For reasons I can’t quite fathom, I’ve been fascinated by the TLC show following the life and times of the Duggar family.
Have you heard of them? This nineteen-member family lives in Arkansas and is currently expecting their eighteenth child. They practice devoutly conservative Christian values including avoiding most television and the internet. The children are taught at home. Their parents encourage “courtship” instead of dating; rather than seeing many people before finally deciding to become serious with one, their eldest children save their entire hearts (and bodies) exclusively for one person.
I’m fascinated by the family for many reasons, not the least of which is that many days, I’m completely overwhelmed by my own gaggle of children, which consists of but a tiny fraction of the number of children the Duggars wrangle. How they manage it boggles the mind.
I wonder, for example, how they can keep all of those children clean. My children are never clean; even directly out of the tub I find schmutz embedded in their crevices. And yet the Duggar children appear to sparkle with cleanliness at every moment, no matter what wholesome activity they’re enjoying. They are never in disarray, not even the little boys, not even when they are jumping out of airplanes, making tater-tot casserole or shooting off paint guns. How can this happen?
On Twitter I announced my confusion. I got a pair of responses:
wendyblackheart Didn’t you know? Christians actually repel dirt with the power of their faith.wendyblackheart Its totally in the bible. Somewhere. Everything is somehow explained in the bible, like that pesky ‘evolution not being true’ thing.
Ah, would that it were so easy.
Schumtz-avoidance aside, I wonder how they’ve managed to produce a crop of such uniformly regular children. For photos and public appearances they line up by order of age, looking like nothing so much as a set of nesting dolls exploded — or the children of Camazotz. Seventeen children and not one of them seems fundamentally different from the next.
Where, I ask myself, is the oddball child? Where is the one who is slightly overweight? The one who turned out taller (or shorter) than average?
Where is the child who struggles to read? The redhead? The child born sick? The one who throws temper tantrums long after that age should have passed? The dyslexic child? The one sporting a cast, or an uneven self-administered haircut, or an identifying mole?
Are none of them left-handed? Does no one require glasses?
Why aren’t the Duggars raising a child who refuses to wear the clothes typically associated with his or her biological sex? Or who does not want to marry a member of the opposite sex — or anyone at all? Or a boy who insists on growing his hair long, or a girl who only wants a fuzzy buzz cut?
Are those children there but hidden? Have they subverted their desires in order to please the family? Do they quietly plot for the day they can wiggle away from the overwhelming forced conformity? Or have their wishes been snuffed out entirely by their parents’ omnipresent guidance?
I don’t know, but it worries me. It worries me in the way that the lack of dirt worries me, because both dirt and childish rebellion strike me as among the most normal aspects of growing up. Without them, I wonder how fully grown up these children can ever be, and how terribly painful it will be for them when the dirt and the rebellion finally take hold.
They give me the creeps.
How can you have a deep and real relationship with 20 children? How can you find the energy for 20 (or 18) children and a spouse and yourself when you are constantly pregnant?
Crazy crazy.
I think it may be inevitable that one or two of the family stray from the strict family beliefs/rules. The one who wants to be a beautician perhaps?
Though I may not agree with their beliefs I am fascinated with their success at budgeting and otherwise raising a large, seemingly healthy family!
I think I am now too firmly entrenched in the sex blogging world to take the Duggar family seriously, but I like how you were able to write about them. A lot of times, I’d expect to see an article just making fun of them, rather than actually thinking about how they live.
Though I have to admit that I suddenly started giggling when I read about how they decided not to use birth control. With 20 kids, the two parents must screw like bunnies! Maybe they’re not too different from us after all…
Wow I am glad I am not the only one thinking the things you are about that family. Was starting to think I was the only one.
They don’t actually raise their children. They birth them, and hand the baby off to the older children to raise. I don’t see their lifestyle as being healthy at all for their childrens mental development, in fact I don’t see how they even know who their children are, let alone who needs a bath or some extra help in math.
Colly900 has it. Both of my parents are from large families (my mother’s had 9 kids, my father’s had 11). Their parents only raised the first boy and girl, then passed on raising duties to that one, then so on and so forth. My grandparents didn’t really pay attention to the individual likes and dislikes of each child. And the only reason that that they knew who I was is because I am the only granddaughter on my mother’s side and the oldest granddaughter (after a very long spell of only boys) on my father’s.
Aside from that, they wouldn’t know who the hell I am.
