When my wife Toty told me she was pregnant, I worried. We hadn’t planned on a child. And I was 48. Could I really do it all again?

On 28 May 2012, Akira Franklin was born in Santiago, Chile, to her Scottish/Italian dad (me) and her Palestinian/Syrian mother. She came three days early, red-faced and howling. Toty – her motorcycle-riding , jewellery-designing mum – was half comatose from an emergency caesarean, so I instinctively held out my arms and cradled six-and-a-half pounds of wriggling, pink flesh. My Akira. My beloved daughter, with all her fingers and toes, and enough energy to prove she was alive and well.

I was smitten – which was a relief, given that I already had six daughters: Francisca (now 29), Susan (20), Maciel (19), Kimberly and Amy (18 and identical twins), and Zoe (eight).

Seven daughters was never part of my plan. I was one of three, born in New Hampshire and raised in Massachusetts; my older sister Sarah (now a professor of sociology at Cambridge) broke all the rules and my younger brother Christopher (a designer of public parks in Maine) soaked up the effusive tenderness of my mother, Susan. My father Tom was a workaholic who never missed a single one of my sporting events for nearly two decades, and imparted in me a sense of risk and adventure. Being the one in the middle, I had more room to drift, and after college I left the US for Chile. I fancied myself as a riot photographer, and rented out my left shoulder to heft cameras into street demonstrations for the absurd figure of $35 a riot.

In 1989, I fell in love with Claudia, a guerrilla revolutionary who was a year older than me, with double the life experience. She worked smuggling messages for the armed wing of the Communist party, shuttling between imprisoned leaders by posing as their girlfriend. Claudia had a child from a previous relationship, Francisca, then four, who became my first beloved daughter.

Claudia and I married immediately and, keen to escape the legacy of Pinochet’s Chile, moved to San Francisco, where I worked as a journalist and Claudia helped run a Chilean arts and crafts import business. We planned to have a second child, and were thrilled by the arrival of Susan in 1995. But pregnancy ambushed us again and again, despite Claudia being on the pill: first Maciel, in 1996, then, a year later, a double surprise: identical twins.

Jonathan Franklin with twins Kimberly and Amy in 1997; they are now 18.

Suddenly we had four little girls in nappies, and another aged six. I arranged dolls houses, swings and toys across the yard to keep them busy, and snared the attention of the municipal inspectors. They arrived at my home, ticket and fine ready. Why, they queried, did I think I could get away with running an unlicensed day-care facility?

“They are all mine,” I pleaded.

Not long after that, I decided to get a vasectomy: conventional birth control was simply not working. The operation itself was easy, so straightforward it is surprising there isn’t a YouTube video on how to do it yourself. Within 48 hours of the operation, I was riding a bike and playing Ultimate Frisbee. Many men fear a vasectomy might change their sex life: they are right, but for the wrong reasons. After the operation, my sex life was better than ever – spontaneity was no longer a gamble on pregnancy and I became an ambassador for the procedure.

Regrettably, the pressure of so many responsibilities took its toll. I had been raised without television, and allowed to run wild in the woods. Claudia and I, on the other hand, moved back to Santiago, where mad traffic and a recent dictatorship meant that TV was a relatively safe alternative to roaming free. We eventually split up when our eldest was 15, unable to see eye to eye over parenting styles. I moved two blocks away, so I was still able to see the children daily.

I was a divorced dad with five daughters when I met Toty, a vivacious, 30-year-old actress. She accepted my daughters, despite unanimous advice from friends and parents alike to steer well clear. Valiant, with a kamikaze survival gene, she braved life with me and I listened to her arguments for a family of our own.

In Chile, I fell in love with a guerrilla who smuggled guns for the Communist party. We married immediately

I shuddered at first, but before long I, too, wanted the buzz of small children again. I reversed the vasectomy (“In terms of sperm, you are a millionaire,” is the way the surgeon summarised the operation) and in 2007, became a father again, to Zoe. Finally, in 2012, came Akira, now a rambunctious three-year-old usually spotted with two pocketbooks and a push bike.

Today, I still live in Santiago, with Toty and three of the children. Three daughters live with my ex-wife, while Francisca is in her own flat nearby, braving adulthood. We all live within a 10-minute bike ride of each other.

In my circles, even three children is considered a bit mad. Four and you are treated like it might be contagious. With five comes all the ribbing about having your own girls’ basketball team. When you hit six, you are suspected of being Opus Dei (especially in Chile), and by the time you have seven, all the jokes and sports analogies are replaced by a gaping stare and something like, “I have two daughters and I’m going half mad.”



Many people feel sorry for me, as if this were a burden. But having seven daughters is a blessing. For one, the four teenagers are basically the same age and tend to treat each other like fellow bear cubs. It’s not always gentle, but it is clannish to the end. In the morning, they can often be found piled in one room, popcorn on the floor, snoring, having told each other stories into the early hours.

When you have seven daughters, you buy a lot of flowers. And tampons. But let’s focus on the flowers. I am often buying and delivering bunches (preference: sunflowers), because, with four teenage daughters, the tribulations of a single week provide ample scenes of triumph or despair. Three weeks ago, my journalist-in-training daughter Amy broke up with her boyfriend for the final time. A week before that, Kimberly, a football goalkeeper, had her knee torn in two, and is at the time of writing bedridden and awaiting a second operation. I have arranged taxis and guitar lessons so that the months of rehab aren’t totally depressing.

