Not letting kids play outside in the fresh air and get a bit of sunlight, EVER, is abuse. The kids may be severely vitamin D deficient.
I have avoided posting in this thread. Those parents are sick and twisted. Period. It isnt about homeschooling, family size, Christianity, how they dress, or names.
My only reason for even wading in (which I am sure I am going to regret) to respond is to comment on the underlying tone that somehow family size is indicative of ANYTHING abnormal. Seriously. Simply bc most people today don’t have large families does not make any statement about those who choose to do so. Smacks of “they aren’t like the rest of us, so something must be wrong with them.”
Signed,
Very happy mother of large family
ETA: The same is true for homeschooling. We have been homeschooling since most people ever heard of the term. I had never heard of homeschooling before we started. It was recommended to me by our local superintendent’s office. I have a degree in education and we made the decision at the last minute to hold our oldest back a yr bc his bday was at the cutoff date. He told me I could teach him K at home. We did and I have never looked back (and that was almost 25 yrs ago). Thank goodness bc my kids have been able to receive superior educations to what they would (have) receive(d)from our local public schools.
I have a friend who homeschooled her kids. She was very active in the homeschooling groups, they had a lot of social interactions with the group and with their church, but the neighbors could have absolutely thought there was something ‘strange’ going on at their house. Their kids never played outside, never played with the neighborhood kids, didn’t ride bikes or do hula hoops in the driveway. Sometimes they were in their backyard, but with a high fence. Their home did not have a manicured lawn.
I don’t think she would have been even insulted if the neighbors had called for a wellness check. She would have invited any workers into the home and showed them their homeschooling charts and posters, the weird animal collection (Madagascar hissing cockroaches?), but overall a safe home.
I personally thought her kids needed to be outside more and I told her so. I told her her kids needed more structure to their schooling and she disagreed (although child #5 is in traditional school because I think she just couldn’t do it anymore!) We are friends but just disagree on some of life’s basic things. Like cockroaches as pets.
If you have a question, call social services. They can do a wellness check. There can be good reasons for marching around the house at 3 am (sun allergies?) but the parents should have to answer to authorities if they have a reason for doing things out of the norm. The answer may be something we all find strange (‘We live on an east coast time zone clock’ or ‘we don’t like them up during the day because of what’s on tv at that time’). It sounds like if a social worker would have stepped foot in this house the problems would have been instantly apparent.
Shackles are a dead giveaway 
@shuttlebus News reports that they were adherents of the Christian Bible, which was used to school their children.
One example is this article is in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/19/starved-beaten-unbathed-how-a-17-year-old-escaped-a-house-full-of-chains-and-freed-her-12-siblings/?utm_term=.40bedebab109
Excerpted here: "The siblings’ grandparents told ABC News that during the children’s home schooling, they were made to memorize long scriptures of the Bible, with some memorizing the entire book. But Hestrin said the children appear to be lacking “basic knowledge of life.” Many of the children did not know what a police officer was, for example, and the 17-year-old who called to report the abuse did not know what pills or medications were upon police questioning.
All I’m saying is: religious zealots exist of every skin color. And religious zealots often adopt non-mainstream parenting methods that are whack and dangerous, or illegal. When the culprits are brown, we are quick to condemn it and point out “their values vs. American values.”
@PragmaticMom Zealots exist outside of religion.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek I agree with you. Zealots exist in every religion, including Christianity, and outside of religion as well. Why do Christian zealots who use religion to abuse their children get a pass? Defending Christianity from the condemnation we apply to other religious (or nonreligious zealots) is hypocritical.
I imagine law abiding mainstream muslims feel the same way Christians might feel when someone of their religion does something like this. I wouldn’t want this kind of abuse associated with my religion, either.
In this particular case, I am not seeing how they used religion to abuse their kids. I don’t see any evidence that they were following some sort of Christine doctrine that states that parents should starve and shackle their kids.
These parents don’t appear to be Christian zealots to me; they are just pure evil.