Quite frankly, I view the Duggars as a weird little cult. Think about it: The kids are homeschooled with no access to anything not pre-approved as being wholesome and good. The kids themselves are kept too busy (as Colly900 pointed out) taking care of themselves. Mom and Dad take care of EVERYTHING for them in the way of provisioning and cooking and all that, as well as their spiritual health (which is Mom and Dad’s religious views with no access to anything not pre-approved as wholesome and good).
They live in Tontitown, AR. It’s near where my grandmother lived and where my aunts live. Tontitown has ALWAYS had a very insular reputation. So I have to say if it looks like a cult and sounds like a cult, it’s probably a cult.
I concur, I remember watching a show pre-TLC about them, and indeed the older ones do shoulder a lot of the care, cleaning and cooking. The mother actually said it was the only way to care for everyone. As for sex like bunnies? in essence they have at least had sex once every 9 months or so, you know, wifely duties and all /eyeroll ;)
Hubbie has said it best “Vagina – Its not a Clown Car”
I can’t stand to watch TV shows about factory farming.
Clearly they are all robots. There is no other explanation.
OK, maybe they’re aliens.
I find the Duggars fascinating too (along with the Roloffs and Gosselins). Their lives are so totally different from mine that I can’t help but be entranced. I do agree that their insular lifestyle is kinda creepy, but they do have a pretty efficient system. Since their TLC series started, several things have made me curious. Michelle admits that the older 4 girls do most of the cooking and cleaning (supposedly happily). What if the kids’s genders were reversed? What if they had 4 teenage boys and a passel of little girls? Would their “traditional” values have the boys fixing all the meals and doing laundry? Hmmmm.
I also wonder if the girls are discouraged (or at least not encouraged) to work outside the home.
No one has been seen wearing glasses, but some of the older kids are now sporting braces. As for other non-approved behavior, the show probably portrays only a portion of their lives….and videotape can be edited.
Statistically speaking, there does have to be some of that variation. But growing up in the public eye, and in such a conservative lifestyle does serve to inhibit personality differences.
As for the physical, well, it’s just possible the Duggar’s are very lucky and there are few if any recessive problem genes in their families.
aag, you have articulated very near perfectly what has been rolling around in my head about the duggars since i first saw a tv special about them when they were only at 15 kids. there’s too much perfection.
but i must politely disagree with colly900. the exclusive focus/attention/devotion of parents towards children is very much an american/western phenomenon. in almost every other culture that hasn’t become more or less westernized, it is the duty of older children, not only siblings, but children within the community, to raise the younger children. hundreds of generations of children were raised this way and they probably turned out okay. :) the duggars are kicking it old skool!
agreed on the ‘cult’ similarity. Not that I’ve got children or anything, but my understanding is that a child’s wayward behavior is corrected by punishing them – the naughty spot, or a stern talking to, or perhaps a smack on the behind for the worst offences.
To keep this many children seemingly in line, and allowing for the statistics of every next boy born having an increasing chance of being gay – I’d say there’d be a lot of tough punishments hanging over these kids. Poor things.
It really does creep me out – the forced uniformity. I can’t imagine that the duggers encourage their children to say oh… think for themselves? Explore? Experience? All of these things I consider of #1 importance in being an adult and “growing up.”
I say check the basement for pods and/or the remains if the “problem” children.
The responses you got to this sadden me AAG. I love your blog, and I love diversity, but there seems to be little in the way of tolerance in your readers :(
I am a Christian, but I do believe that god wants us to love our bodies and do not adhere to the medieval notions that some ascribe to.
This family doesn’t sound like they are hurting anyone or damning those who choose other paths.
Their life style is not for me, but It is not my place to criticize them either. They live their life, I live mine why do we need to call them names or belittle them because they are different?
As for the children “Thinking for themselves” Anyone who says that has never obviously raised any children. You may think a parent controls their child, but once they hit thew teens you will learn that they have quite a lot of “thinking for themselves” Shame on you people who want to force your values on others while condemning those who would force theirs on you.
@maggie: “in almost every other culture that hasn’t become more or less westernized, it is the duty of older children, not only siblings, but children within the community, to raise the younger children. hundreds of generations of children were raised this way and they probably turned out okay. :) the duggars are kicking it old skool!”
Yeah, but a lot of people today in first-world countries have these “ideas” about letting girls know that their destiny isn’t necessarily to be a wife and mother, and that they have choices in life. Very quaint, I know.
For some of the children, raising their siblings may well serve as aversion therapy. I’ve heard of many people who had the reaction of not wanting any children of their own as a result of being forced to raise children before they were adults themselves. ‘twould be quite ironic in the Duggars’ case.
