Meet NYC’s supersized families

“Once we had the first two,” says TriBeCa wine wholesaler Brenda Di Bari, “I definitely wanted more.”

She’s not referring to the latest chianti offerings — she’s talking about kids. Of which she now has six.

In the competitive arena that is New York parenting, the new motto seems to be, “Go big or go home.” City parents are increasingly going the large-family route, opting for four, five or even six children. And in contrast to the cliché of fleeing to New Jersey or Connecticut to breed, these people say they wouldn’t be caught dead in the ’burbs.

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“I love the community and the diversity,” says stay-at-home mom-of-four Lauren McGeough, 37, who lives in the Financial District. “That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to move to the suburbs. We take subways and buses everywhere, and people are so friendly, and they help. When you’ve got four kids with you, people talk to you!”

“I love raising our family in New York City,” agrees 44-year-old Di Bari, whose brood ranges from 21-month-old twins to a 17-year-old. “We are definitely city people. We don’t have to worry about relying on cars. Our kids are exposed to many cultures and points of view, and they have access to top-notch educational opportunities and a huge variety of activities.

“The downside,” she admits, “is it’s very expensive to raise a large family in the city.”

This may be why the statistical bump in family size is happening at the top of the economic ladder. A 2008 study by the Chicago-based Council on Contemporary Families cited a “significant” increase in families with three and four children among the “super-rich” top 2 percent of households in America, with an income of $400,000 or more.

“The richest families seem to be weathering the recession better than the rest of the country,” explains Steven Martin, a research associate at NYU who worked on the study.

“At elite income levels, it is possible to raise quite a few children and still devote significant resources to each one.”

Three years on, schools are seeing a serious uptick in multiple siblings — as was noted by comic Tina Fey in her recent New Yorker essay on modern motherhood.

“I thought that raising an only child would be the norm in New York, but I’m pretty sure my daughter is the only child in her class without a sibling,” she wrote. “All over Manhattan, large families have become a status symbol. Four beautiful children named after kings and pieces of fruit are a way of saying, ‘I can afford a four-bedroom apartment and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in elementary-school tuition fees every year. How you livin’?’ ”

The “pieces of fruit” remark was presumably aimed at Gwyneth Paltrow and her daughter, Apple, but with only two kids, Paltrow’s actually on the meager end of celebrity motherhood. Closer to the trend are New York parents like Heidi Klum, who has four children with her husband, Seal, and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who keep a condo on the Upper West Side and recently enrolled Maddox, the eldest of their six-child brood, at the Lycee Francaise de New York, where yearly tuition is close to $25,000.

But it’s not just boldface names who are going all Brady Bunch. Lisa Carnoy, a Bank of America exec who hit the headlines for making BoA $19 billion in a stock sale, is a mother of four children. So is Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach for America. Courtney and Robert Novogratz, the married couple behind the NYC-based interior design firm Sixx Design, have seven children (and a perhaps inevitable Bravo reality show about them, which aired last year, called “9 By Design.”)

Another reality-show contestant, Laura Bennett, is a fashion designer who appeared on the third season of “Project Runway.” She has six kids, which inspired her to pen the book “Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday? A Mother’s Guide to Sanity in Stilettos.”

A firm defender of the big family/big city combo, Bennett says she thinks the trend toward more kids started here in 2001. “I think 9/11 really shocked New Yorkers and put perspective on what’s important in life,” says the 47-year-old, who lives in a downtown loft with her architect husband and their five sons (her eldest child, a daughter, is in college). “I think that’s part of the big-family thing. You start to realize what’s precious.”

Per New York-size ambition, if something’s precious, why not get as much of it as you can? That theory was actually borne out in another parenting study, released in the Journal of Personality in 2009, which determined that people with a Type-A personality were likely to have more kids than their easier-going peers. This correlation is visible not only on the streets of NYC, but in some of our most visible female politicians; Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi and Michele Bachmann all have large families, with five children each.

Here in our city, where ranking social hierarchy is a more popular game than politics, could it be that big broods are becoming a way to announce that you’re invincible, both financially and dynastically? Is reproduction becoming a source of one-upmanship?

“The main thing I see in a lot of fertility behavior is people are very conformist, they want to do what others around them are doing,” says Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of “Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids,” out next month. “So you might say that [big families] are going to become normalized, if you think that people copy what rich people do.”

But Bennett just laughs at the notion that couples are reproducing like mad so they can increase their social standing. “I guess in some cultures, if you have a lot of children it’s a status symbol,” she says. “But in New York, I think that’s a ridiculous notion. And I think anyone who would engage in that game is probably a sociopath.”

And Di Bari resents the link that’s often made between parents of four and five and those with obscenely large families, like Jon and Kate, the Octomom and the 19-and-counting Duggars. “[These examples] shouldn’t reflect on normal healthy families,” she says.

Even though broods of four and up are becoming a more usual sight, these parents say they still get a raft of questions when colleagues or acquaintances first find out just how fertile they really are.

“You’re crazy . . . Was it a mistake? . . . When’s the next one coming?” says New York mom-of-four McGeough, ticking off the type of questions she and her attorney husband, Paul, regularly get. Her friend and Financial District neighbor Nora Fitzpatrick, an executive at the Federal Reserve Bank, says people ask leading questions about her reasons (and occasionally her sanity) for having four children of her own.

“They’re trying to get to the bottom of why you’re doing this,” says Fitzpatrick, 33.

“People will ask how old I am, and when did we get started. I think people are really trying to ask me how big my apartment is.”

Her husband, Trey, thinks their family-centric lifestyle still goes against many people’s image of the typical New Yorker. “Going back to the ’70s and ’80s, and the idea of a New York inhabited by a somewhat strange person, you never think of those people as having families at all,” says Trey, 34.

And maybe that’s the point: These people believe they are moving toward a different definition of what it is to be a New Yorker.

“These things go in cycles,” Bennett says. “In the ’80s, there was that make-money, glamorous life. That’s sort of played out.”

Di Bari goes further, widening the chasm between the many-childed and the non: “I think a child-free life limits personal growth and purpose,” she says. “I see a much higher degree of narcissism in people who have no one but themselves to focus on in life.”