@pragmaticmom No one is defending “Christian zealots.” You took @shuttlebus’s question, do any Christian religions condone starving and torturing children, and turned it into a commentary on these parents are “Christian zealots.” That completely misses her pt.
Whatever they are, their behavior is the antithesis of those embodied by Christ.
Eta: I see shuttlebus posted while I typed. I agree. They are evil.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I did not say Christianity condones abuse. My point is that some fringe Christians use their religion to condone their parenting, including acts that we all agree here are evil.
@PragmaticMom I haven’t seen anything from the parents yet as to their justification (of which there is none!) They have some extended family saying things that may or may not be true. The bit from the half brother saying they wanted a reality TV show seems really off, they won’t let the kids be seen in day light or even interact with family but they’d let in a TV crew to film them 24/7? that just doesn’t seem to add up.
I don’t see anyone giving them a pass for torturing their kids because they are Christians. I also doubt that kids with cognitive impairments could memorize large texts of the Bible. Lot of things don’t add up.
But what I don’t get is that the youngest child is 2, and there are pictures with the family at Disney with all 13 kids in the picture. Those must have been taken withing the last 2 years, but the medical reports are that they have years of malnutrition. The timeline is throwing me.
If you look at the pictures you can see that the girls, at least, seem to be lacking secondary sex characteristics. They are almost all extremely flat chested. They have the bodies of tall 11 year olds.
If you look at the pictures and don’t know how old they are, they might appear somewhat normal. When you realize that in 2015, the oldest girl was around 26-27, you can see that none of the children appear to be anywhere near that, so something must be horribly wrong.
I agree that the timeline is odd. It’s also reported that none of the kids have seen a doctor in four years but all the kids children were born in a hospital so at least the baby must have seen a doctor in that time. One of the older boys is wearing glasses but that could be an old prescription. I think they could have still been starved while at Disney.
I don’t think they starved any of them as babies. I’ve have worked with two children that were starved as infants/toddlers and they both suffered nutritional blindness and deafness as a result. After time they regained hearing but not their vision. My guess is the starvation started slowly in late childhood but before puberty.
If you were wondering…I made some discrete inquiries and am satisfied my neighbors aren’t abusing their kids. They are making/have made some choices that I don’t agree with, but they are not criminals. (These parents are very lazy and disorganized IMHO. Not just with their kids, but also their financial choices. The kids do leave the house and are seen by outsiders. The family is very religious and many child raising choices are governed by this. Funny thing, I know some other people in their little community—and they have one—and have long thought that the parents are making choices that may look easy and convenient in the short term but are not good in the long term. FWIW one high spirited kid in this community did make it out by joining the military, an acceptable path. Kids get enough to eat, can join outside groups, and are taught from a national homeschool curriculum. I don’t think they are taught to soar, but they learn to walk.)
I commented to a friend of mine, who is a doctor, that I wondered if perhaps the oldest D was the mother of the 2-year-old and my friend said that, in her opinion as a physician, the answer would be no, because an 82 pound, 29 year old woman likely doesn’t menstruate and probably couldn’t become pregnant or carry a child to term. In a strange way, that made me feel a tiny bit better about this horrible situation.
The whole thing is sickening. I can’t believe that the neighbor who saw the children marching in the middle of the night didn’t do anything about it - unless it only happened once, in which case it could have been put off to a one off occurrence.
I missed the part about the kids all having J names. I know about the Duggars but never connected it as being that J was for Jesus (I’m Jewish so Jesus is really not an entity that is on my mind very much). I don’t think that giving all of your kids names with the same initials is that strange. My first two kids have the same first initial. I would have used that initial again but I didn’t have any other dead relatives whose names matched.
Anyway, I think the dad should die in jail. The mom seems like a walking vegetable but I bet she is the one who carries out the discipline, so she should die in jail, too.
I agree. Much less the “entire” Bible. Please.
The Duggers all have J names because their father is a J - Jim Bob. Josh has all M named kids, maybe in honor of his mother, Michelle?
We had a family in our town with all J names. Ten kids. I think their mother just liked it. I don’t even think they were catholic and we lived in a very catholic town.