Multiple Births : More Are Not Always the Merrier

Twice a year, the irrepressible Kienast family quintuplets were delivered to millions of American households in the pages of Good Housekeeping. The New Jersey quints took to the airwaves to show other youngsters how to run faster with Keds. Kodak posed the photogenic five on prime-time TV to show how good those multiple grins looked in Kodachrome.

But then the free diaper service ran out. The TV contracts weren’t renewed. The second pair of quintuplets ever born in the United States had been joined by 11 more, and the now-teen-age youngsters were no longer wearing Keds.

William Kienast, heavily in debt and about to lose the family home in Liberty Corner, N.J., was found dead in his car in March of last year, an apparent suicide.

Media Attention

The incident focused another flood of media attention on the Kienast family, but it also underscored what multiple-birth counselors say is a little-understood undercurrent to the celebrity that accompanies the birth of quads, quints and sextuplets: that, after the free diapers and baby food and formula are long gone, families are left outside the spotlight to cope with difficulties that may be much more profound than the hilarious routines in which mother attempts to place five bottles into five mouths with two hands.

Marital problems, severe financial constraints and the inherent difficulties of helping multiple infants grow into individual, psychologically healthy adults are all part of the little-known realities that multiple-birth families must face every day, said Pat Malmstrom, director of Twin Line, a Berkeley-based support service for multiple-birth families that is one of the first of its kind in the nation.

‘Limelight ... Is Exciting’

“You know what the limelight is like. It’s exciting, but what does it do for you on a day-to-day, practical basis? It isn’t all Doublemint gum,” Malmstrom said this week, after the much-celebrated birth of septuplets in Orange to Samuel and Patti Frustaci. One of the babies was stillborn and a second died Friday.

“I think the thing that sums it up so perfectly is a Nigerian father we talked to when his third child turned out to be twins. He was driving a cab at night to support them, and he said, ‘Twins are a hard happiness.’ That’s so true.”

In the first few months, there is the simple problem of sleep-deprivation. Even with both of them working at it, Janet and Scott Lederhaus of Santa Ana said they were getting only about three hours of sleep a night when they first came home with quadruplets in 1983. Feedings were lasting two hours at a stretch, with only an hour in between.

“Then there’s the emotional shock, and your marriage,” said Malmstrom. “How do you even remember a marriage relationship in this sea of babies? Sex? What? Who?”

Many of Twin Line’s clients are, suddenly, single parents, she said. “Sometimes dads are so scared. They’re exhausted because they don’t get any sleep at night, and usually they’re the ones who are supposed to keep on working. And yet we have two dads abandoned with toddler twins. Sometimes the dads run away, but sometimes the moms beat them to it.”

Patti Milner of Long Beach said she and her husband decided to divorce shortly after she learned that she was pregnant with triplets. Once she had the girls--now 15 months old--the new mother, who already had a 5-year-old, wrote to diaper services, baby food companies and formula producers because she had heard they would supply free services to multiple-birth mothers. But she never received a reply.

Triplets, even quadruplets, are becoming “ho-hum” in this era of fertility-drug births, said a Los Angeles public health nurse who is seeking aid for four families with quads that “are getting no help whatsoever.”

Help Is Essential

For many families, help is essential. The cost of raising a single child to adulthood in a city in the western United States now averages $96,484, according to the Department of Agriculture. And for a group of premature infants, the first few months of medical bills alone can easily run $250,000 or more.

The Kienast family, in addition to magazine and TV contracts and donations of free baby supplies, were aided by a local builders’ association which built a seven-room addition to the family home, charging only for materials. But the 150-year-old farmhouse had been conditionally sold at auction by the time William Kienast, 52, committed suicide. Kienast had borrowed heavily to found a chemical company in 1979, but it went out of business and he declared bankruptcy that same year. He later started a chemical brokerage firm that was only moderately successful.

Peggy Jo Kienast said in an interview this week that perhaps her only regret about the quintuplets’ birth and subsequent celebrity was the effect it had on her husband.

‘Was a Dreamer’

“The only regret is the pressure that it put on my husband, but I don’t blame the numbers for the pressure, necessarily,” she said. “My husband was a dreamer to begin with, and he always had big thoughts and big plans, and they didn’t always pan out, and things just went from bad to worse.

“Stress can be a very debilitating thing. It just sort of creeps up on you and, before you know it, it’s on you.”

It was the financial pressure that weighed most heavily, she said, not the day-to-day stress of raising the children. “If anything, the kids were Bill’s pride and joy, and he wouldn’t have traded anything, ever, for them. If anything, they kept him going longer than he might have otherwise.”

Since her husband’s death, a private-donation fund has been established for the Kienasts. The fund saved the family home and now, along with Social Security and some odd jobs, it supports the family.

In Wirral, England, Graham and Janet Walton, parents of 1 1/2-year-old sextuplets, have been living on a contract for articles and photos with the London Sunday Mirror since the birth of the babies in 1983, and other magazines paid for articles during the first few months.

Gave Up Job

Janet gave up her job as chief cashier at a bank when she learned that she was pregnant. Graham, a self-employed home decorator, attempted to go back to work shortly after the babies were born, but soon found that it was impossible. The six children, all girls, demanded too much care.

Now, the newspaper contract money is beginning to run out, the couple said this week, and the four-bedroom home the family moved into just before the sextuplets were born is beginning to feel cramped. The government-supplied nurses that helped the couple during the first several months are no longer available, but Graham will undoubtedly have to return to work soon.

