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This Mom Has 14 Kids. Here’s How She Runs a Smooth Household.
Karen Derrico, star of ‘Doubling Down With the Derricos,’ shows us how she and her husband manage their large family
“One, two. This way, now come on,” Karen Derrico says, encouraging her children as they dance down the family Soul Train line in their North Las Vegas home in tonight’s premiere of Doubling Down With the Derricos on TLC. The kids spin and show off their footwork. Dance is one way Karen keeps her 14 kids occupied. “We dance every day, throughout the day,” she explains.
Dance is also what brought Karen and her husband, Deon, together, years before they started their family. The two met in a Detroit club when Karen was supposed to be at church. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Karen says on the show, which has been in development and production for more than a year. And she’s not just talking about crossing paths with Deon. Karen is also talking about her journey with motherhood. After two miscarriages before successfully giving birth to the oldest Derrico child, plus a diagnosis of secondary infertility, which affects approximately 3 million women in the United States, Karen says she prayed that her dreams of “having as many children as God would allow” would come true. They did.
These days, Karen, 40, and Deon, 49, enjoy busting a move with their 14 naturally conceived children: singletons Darian, 14, and Derrick, 10; eight-year-old twins Dallas and Denver; six-year-old quintuplets Deniko, Dariz, Deonee, Daician, and Daiten; two surviving three-year-old triplets (their brother passed away shortly after birth) Diez and Dior; and one-year-old triplets whose names we will learn on the show, which also chronicles their arrival.
“People look at us now and say, ‘You have all these children. It must have been an easy journey.’ But it was not easy,” Karen tells ZORA. “[When I had the two miscarriages], I had a lot of questions like, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ No one in my family had this recurring loss, and no one could talk to me about it.”
