As Numerous as Grains of Sand on a Beach

I have a teeny tiny obsession which was started and enflamed by Geo and Law. There is a family, wholesome and strange known as The Duggers.

The Duggers have (as of this week) 17 children. For those of you who have not seen the TLC specials, let me recap: Michelle and Jim Bob started out with normal ideas of family production and had three wee bairns. Then Michelle had a terrible miscarriage due to birth control and the Duggers decided to leave their child production up to God from then on. I believe Michelle has been almost continually pregnant since that decision.

All right, so they have a large family. Why am I so interested? Because these people are starting their own cult. Oh, that’s not what they say and they have no formal declarations of religion on their show beyond vague Christian sentiments, but its there between the lines. The children are all dressed in concealing clothing and the girls don’t seem to be allowed to cut their hair (Michelle’s is waist length). The overall appearance is very very conservative.

And then there’s The House. They bought a large track of land and built a house on it. Not just any house, but a house that you would buy in Costco if they sold houses. And? The kids still don’t have their own rooms. Because they wanted it that way. That’s right, the teenagers were choosing to live with their itty bitty siblings instead of having privacy. Which I suppose is admirable, but also rather spooky. The land that the house sits on is fairly massive and the hope is that the children will settle their families on it. It’s going to be a Dugger Compound.

Of course, these kids are not allowed to attend public school where they might learn things and have experience outside of their family. No, they are home schooled on top of everything else. I have nothing against home schooling for children who have difficulties dealing with that environment, but from all appearances the Duggers would do reasonable well in public school. And would it really be a crime to know life outside of your own family, even if it is made up of seventeen people? On all the TLC specials, the Duggers insist that all the kids have outside interests and social lives, but there is never any evidence of this. Any depiction of ‘outside’ interests always includes the rest of the family.

Recently they went on vacation in an RV with a trailer. The boys slept in the trailer and the girls in the RV. It was a pleasant enough Discovery special with lots of inserted health facts as it was after all, Discovery Health airing it. While on an airplane over the Grand Canyon, all but three of them threw up. The narrator commented that that couldn’t keep this family down and moved merrily along. It was an oddly paced moment. Other then that the trip looked uneventful enough considering.

I have watched similar shows about families with tons of kids and none have captured me like the Dugger specials. Normally, I would reserve my opinions about their choices and appreciate the fact that America is home to so many different kinds of folk. Except they have opened themselves to these sorts of things by allowing cameras into their homes. Once you put your life on TV, you are forfeiting your privacy, even if your intent is to glorify your life style.

Now, to be fair if this was a hundred years ago, no one would blink at this family except to comment on their low mortality rate. Perhaps the Duggers are just anachronistic and should simply remind us of more pastoral times. Perhaps they even represent a dying America full of DIY projects and a can-do attitude.

So it’s probably just the cynic in me that looks at the happy group and thinks ‘incipient cult’ or ‘messianic complex’ or ‘God expects you to make your own choices, that’s why we all have free will. Please do not blame him for you having 17 kids.’

Catch you on the flipside,
CGL