They’re the perfect family: perfect son, perfect daughter, perfect mother, perfect father. After reading “The Duggars: 20 and Counting!” that is how I would describe The Duggar family, with one exception. They have 18 children, so their perfect son and daughter are perfect sons and daughters.
I had never heard of the Duggars because I don’t have cable, and even if I did, I wouldn’t watch TV much. So when my friend told me of the family with 18 children who have their own show on The Learning Channel, I was completely in shock. It baffled me how a couple could have 18 children without entering a mental institution. What’s more is that they intend to reproduce even more. The book, written by the two parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, is a 227-page autobiography on the start of their family and how they raise 18 children. But after reading the book and watching a couple of their shows on The Learning Channel, their family felt like something I would watch in an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
According to their book, Jim Bob and Michelle married right out of high school and had their first child in 1988. Twenty-one years later, the family now has an overabundance of children and more than a peculiar set of values. All of their children are home schooled because their main goal is to educate their children about God. “We teach them that any kind of vocation is a way to minister to others,” they said.
Being a Catholic myself, I am not saying that being raised with a set of moral religious values is a bad thing, but I feel they take it far beyond what God would want for His people. In educating their children, they only let them read books from Christian authors whom they respect. I have more than one problem with this: First, their children will lack the power to think for themselves and the power to challenge thought. Second, it’s putting their children in a nice, perfect little bubble where no harm or evil doings occur.
This is bogus. They are setting their children up for failure or disappointment. The world isn’t nice, and it’s far from being kind. They also have four computers with Internet access, but they are only allowed “seventy-some Web sites that the kids can visit.” If they want to go anywhere else, they have to have their mother, or oldest sister type in a password, then they will stand behind the child and monitor the access. It’s a whole new level of censorship.
The Duggars raise their daughters to have no desire for anything other than to raise a family of their own and reproduce with the perfect Christian man. In an e-mail to the Duggars, Jana, the eldest daughter, was asked if she ever gets tired of raising the family. Her response was disappointing to the future of women’s rights. “I love working with children, and I especially love being around new babies . I have lots of other interests too, including sewing, cooking and playing the piano, violin and harp. I also love doing friends’ and family members’ hair.”
This comment upsets me because it is frustrating to hear that my great-grandma fought so hard for the 19th Amendment to be passed. I feel it’s chauvinistic and an insult to every hard-working woman in the world.
To make sure the young children obey their parents, they made up what they call a “‘Yes, Ma’am’ chart” and then the “obedience game” to follow. Anytime the children call their parents “sir” or “ma’am,” they get a penny. A whole whopping cent! And let’s not forget the fact that a 5-year-old calling his/her mother or father “sir” or “ma’am” is awkward and unnatural. The name of the “game” alone sounds like a way to train a dog and not a way to raise a child.
I think it is also ironic how the family claims to be non-materialistic and how everything they do is with the intentions of God but to reward their children for a job well done, they give them money. Also, they sold their family to TV and are now making money so that cameras can invade their personal lives and time for people across America to watch. They even say in the book that the Discovery Channel paid for parts of their home. I understand that it has to be expensive to raise that many children, but don’t act like you don’t care about monetary values when you do. Everyone does.
16-year-old daughter, Jessa answered an e-mail someone sent, which asked about how much freedom the kids had to express themselves. “As one of my sisters said, ‘Mom, when we go out to an event somewhere, we often see groups of teenagers who are all dressed alike–sometimes they’re all in black, or they’re all wearing jeans, or they’re all wearing the same kind of T-shirt. Sometimes they even have nose rings and tattoos!’ but instead of being influenced by peer pressure, we’re guided by our family’s standards of modesty and what we read in the Bible.” This was probably the most discouraging thing that I read in the entire book. The fact that a 16-year-old girl is so brainwashed that she has no desire to express herself in any way is sad. Every teenager should want to express himself or herself and be different in his or her own way instead of conforming to the family’s conceptions of proper expression.
The family is nothing more than a cult setting women back 100 years in history and blinding the children from reality. I feel bad for these children as they enter society and face the harsh realization that is the real world.