Is the fourth child a status symbol? - As the Beckhams announce that they are expecting their fourth child, Geraldine Bedell wonders if anyone else can afford such a big brood.
Victoria and David Beckham have announced that they are expecting their fourth child, proving that celebrities really are different from the rest of us. At a time when most British families are worrying about VAT rises and university fees for our 1.8 children (no longer the old 2.4 – normal people can’t afford that many any more), the Beckhams are reproducing in a way that, were they members of the underclass, would be regarded as not quite responsible.
The only couples who have four children these days aren’t really couples at all. Either they’re brands, selling thousands of cookbooks faster than you can boil an egg (see also Jamie and Jools Oliver), or they’re people who resemble the cast of Shameless and don’t stay together long enough properly to qualify as couples. They’re the people who can afford not to be bothered about the fact that children are extremely expensive and time-consuming and keep you up half the night, thus preventing you from earning the £193,772 of disposable income they’re going to cost you until they’re 21 – and that’s without educating them privately.
Victoria and David Beckham have announced that Victoria is pregnant with their fourth child
Everyone else, those of us in what the politicians like to call the coping classes or the squeezed middle, or (see Nick Clegg yesterday) alarm clock families, is too busy coping and being squeezed and getting up really early to have any time left over for sex, let alone for having another child and bringing it up. In her novel Notting Hell, Rachel Johnson describes a fourth child as the ultimate status symbol, proving that you’ve got enough money to buy yourself sleep, the most precious beauty product of all. A friend of mine, the mother of two, admits that she sees having only two children as faintly humiliating: 'you may as well have “low income, no future” branded on your forehead.’
I should probably confess at this point that I do have four children. In my case it’s because I’ve been married twice, so really I’ve had two lots of two. I have been a young mother and an older mother; what I have never been is a particularly competent mother. I am in awe of women who have four children under the age of eight. I couldn’t deal with that many sticky fingers. Saying you have four children sounds impressive, though, as if you are one of those multitasking, organised people, so I am quite fond of dropping it into conversation. I expect even Victoria Beckham will get a bit of a kick from having brought up four children, even though, in truth, she won’t have had to rub the jammy hand prints off the walls herself.
There’s been quite a bit of speculation that one reason the Beckhams want a fourth child is that they’re keen to have a girl. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be successful: the odds of having a boy if you’ve already had two or three does rise very slightly, but essentially, you’ve got a 50-50 chance with each child. Victoria has not divulged whether she has attempted to determine the sex of her child by any of the various recommended methods, including vinegar douches and sexual positions and timings and other joyless preoccupations that you would think would put any sensible child off being conceived – though almost any piece of advice in this field is contradicted by another, directly opposite, but of advice.
That said, some people do claim to have determined the sex of their child. The novelist and journalist Lucy Cavendish had three boys and desperately wanted her fourth child to be a girl: 'I really did use a kit! I used a How To Get A Girl kit from the internet. I longed for some female energy rather than the endless Tonka toys and Thomas the Tank.’ Quite possibly, though, people who have been less successful don’t talk about it.
Geraldine Bedell is mother to four children
We have to hope, in fact, that the child is not a girl, for its own sake. The Beckhams have not shown great restraint in the matter of their boys’ names and, when it comes to celebrity daughters, the temptation would seem to be even greater. One thinks of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s Suri, or Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Apple, or Geri Halliwell’s Bluebell. Nicole Richie has called her daughter Harlow, although presumably not for the reasons that led to Brooklyn Beckham’s naming. I spent many a happy adolescent hour shopping in the Essex new town but even I never fancied conceiving a child there and I am not the celebrity daughter of Lionel Richie.
Quite apart from the tricky business of having a silly name (one that screams 'No way am I going to be a swotty girl with glasses and a passion for ancient languages! I am glamorous!’) life is harder for celebrity daughters than sons. Their parents rarely seem able to resist the temptation to turn them into walking designer accessories, a bit like handbags that hold on to you. Little girls all want to be princesses and need to learn that while that’s sometimes fine, doing it all the time makes you into a monster. Suri Cruise has not only a weird unpronounceable name, but clothes no other child of her age would ever wear which, were her parents not international celebrities, might excite the interest of social services. Heels? Lipstick? Call me old-fashioned, but this is not a good look for a four year-old. As for the floor length Ralph Lauren, where to begin? It’s so decadent, it’s like something that ushered in the fall of Rome.
