I’ve got nothing…except for the deepest respect for Lasciel for having the courage to open her life like this to us and for the (in general) respectful and thoughtful questions asked by the Dopers.
Outstanding thread.
You have it exactly backwards. If he was brought up with the same spiritual education I was, he knew it was wrong to an enormous monumental degree. He was, however, taught that all the other stuff (looking at a hot woman, masturbating, having fantasies about someone) was ALSO wrong to an enormous monumental degree. Having done any one of the others (and being a 14 year old boy, I have a feeling at least something on the list of unacceptable thoughts or urges happened) in the eyes of God, he’s been taught that he’s already just as damned and sinful as he can possibly be.
And yet nobody has done this.
How does that make you feel?
Lasciel, did you ever personally see or hear of abusive ways to “train” babies? I’ve read on Free Jinger about “blanket training” and other methods with very, very young children and it made my stomach turn. Was there any of that type of stuff in your community?
Seconded on all counts. Many thanks again, Lasciel.
If anyone in our group was likely to do outright abusive blanket training where they actually hit them, it would have been the abusive dad, but we avoided that family as much as possible in our small group.
That said, yes, we did blanket train. Another thing I’m not proud of, but it was how things were, and the way to rid children early of an unrighteous spirit of disobedience and independence.
For people who don’t know what we’re talking about, baby goes on the blanket, and things the baby is interested in are stationed around the edges. Baby is told to stay on the blanket, and chastized and returned to center every time it manages to crawl towards the object of interest. Eventually baby is worn down and defeated, and stays on the blanket always, looking to the adult for permission to move, no matter what’s going on around them.
For us it happened during the church meetings held before or after services. Moms and girls worked on projects (bracelet looms, actual sewing, crafts, whatever) just off the edge of the blankets, and the girls mostly did the returning to center. For us, chastizing was a flick on the wrist, but several didn’t even do that. Regardless, it was frustrating for he little ones, and eventually the babies would lose it and cry themselves to sleep.
The harder thing for me was watching parents train them to not seek attention - children (and adult women) were supposed to be modest and obedient and not put ourselves forward, and that started in infancy also. Babies quickly learned to find a girl for attention, rather than their actual parent, because the parent would ignore them on purpose to teach them that their needs weren’t important. I always thought that was horrid, but again, it was how it had to be - parents had to do hard things to train children out of the sinful fleshly nature we were born with.
Things like this are why I still don’t have kids myself.
This reminds of a post I saw on the blog of another woman who was raised Quiverful. She talked about the two boxes for immoral and moral sexual activity and how they were viewed differently from a fundamentalist perspective v. more liberal or secular perspective. “Consensual v. Not” for one group and “Godly v. Not” for the other.
She brought it up again in regards to Josh Duggar. You can even see the Facebook post there of someone equating Josh Duggar’s actions to a teenage boyfriend and girlfriend having an unchaperoned trip to Disneyland. It’s mind-boggling.
That’s horrifying. I’d read bits about it, but had no idea that they actually went the extra mile to tempt the babies and then “discipline” them. Gah.
Reminds me of another tactic I saw somewhere. Some Gothard type mom was crowing about how proud she was of getting that disobedience out of her toddler by pushing him away whenever he came to her for comfort. This particular time lasted all day long until his will was crushed and he remained on the couch instead of begging for his mother. I just can’t even begin to truly imagine the mindset that feels this is the way to raise your children. I’m so glad you got out.
The awful thing for me is that it still doesn’t seem so wrong. I mean, I know it is, but it and everything else did work, and did result in obedient, compliant, helpful, polite, well-behaved children who respected and feared their parents and other adults like they are supposed to. :smack:
It can even sound more innocuous. Look at one of the proDuggar FAQs where it talks about her chair-training the toddler boys: Duggar Family Blog: Duggar Updates | Duggar Pictures | Jim Bob and Michelle | Counting On | 19 Kids: Quiet and Still: Teaching Self-Control
It doesn’t sound so bad, until you look closely. 5 minutes is the time increment she starts with this game, with a very young toddler boy - perhaps 2 or 3 years old, just old enough to sit in a chair. Two or three times a day, the kid is forced to stay in the chair for 5 minutes with mommy right there, until he ‘gets it’ : ie, he stops trying to wiggle or get down.
Note how she specifically says ‘not waiting til they do something wrong’ - the translation there is that she has to set temptations so that the “bad behavior” comes when the parent is around to punish it immediately and consistently.
Conveniently unmentioned is the swatting and the withdrawal of affection that the kid gets when he doesn’t stay in the chair to the satisfaction of the parent, and the crying and confusion until he becomes compliant.