Wow, you’d think people who read a sex-positive blog would be more open-minded… some of you are awfully judge-y about this family when in fact none of us knows everything about them.
I was actually just watching the show and they had all the kids switch chores… they had the girls, who normally do most of the cooking and cleaning, reverse chores with the boys. The parents, specifically the mom, said they wanted all their children to have a well-rounded skill set.
Their lifestyle choice is not for me but from what I can tell they seem like a wonderful family raising children who are loved and will probably go out into the world and do good things. And there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.
I just found your blog which, by the way, is a wonderfully enjoyable, but had to come back to comment on your readers reaction to the Duggar family.
I’ve never watched an episode (I don’t watch tv, it’s my junior year of college, who has the time? I can never stop at one channel or episode…) but I still found reactions to be rather close minded. The Duggars sound very much like my family, although one of my siblings had neuroblastoma and was very sick for most of our childhoods. Also? There aren’t quite many of us.
Lack of rebellion in a family often has to do with good parenting, not stifled children. I’m the oldest and, maybe because neither of my parents are American—I’ve noticed many American parents tend to coddle their kids when it comes to responsibilities but, overall, spend much less time with them—I hold absolutely no resentment towards them for helping to raise my siblings. In fact, we are much closer to one another than the average family.
Both my parents are very conservative, we grew up without TV, and many other mainstays of the ‘average’ home. Few of us are as religious as our parents, and we definitely have our own opinions, but it isn’t something we argue about. My siblings and I also have a very respectful relationship with our parents, not to say there isn’t tons of pillow fights, back rubs and (for the youngest) crawling into their bad at night, but we don’t argue against or challenge their beliefs. It’s perfectly reasonable to respect your parents, and then happily do your own things.
Oh and we keep ourselves very clean. Because we helped take care of one another, and ourselves, it gave our parents much more time to spend with us, not worrying about general upkeep. I’ve known people to refer to my family as ‘the little cult,’ personally, I think labeling anything a ‘cult’ provides an easy way for someone to marginalize something they cannot understand, or feel unable to achieve in their own lives.
Although, for the Duggar Family, there’s always editing.
Wait… a family that shuns popular culture but has their own reality tv show? Doesn’t anyone else think that’s kind of odd in itself?
With 18 kids, it would be almost impossible for there NOT to be at least one who is outside the norm in some manner, so to speak. I can only assume (not having seen the show) that there’s a lot of pressure to conform. I’m not even saying that that pressure is a bad thing… without conforming, the family wouldn’t “run” so well.
Sarah, I really didn’t read any of the posts here as being so negative about the family. But, if there is judgment against them, I’d guess that it’s sort of defensive. It’s not hard to imagine what they would think of most of our lifestyles and it’s natural to be defensive. Not right, necessarily, but definitely normal.
frydaddy: quaint? the idea that girls don’t have to be wives and mothers is quaint? um. wow.
it’s possible that i didn’t express myself adequately.
i’m a hardcore feminist. i would argue that such an idea bypasses the realm of “quaint.”
what i was getting at is that the duggers, by having the older children do a significant portion of the child-rearing is not necessarily a problem. and it would be far from emotionally stunting, not for the ones doing the work, not for the younger kids.
further, i would argue that the Western tendency to be so very child-centric is more harmful than the alternative, producing self-centered, greedy children more often than not.
i could be wrong, especially because i don’t have any children, but ya know, as an anthropologist, i notice patterns in human behavior.
maggie, it’s called sarcasm. We’re not that far apart, as it turns out, other than I disagree with you on kids raising kids being anything but a bad idea.
It would appear that I misunderstood the intent of your original post. My apologies for the snark. :)
(I’m childfree, it’s just a name.)
i think everyone is getting a little too worked up about this. we’re ALL allowed our opinions, even those of us who think the duggars are goddamn bizarre. and aag offered us the space to air these opinions. (isn’t that what the internet is for? airing our opinions?)
it’s not like any of the duggars are gonna read this, anyhow. :P
They aren’t?
::sad pandas::
I watch the show right before the Duggars. Those Gosselin kids are awfully cute, and they misbehave sometimes, and mom and dad bicker a lot – the way I imagine the parents of 8 kids would naturally.
The intro to the Duggar show has them going to a museum for creationism, I think. That turned me off, but maybe I should check it out some time just to see a little of their lives. They’re people after all, and despite our differences, most of us have a lot of common values.
do you WANT the duggars to read this, aag???? ::evil smile::