>OK, it is late, but I will try to make sense. From what I understand you want to do this for each header table and its 41 child records, right?
>
>Update HeaderTable set name=@name1 where id=@id1
>--@@ROWCOUNT=1 at this point
>Update ChildTable set name=@name1 where HeaderTableID=@id1
>--@@ROWCOUNT=41 at this point

First, I'm not the one who wants to do those updates. :)
Second, @@ROWCOUNT is set after every T-SQL statement. IOW< it's not cumulative.