Mostly I stay at arm’s length – I wouldn’t install tracking software on the girls’ phones and have never spied on their social media. Well, not much. I know that two of my daughters smoke pot, that another once downed seven shots of tequila and felt nothing, and that a fourth likes cigarettes. But I am pleased they tell me these things. And when they ask, “What is it about Chilean boys? None of them knows how to kiss”, I don’t cringe. It is a gift to be a teenager, and I see a dad’s job as lifeguard, not chaperone. The older girls are all on the pill, and that helps me sleep at night.

Franklin, holding Akira, with (left to right) Amy, Maciel, Kimberly, Zoe, Francisca and Susan. Photograph: Alejandro Olivares

Of course, lots and lots of boys hit the doorbell – though all of them soon realise that if they are considering dating one of the four Franklin teens, it is a gauntlet of protective sisters, not the parents, who will weed out the weak and unqualified.

For me, the key to being a competent dad (I dare you to shoot for excellence when your time is divided by seven) is living as the gatekeeper. I can open opportunities, re-route bad behaviour, shine a light on some paths and sort the dangerous emotional collisions from the trivial. I don’t know how many times I have consoled a small girl over tiny yet enormous tragedies: a bag of chocolate left on an aeroplane, a doll’s button eye suddenly popped off and away, a sister touching a toy she shouldn’t.

Just yesterday, I arrived home to find that potential art student Zoe had painted the youngest one a dark blue – while Susan was distracted by studying – and I mean a full-on Avatar-style blue. Zoe was looking fairly proud of her accomplishment, while my reaction was to scream and half-drag the two of them into the bathtub, trying to avoid brushing the walls. Only an hour later did I regain my humour and curse my idiocy at not taking pictures. This, after all, was the ultimate sisterly portrait: the artist and her work.

One thing I have realised over the years is that you can never really have as much energy as a small child, but you do develop methods of coping. When they were young, I often took a midday break from the four little ones to smoke a joint in the shower, play some Warren Zevon and pretend to be an adult for the eight minutes of peace I had reserved for myself. “Why do you take so many showers?” was a refrain I often heard when all four were in nappies. But I felt no guilt in allowing my mind to soar a bit. In many ways, a young child acts as if they are stoned anyway: raucous laughter at the smallest joke, joyous appreciation of the senses and a voracious appetite to follow.

Energy was a constant challenge. Not just my own, but the collective 8,000 calories a day used up by four little ones. Early on, I learned that if you don’t burn those calories outside the house, it’s multiplied exponentially by the presence of walls.



The trampoline was my saviour. Twenty-five years ago, I bought the largest one possible

The trampoline was my saviour. Twenty-five years ago, I thumbed through the Yellow Pages and bought the largest one possible for the garden. A monster, some 4m x 3m, like a mini tennis court that bounced. The kids soon learned to fly. At first I was terrified. What if they break their necks? What if someone crawls underneath and gets flattened? But after a quarter of a century, I am in awe of the trampoline. It may well have saved my sanity. I sat by the side, guiding, coaching and protecting my children from dangerous habits while watching them sail ever higher.

Then we heard that the Chilean Olympic committee recruited future high divers by placing small children on the trampoline and evaluating their “flight skills”. The Franklin girls rocketed. Soon, I had four of them at the Olympic training centre three days a week, for years. Susan was later invited to travel to Cuba as a guest of the diving school. I was so proud, even when she came home and gushed, “Dad, I didn’t learn any new diving tricks, but I am an excellent salsa dancer.”

Now I am watching the ripening of their childhood skills. Francisca, the oldest, wants to be a psychologist (she laughs that she already did the fieldwork by helping take care of her six little sisters). Susan has begun to study physical therapy, using her athletic skills as a guide towards rehab. And Maciel remains the wild child – her comment on recently graduating from high school was succinct: “Dad, I am out of jail.” Instead of a laptop, I bought her a backpack and a compass.

I don’t pressure any of them to follow in my footsteps, but Amy is headed that way; a prolific writer so eloquent I used to worry she may have filched it all from the internet. Her twin sister Kimberly is preternaturally calm, a magician at calming children, with plans to be a teacher.

Now I have two grandchildren to add to the clan – Tommy, seven, and Josepha, two – and I will likely have a dozen or so before too long. I once imagined having my older children take care of my youngest, to allow the odd “date night” with Toty. “Nah, dad, we have another plan,” Maciel declared. “We’re going to leave all the grandchildren with you, so we can go out and party.”

Having small children underfoot certainly seems to be my destiny. I’m now 51, and when my youngest graduates from high school, I will be nearly 70. What have I learned after a century of child-rearing (the total age of my children is 115)? That a good sense of humour is key. I try to keep my mind as agile and nimble as a feisty three-year-old. Some would call my attitude infantile (perhaps they’re right) but I would rather spend a day playing with small children than stuck in meetings with adults. When all else fails, I am comforted by the fact that when I am ill or old, I will never be on my own. After all, you’d have to be a pretty terrible father if not one of your seven daughters was willing to take care of you at the end.