“His family has helped, and we’ve had help from friends, and we’ve been able to manage really quite well,” Janet said. “But the fact that you only have one pair of hands each, and just the very great volume of work--washing bottles, washing clothes--there’s so much to do during the day that there isn’t a break at all.”

The couple try to get out of the house at least once a week, either for a drink or dinner, but Graham says: “If you miss anything, it’s the male company, your mates and that, your friends. We do see them now and again, but obviously, we don’t get out as much as we used to.”

But Janet says she has “no regrets whatsoever. . . . I wouldn’t fudge at all. I love it. We’ve got six times more joy than anybody else, and I suppose we’ve got six times more heartaches, but we’re very, very happy. We wouldn’t swap, neither of us.”

Oldest Survivors

Susan and Colin Rosenkowitz of Cape Town, South Africa, have six 11-year-olds, the oldest surviving sextuplets in the world.

The couple received a large contract from the National Enquirer for rights to stories and photos, but Rosenkowitz, a 50-year-old free-lance fashion wholesaler, said, “I don’t even like to talk about that. I think the health and the well-being of the children is more important than the diapers and free help and so on.”

When the children were born, he said, “We had a telegram from the top (the government), but since then, we haven’t even had an inquiry. . . . We haven’t had any assistance. People say to me, if this would have been England, you would have had help from the government. In England, they pay you to have children, but England is a welfare state. South Africa is not a welfare state. We have had no help. But I don’t mean to sound like I’m criticizing . . . .”

Susan Rosenkowitz now works with her husband part time, and the couple manage more easily now that the children are older and involved in a number of sports and recreational activities.

Colin is thankful, too, that the publicity has waned. “Still, we have people phoning up in the middle of the night. You’re sleepy, and they ask, ‘How old are the kids?’ I say, ‘That’s the same question you asked last year.’ ”

“Obviously,” he said, “our lives have changed. They’ve changed a lot. But if the children are not at home, we’re lost. We don’t know what to do with ourselves.”

For many families with twins, triplets and more, helping their children relate properly to each other and to the outside world at the same time is one of the most difficult parts of child rearing.

At a gathering Thursday night of mothers with multiple births in Orange County, one young woman introduced herself and then confided quickly that she was troubled because she had just learned that her young son, a twin, would not be ready to enter kindergarten in the fall. Though he had scored several months ahead of his peers in mental ability, he was withdrawn and often appeared unable, or unwilling, to communicate with others, she said.

But when she took him to a psychologist for help, “He acted fine. There, he was the center of attention, and he wasn’t withdrawn, and you couldn’t tell anything was wrong--until we got home.”

Counselors say such problems can be multiplied with larger births. Sometimes, said Malmstrom of Twin Line, parents complain that their quadruplets seem unwilling to communicate with anyone but their brothers and sisters.

Huddle Together

Often, they voice concerns because their twins or triplets, if left to nap in a single crib, will consistently huddle together, fetus-like, even when parents try to separate them.

“There’s an awful lot of fine-grained thinking that parents of multiples have to do,” Malmstrom said. “They worry about dominance and competition. We all want our kids to be functioning and independent individuals as adults, and we want them to love each other and be best friends. It’s not a contradictory goal, but how you actually facilitate all that is a real challenge to parents.

“What we tell them is that independence comes with maturity, and maturity comes with time, and the relationship between newborn multiples is an absolutely rare and marvelous experience which should be enjoyed and not worried about,” Malmstrom said.

Janet and Scott Lederhaus take their quadruplets regularly to a professional “developmentalist” to ensure that the babies are progressing normally, both physically and psychologically.

The Santa Ana couple has confronted the delights--and heartaches--of multiple births twice.

Less than a year before she successfully delivered quadruplets in November, 1983 (having lost a fifth baby earlier in the pregnancy), Janet had gone into labor with another set of quadruplets in her 28th week of pregnancy.

‘Came Out Crying’

It was Christmas Day, and the doctor told her she would have to come into the hospital to deliver the babies, though they would probably be stillborn.

“We knew they would all be dead, but they all came out crying,” she said. Janet, a critical-care pediatric nurse, and Scott, a neurosurgery resident, told doctors not to take any extraordinary measures to keep the babies alive. “We’re both strong believers in quality of life. You know, they can keep anything alive, and you just wonder if it’s worth it for the child. So they got enough to make sure they were comfortable, oxygen and blood. They weren’t on ventilators. They all died within a day, but we couldn’t do anything except wait for them to die--and then go home with nothing.”

The new quadruplets, all healthy and well-developed, turned 18 months on the day the Frustaci babies were born. And now Janet Lederhaus, who stopped taking fertility drugs after the quadruplets, is pregnant again--this time with a single child, a turn of events that she has described as simply “a shock.” Her pregnancy was running six days behind Frustaci’s, with delivery due in August.

That will be one month after Scott finishes his residency at UC Irvine and begins looking for a job--and just about the time that the three-bedroom Santa Ana home will be hopelessly outgrown.

“We got all the free formula and free food and diapers,” says Janet. “But the harder part is now, because we’re still on the same salary, but we’ve got to buy four of everything. A simple thing like milk, we go through gallons at a time.” Diaper changes were running 360 a week in the early days. Grocery bills have been averaging $140 a week.

“I worry about (Scott) finding a job,” Janet says. “I know, people tell me he won’t have any trouble, and I know he won’t have any trouble, but I still worry . . . .”