This is when I think foster parenting (or ophanages) are a good idea. I personally think the kids should be taken away from this mom until she can financially pay for them on her own.
She is in her 30’s, so why is she still in college? How is she going to do that with 8 babies? This woman is crazy!!!!
I don’t really even know what to suggest they should do. But the situation certainly bears watching.
The college thing makes sense, assuming her back injury was real (and it very well may be, since various major media reports are reporting the outline of the injury incident during a psych hosptial patient riot as fact, not just as “according to Ms. Suleman”). She had gone to college and graduated, and gotten her license as a psychiatric technician (which is a genuinely skilled designation, not just a glorified bed pan cleaner thing). Most psych technician jobs would require physical ability to handle physically uncooperative patients, and a serious back injury often heals well enough to not be a problem for everyday activities, but remains subject to easy re-injury, and a psych hospital wouldn’t hire a technician with that sort of physical problem.
So if genuine physical disability has rendered someone unable to do the job that their previous education qualified them for, going back to school to get an additional degree in a related field, to get qualification for a type of work where the injury won’t be a problem, is a reasonable thing to do. Going out of one’s way to add to an existing brood of 6 children, in the middle of this job re-training process, is obviously not reasonable.
Frankly, I think the state should pay her a standard public school teacher’s salary to homeschool the whole brood. She has plenty of relevant education, she’d enjoy it, and it would cost a tiny fraction of what the bloated public school system spends on any 14 students (probably about what it normally spends on 3). I’m quite sure that her mother will cave and continue providing full time, free child care service. And her father has been saying all along that he’s going back to work in Iraq to make money to support the brood. My sense is that the three of them are about equally crazy.