Then there is the tricky question of eating. You do not have to be particularly well-informed to know that Victoria Beckham’s relationship with food could not be characterised as hearty or jolly. It is quite difficult in the mad modern world of diets and obesity to bring up daughters with a sense of the joy of food: women generally are ex-expected to see-saw between desire and guilt, between puritanical self-punishment and rebellious greed. Instilling a love of food and a sense of restraint about it in daughters it is a surprisingly difficult job and almost certainly cannot be done by someone who never eats cake.
Or indeed, smiles. Quite possibly inside the Beckham household they are all falling about laughing at Posh’s success at scowling. Quite possibly she never stops grinning about it as she larks about with the kids. But never smiling is not a good way to get people to like you, generally speaking, and one has to hope that the daughter, if daughter there is, is encouraged to do something other than glare.
The Beckhams have never been a couple to do things by halves. There were the thrones and white doves at their wedding, there is Beckingham Palace, there’s the fact that neither of them seems satisfied with just the one job. Victoria has turned herself from Posh into a really good designer; David no longer seems content to be associated with just the one football club. So we should probably not be surprised that at a time when families are generally getting smaller, they are going for big. (In 1964, one in five women had four or more children; by 2009, the figure for women was only one in ten.)
A friend of mine who has two children consoles herself with the fact that most of the people she knows who have four children are married to 'no-life bankers.’ Having lots of children may look like an advertisement for a great relationship, but in practice it probably means that at least one of you is so busy earning bonuses that you can’t be there much and when you are, you’re rather dull.
Perhaps I would feel less snarky about Victoria’s many children had she not retained the figure of a 23 year-old (currently on the front cover of Vogue). If she had ever been photographed in some ill-fitting ugly piece of maternity wear she was forced to endure because it’s only a matter of months and you can’t spend too much money on clothes you’ll never want to have anything to do with again. If she’d ever appeared in public looking hollow eyed and exhausted and with stains on her t-shirt where she’d leaked through her hideous maternity bra. If having four children meant she had to go without expensive holidays and spent a large part of every day loading and unloading the dishwasher.
The truth is that those of us who sensibly have two children, and those who have chaotically and unaffordably had four, all wish it could have been easier. If we could have the nannies and cooks and drivers and no worries about grocery bills or school fees and could bear the pregnancy and birth bit all over again, there are quite a few of us who would have had more, or who would have had a nicer time. So we’re just jealous, and must wish the Beckhams well. ( telegraph.co.uk )
Victoria and David Beckham have announced that they are expecting their fourth child, proving that celebrities really are different from the rest of us. At a time when most British families are worrying about VAT rises and university fees for our 1.8 children (no longer the old 2.4 – normal people can’t afford that many any more), the Beckhams are reproducing in a way that, were they members of the underclass, would be regarded as not quite responsible.
The only couples who have four children these days aren’t really couples at all. Either they’re brands, selling thousands of cookbooks faster than you can boil an egg (see also Jamie and Jools Oliver), or they’re people who resemble the cast of Shameless and don’t stay together long enough properly to qualify as couples. They’re the people who can afford not to be bothered about the fact that children are extremely expensive and time-consuming and keep you up half the night, thus preventing you from earning the £193,772 of disposable income they’re going to cost you until they’re 21 – and that’s without educating them privately.
Victoria and David Beckham have announced that Victoria is pregnant with their fourth child
Everyone else, those of us in what the politicians like to call the coping classes or the squeezed middle, or (see Nick Clegg yesterday) alarm clock families, is too busy coping and being squeezed and getting up really early to have any time left over for sex, let alone for having another child and bringing it up. In her novel Notting Hell, Rachel Johnson describes a fourth child as the ultimate status symbol, proving that you’ve got enough money to buy yourself sleep, the most precious beauty product of all. A friend of mine, the mother of two, admits that she sees having only two children as faintly humiliating: 'you may as well have “low income, no future” branded on your forehead.’
I should probably confess at this point that I do have four children. In my case it’s because I’ve been married twice, so really I’ve had two lots of two. I have been a young mother and an older mother; what I have never been is a particularly competent mother. I am in awe of women who have four children under the age of eight. I couldn’t deal with that many sticky fingers. Saying you have four children sounds impressive, though, as if you are one of those multitasking, organised people, so I am quite fond of dropping it into conversation. I expect even Victoria Beckham will get a bit of a kick from having brought up four children, even though, in truth, she won’t have had to rub the jammy hand prints off the walls herself.