It all sounds so wholesome when you phrase things the right way.
This reminds me of the stories about the babies in Chinese and Romanian orphanages who didn’t cry because they knew nobody would come anyway. 
Lasciel, no wonder your brother had a personality disorder!
One of my Facebook friends (I don’t think she’s even on the site any more) used to post memes all the time that said things like “My mother carried a wooden spoon around with her all the time to show me who’s boss, and it made me what I am today!” She also said that her mother would sometimes walk into a room and start hitting her for things she didn’t get caught doing. :eek:
So, what is she today? Divorced from 3 abusive husbands! :smack: One abusive husband? That was his fault. Three of them? Honey, something’s wrong with you - and let’s not even get started on what this has probably done to her children, of whom she has 4.
Interestingly, she has never said anything about her father acting this way, or what he thought about it.
Lasciel, thank you once again for starting and then bumping this thread, I missed it the first time around. I grew up in and left an independent fundamentalist Baptist church a bit more than a decade before you were caused to leave your church. It only seems like another world. The thing that interests me most is that the younger men of the church I left could have gone on to be the younger parents in yours.
I’ve always fed on questions, it is what saved me from places like that church. You noted the certainty and simplicity of hyper literal (usually KJV Only) Biblical thinking. On some level it would be nice if someone could offer us a plain unvarnished and never changing truth but I’m pretty sure you’d agree that in order to avoid questioning that truth we’d have to avoid the instinct to ask questions. That was too high a price for me.
Some what (but not completely) off topic, in 2011 on NPR’s Fresh Air Terri Gross interviewed Frank Shaeffer when he published his book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it Back. If you haven’t heard it it’s worth a listen.
As far as I know, none of our group ignored their kids indefinitely like in faithfool’s lovely example. The idea wasn’t to make them into soulless husks, but just to make sure they knew that they weren’t the most important thing in their parents’ lives. So babies and toddlers would get ignored for a few moments, or older kids would get told to go do an errand first, or to do something for a sibling, or little ones would get asked to sing a song while they waited, or something else like that.
As for my brother, I’d love to blame his issues on the church, but he was like that from the start. I’m certain that nothing we tried actually helped, and much of it actively was damaging, but the underlying personality issues? He came by those honestly.
I’ve always been curious as well, and the insistence that curiosity was not allowed and that questions were a sign of a rebellious spirit… Well, it didn’t help me fit in any better. Even from the beginning, I wasn’t well-liked by the church leaders because I’d been contaminated by public school. As I got into teenage years, I got drafted into the youth group, and sent to Jesus Camp to see if I wouldn’t straighten out and be less intellectual and worldly. If I hadn’t been so spiritually invested and emotionally pliable, I think I would have been seen as a greater threat than I was.
I wonder a lot what would have happened with me if my dad hadn’t been so very uninterested in the whole situation. If I hadn’t had a chance to ‘cheat’ a little with him by watching action movies and working on cars in his garage, I would have been much more cowed by the church.
I’ve had it recommended to me before. It’s hard to read about things like that, because I heavily identify with the narrator/protagonist, and get really really really angry on their behalf. That sort of emotion isn’t really helpful for me, but sometimes it’s nice to see other people’s similar experiences.
Because it’s not science. If you are talking about discussing some of the history of science, and things that we used to believe and then discarded like the theory that bad humours cause disease, sure.
It was 'arrowing.
– Ringo (in Yellow Submarine)
golf clap
My question is, in light of the revelations about the Duggars, are you surprised by any of it?
Not really, sadly enough.
The actual Gothardite teachings about sex and relationships and power balances in the home are quite frankly fucked up. Basically they took the worst parts of shame-and-blame and of rape culture and they added a couple of out of context bible verses for extra psychological impact.
So, no, it does not surprise me in the least. Neither does their method of dealing with it thus far.
Now, while I was in the church, if we had heard about this, I would have been SHOCKED, as would everyone else. It would have been treated as a grievious sin, and most likely the result of a concentrated demonic attack (thus proving that the family was overall righteous and doing God’s work powerfully in the world to provoke said attack) and we would have probably doubled down on our own very slack interpretations of how to be pure and keep lustful thoughts at bay.
Which is of course yet another really unfortunate part of this whole incident - the practices and beliefs that (in my opinion) made this abuse more likely are the very things that are very likely, in families and groups across the country, be embraced in more draconian ways to try and prevent it from happening again, because no one in the movement has the perspective to see how it’s damaging (or doesn’t care because it’s a cornerstone of the entire movement, and can’t exactly be excised without admitting the ‘divinely inspired’ leadership was flat wrong.)
That description of blanket training is the saddest thing I’ve read in I don’t know how long.