reply to Stacy

Hi Stacy - thanks for dropping by and replying. Hope you come back. Because I have a long reply to your comment, I decided to post it as a new post (comments are a limited size).

I have to agree that they do seem happy. But happiness can also be faked. I recently observed my mother who, after spewing venom at me for 2 days, walked into her doctor's office and totally change personality. A nurse told my sister and me that our mother was "such a sweet lady." No one who knows her well has ever described her that way. But even very unhappy people can pull it together when they want to - e.g. when cameras are on. They may be very happy, but one certainly can't determine that from one hour of selected footage.

Can the same be said of me and my parents? Absolutely not. I grew up fairly miserable. Trying to change things with my own kids. One of the reasons hubby had a vasectomy after our 3rd child was so that we would be able to care properly for the kids we have and not be stressed out by more.

How can I say they don’t know their children when they do everything together with their children? I used to work with children and youth in a group home setting – 6 to 8 kids living in a house with rotating staff. While there, the adults’ focus was totally on the kids’ needs. In fact, overnight staff took care of things like laundry and meal prep so that day staff could focus on the kids. Even with all that, it was very hard to know the children and to find significant time for each one individually. While these were damaged kids, and the Duggar’s kids are probably reasonably healthy, it still translates into spreading oneself very thin and into kids getting their needs met by other kids rather than by parents. Kids helping other kids is healthy to a point. When kids are parenting, they are out of their league.

We do spend a lot of time with our children. Like Jim Bob Duggar, I am self employed. I have a home office and a lot of control over my own schedule. Like Michelle Duggar, my hubby is a stay at home parent (although we do not home school as it was not the right decision for us). It is in that context - 3 kids, lots of time spent with our kids, and often still feeling like our kids don’t get enough attention in our efforts to get tasks done – that it is hard to envision a family with 16 kids having enough of parents to go around in light of all that has to be done.

I have looked for things to learn – I like the way they organize to make things work, and as I noted above I’ve re-thought how to encourage appropriate responsibility in children. I honestly don’t feel like I judged them. My comment about house church people being freaks was a joke in that both I and Cindy have been part of a house church and are looking to possibly create another. But if you do not know me and are not a regular reader, you could not know that so of course it must have seemed like a judgmental comment. I have weighed in on their decision to have 16 kids so close together. To me, discussing the wisdom of decisions is not judgment, but part of being a thinking person. The Bible has plenty of commentary on the decisions that people make, sometimes in the realm of morality and sometimes in the realm of wisdom. So while I take seriously the exhortation to not judge, I don’t see this discussion as judgment.