would tune in to see how they coped with eight.

But the sad turn that their lives has taken has changed the viewing experience for me inexorably.

Watching the older seasons that are being telecast here, behind the latest and fifth season
in the United States, is like revisiting old family videos after things fall apart, and suddenly seeing all the tell-tale signs and fault lines in previously innocuous looks and comments.

I guess it serves only to reinforce a commonsensical point: There is no such thing as a perfect family.

No matter how successful and fun a clan looks, we ultimately see what we want to believe.

And all of us will just have to cope with our family lives the best we know how, shorn of illusions and resisting the urge to tear others down.

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