I confess - I am guilty of media celebrity mommy oogling.  I didn't fall prey to the Duggars and their brood of 18 (soon to be 19) but I couldn't resist the novelty and then the train wreck that was Jon and kate and even went so far as to publically defend Nadya Sulemon when she was being condemned for that 911 call (come on, we all could have made a similar panicked plea if one of our kids was lost).  But beyond the rubber necking many of us moms are guilty of, is there more to our obsession with these extreme parents than meets the eye? 

Jessica Grosse, author of the hilarious book, Love, Mom and the managing editor for Slate's Doubleex, answers this question and then some.  In her article, Extreme Moms and why we love them, Jessica posits that "maybe we are fascinated (with these moms) because they offer a vision of liberation, avatars from the approaching age in which overparenting is dead, as this week’s Time magazine heralds."  Basically, she says, we are obsessed because with so many children, these moms are bound to fail often and this makes the rest of us with only a handful of offsrpring feel less guilty -- it's Shadenfreude at it's finest. 

Do you agree?  Is it really as simple as our desire to feel better about ourselves as parents that drives us to watch  the foibles of others?