"Jim Bob Duggar, 40, said he and Michelle, 39, want more children. “We both just love children and we consider each a blessing from the Lord. I have asked Michelle if she wants more and she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them,” he said.
The Learning Channel is doing another show about the family’s construction project, a 7,000-square foot house that should be finished before Christmas. The home, which the family has been building for two years, will have nine bathrooms, dormitory-style bedrooms for the girls and boys, a commercial kitchen, four washing machines and four dryers.
Discuss.
The article says the dad is in real estate, but I saw the Discovery Channel program about this family (when they were pregnant with their 15th), and they are actually very smart about this. When they started their family they paid off all their debts, cut up all their credit cards, and saved enough money so they’d never have to rely on state assistance or public donations to support themselves. Very self-sufficient.
At what point do you cross the line from loving children to attention-whoring? I think these people may have stepped over it about a half-dozen kids ago.
However, so long as they’re the ones bearing the burden, it’s their funeral, I guess.
I saw the documentary a while back, and was actually pretty impressed. They were talking about how they had paid off all their debt, don’t charge stuff, pay cash for things, are building their own house (that’s literally building their own house; with their own hands and tools) to comfortably house their kids, how they maintain this massive wall-schedule to keep the household going, she homeschools, and so on.
I have three Silverjuniors and this woman is far more organized than I am. :rolleyes:
They support themselves and the kids appear to be well-cared for, well-loved and happy. More power to them.
Wow, think of the grandchildren that will result from this family of siblings. :eek:
Large families used to be very common – my own great-grandfather had eighteen children, albeit by two wives (9 by Wife #1, 10 by Wife #2). There doesn’t appear to be anything freaky going on, since they didn’t start a family until four years after they married, and remember they had two sets of twins. This family seems perfectly capable and as long as the children are properly cared for, loved, and educated, there is nothing wrong with having a large family. Even giving them all ‘J’ names makes some sense, since Mom can just write ‘J. Duggar’ on every pair of socks, every backpack, etc.
I read an article on them about a year ago when they explained their system of giving each older kid a younger one to bathe, feed and homeschool daily. This sounds neglectful in my opinion. Although, I’ll admit that I’m looking at this from a modern point of view, and that in the past kids had a lot less leisure time than is standard today.
Neglectful to who? The younger ones? Maybe, if the older sibling isn’t actually able to be responsible. But you make it sound (from your comment about leisure time) that you’re refering to the older ones. Have we really gotten to the point where giving your children responsibility is considered bad parenting? (I can’t be the only person who had chores. I can’t be the only person who had to work in the family business for free. Frankly bathing/feeding/teaching my little sister would have been less work and more fun. I’m only 26.)
Neglectful to both sets of children. The younger children miss out on actually getting parented by their parents. The older ones miss out on a large chunk of childhood, and are basically forced to become teenage parents. Being a primary caretaker for a small child is not my idea of a chore. YMMV.
Oh, and I’m 23, with a sibling who is eleven years younger than my and whom I’ve cared for on occasion since she was a baby. Not really sure what relevance our ages have to the conversation, but there’s my information fwiw.
I have to say I don’t agree with making the older kids take care of the younger ones. If the mother can’t take care of her kids, she needs to stop poppin’ them out. The older kids didn’t choose to be parents, and it’s not fair to them to make them take care of their siblings.
I just don’t understand this at all. In what universe are people raised that the older children DON’T take care of the younger children? What law was recently passed that said that a family couldn’t all pitch in on raising young children, but that only the parents could ever do chores related to baby-raising?
Have we actually become this spoiled? “The older kids didn’t choose to become parents?” That sounds like a ten-year-old complaining that he shouldn’t have to take our the garbage because “I didn’t ASK to be born!”