There’s been quite a bit of speculation that one reason the Beckhams want a fourth child is that they’re keen to have a girl. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be successful: the odds of having a boy if you’ve already had two or three does rise very slightly, but essentially, you’ve got a 50-50 chance with each child. Victoria has not divulged whether she has attempted to determine the sex of her child by any of the various recommended methods, including vinegar douches and sexual positions and timings and other joyless preoccupations that you would think would put any sensible child off being conceived – though almost any piece of advice in this field is contradicted by another, directly opposite, but of advice.
That said, some people do claim to have determined the sex of their child. The novelist and journalist Lucy Cavendish had three boys and desperately wanted her fourth child to be a girl: 'I really did use a kit! I used a How To Get A Girl kit from the internet. I longed for some female energy rather than the endless Tonka toys and Thomas the Tank.’ Quite possibly, though, people who have been less successful don’t talk about it.
Geraldine Bedell is mother to four children
We have to hope, in fact, that the child is not a girl, for its own sake. The Beckhams have not shown great restraint in the matter of their boys’ names and, when it comes to celebrity daughters, the temptation would seem to be even greater. One thinks of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s Suri, or Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Apple, or Geri Halliwell’s Bluebell. Nicole Richie has called her daughter Harlow, although presumably not for the reasons that led to Brooklyn Beckham’s naming. I spent many a happy adolescent hour shopping in the Essex new town but even I never fancied conceiving a child there and I am not the celebrity daughter of Lionel Richie.
Quite apart from the tricky business of having a silly name (one that screams 'No way am I going to be a swotty girl with glasses and a passion for ancient languages! I am glamorous!’) life is harder for celebrity daughters than sons. Their parents rarely seem able to resist the temptation to turn them into walking designer accessories, a bit like handbags that hold on to you. Little girls all want to be princesses and need to learn that while that’s sometimes fine, doing it all the time makes you into a monster. Suri Cruise has not only a weird unpronounceable name, but clothes no other child of her age would ever wear which, were her parents not international celebrities, might excite the interest of social services. Heels? Lipstick? Call me old-fashioned, but this is not a good look for a four year-old. As for the floor length Ralph Lauren, where to begin? It’s so decadent, it’s like something that ushered in the fall of Rome.
Then there is the tricky question of eating. You do not have to be particularly well-informed to know that Victoria Beckham’s relationship with food could not be characterised as hearty or jolly. It is quite difficult in the mad modern world of diets and obesity to bring up daughters with a sense of the joy of food: women generally are ex-expected to see-saw between desire and guilt, between puritanical self-punishment and rebellious greed. Instilling a love of food and a sense of restraint about it in daughters it is a surprisingly difficult job and almost certainly cannot be done by someone who never eats cake.
Or indeed, smiles. Quite possibly inside the Beckham household they are all falling about laughing at Posh’s success at scowling. Quite possibly she never stops grinning about it as she larks about with the kids. But never smiling is not a good way to get people to like you, generally speaking, and one has to hope that the daughter, if daughter there is, is encouraged to do something other than glare.
The Beckhams have never been a couple to do things by halves. There were the thrones and white doves at their wedding, there is Beckingham Palace, there’s the fact that neither of them seems satisfied with just the one job. Victoria has turned herself from Posh into a really good designer; David no longer seems content to be associated with just the one football club. So we should probably not be surprised that at a time when families are generally getting smaller, they are going for big. (In 1964, one in five women had four or more children; by 2009, the figure for women was only one in ten.)
A friend of mine who has two children consoles herself with the fact that most of the people she knows who have four children are married to 'no-life bankers.’ Having lots of children may look like an advertisement for a great relationship, but in practice it probably means that at least one of you is so busy earning bonuses that you can’t be there much and when you are, you’re rather dull.
Perhaps I would feel less snarky about Victoria’s many children had she not retained the figure of a 23 year-old (currently on the front cover of Vogue). If she had ever been photographed in some ill-fitting ugly piece of maternity wear she was forced to endure because it’s only a matter of months and you can’t spend too much money on clothes you’ll never want to have anything to do with again. If she’d ever appeared in public looking hollow eyed and exhausted and with stains on her t-shirt where she’d leaked through her hideous maternity bra. If having four children meant she had to go without expensive holidays and spent a large part of every day loading and unloading the dishwasher.
The truth is that those of us who sensibly have two children, and those who have chaotically and unaffordably had four, all wish it could have been easier. If we could have the nannies and cooks and drivers and no worries about grocery bills or school fees and could bear the pregnancy and birth bit all over again, there are quite a few of us who would have had more, or who would have had a nicer time. So we’re just jealous, and must wish the Beckhams well. ( telegraph.co.uk )
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