@stradmom Despite some attempts to show her being interested in individual children, the overall message is that she’s more or less disconnected from the children once they’re weaned and handed off to their older “buddy.”
Does that mean the older buddy knows the child better than the mom?
Doesn’t the mother interact with all of them?
The mother sounds like she mostly interacts with her husband.
LOL!
Yep, she interacts a LOT with her husband. Hence, the 19 kids 
Well, we all would, too, if we were not allowed to say no.
Just happened to catch an old Law and Order SVU with Tim Daly as the dad. Religious family with 10 kids, the implication was the dad was possibly gay and was repressing his urges by producing multiple children, repressing wife and kids (including a son who was definitely gay). Not saying that is what is going on with the Duggars but it was creepy to watch this episode.
They also have “buddy groups” - so an older child corrals her buddy group - a couple of other kids that they take under their wing - and probably make sure that they do their chores so Michelle doesn’t have to!!!
"But in the Duggar household, the buddy system is more than grabbing a brother or sister to make sure neither of you gets lost coming back from the bathroom. Nope, as a Duggar kid, your buddy is with you for life, through vacations, chores, and just about everything else. Sometimes, it comes off like Michelle’s trusting her oldest daughters to raise her little ones without her… and yeah, at times, they probably are. But apparently, the buddy system works, because they have yet to lose a single child yet.
It started when Josh was eight years old
According to Michelle, the buddy system sprang up from a need to be everywhere at once to help her children — a need that was obviously impossible to fulfill, especially when she realized how difficult it was to get so many young kids ready and out of the house at once.
“We realized it works much better if we’re trying to hurry to have one of the older ones help the little guys buckle their seatbelts,” Michelle explained to TLC. ”I have noticed the ones that were teamed up and worked together a lot have such a sweetness in their relationship.”
They work together on chores, or “jurisdictions,” too
When the Duggars aren’t out and about, they refer to their color-coded chore charts, and their buddy teams are responsible for getting done whatever the chart tells them to do.
“All pink are Jan and her team. All blue are Jill and her team,” Michelle told Parenting.com. “There is a schedule from morning until bedtime so that they know what to expect — what their goals are, what they are aiming for, what they try to get done.”
Chores from morning until bedtime? That sounds miserable. How does this woman manage to raise 19 kids who all love the idea of helping out their parents? It might be the lack of a TV in their house."
Wonder if any of Josh’s “victims” were in his buddy group???
I keep expecting a big announcement, like “surprise, yay we are expecting number 20, now we can just start a NEW show called 20 kids and counting!” and it’s all good!
No, it will still be… 19 Kids…we got rid of Josh due to popular demand by our sponsors and the viewing public!
The schedule from morning until bedtime isn’t all chores. It includes the schooling time, music practice, some of their brand of downtime, reading time, naps- and bible studies, plus whatever. And Michelle and JB have said they schedule some sort of rotating time with kids individually.
This starts to explain not just popular interest, but the mechanics:
*As Jennifer Pozner writes in the introduction to her book Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV:
TV execs believe that the more they bait advocacy groups like NOW, the NAACP, and GLAAD, the more controversy a show will generate. Offensiveness = hype = increased eyeballs for advertisers and cash networks, making outrageous bigotry less a by-product of reality TV than its blueprint.*
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/8662907/josh-duggar-abuse I don’t think the timeline is perfect, but it offers a summary of sorts.
So, I think some of what was both included- and excluded- on the show itself is all calculated to draw interest. It is possible there is more Michelle involvement that the producers chose to show, all in the name of getting eyeballs.
This is also interesting http://www.intouchweekly.com/posts/11-things-the-duggars-are-still-hiding-after-second-interview-60110
Read this interview with an apatheist (apathetic atheist) who was brought up under the same ATI homeschool fundamentalist education system as the Duggars. Interesting comment on how lust-related sins were all considered equal.
I was 8 when my youngest brother was born, and he was mine. Not because my mother said so, but because I wanted him. In every picture I’m holding him. I used my mother’s bike because it had the baby seat and I’d take him to the store (I was probably 9 then as he could sit up). When I was in grad school, he moved in with me because my parents moved and he wanted to finish high school. I do not think it unusual to have a buddy system. There were 6 of us and 3 were older, 3 younger so it worked pretty well. I don’t think their organization style is all that strange. In big families, kids have a lot of chores and some of those chores involve watching other children. Even with only 2 kids, my niece often watched her brother, made his lunch for school, mothered him a little. I think if the Duggars only had 8 or 10 kids they would have had the buddy system.
19 is more than I’d like and more than I think is manageable, but there were actually a lot of families I grew up with that had 10, 13 or even 15 kids. Farms families, and big Catholic area. Sometimes at school you’d meet two kids with the same name and ask if they were cousins and they’d say ‘No, he’s my uncle’ as one was the child of the oldest sibling and the other the baby of the family. One family my kids went to school with had 7 kids, from 10 to 22 years old, with the 22 year old having 2 kids of her own (only girl, the rest horrible, horrible boys). Then there were 8! The mother, at age 49, had a oops baby who was 2-3 years younger than her grandchildren.
One of the stars of “Duck Dynasty” on TLC, another gay hating fundamentalist family came out today announcing he was molested at 6 on the school bus by a girl. Surprise! He’s written a book and supports Josh Duggar.
I’m betting TLC begged all their “stars” to dig deep and find something to normalize molestation. He got over it. We should all get over it.
I feel very sorry for the daughters. From birth this is the only way of life that they know. It they decided to step out into the real world they would be in for a culture shock because all their beliefs based on what they have been exposed to is so different from mainstream culture. They wouldn’t be able to apply what they have learned growing up to living a normal life outside of what they know. Just imagine for them one day or week where they have no chores and just get to relax and do whatever they want. Go to the mall, go for a movie, watch tv, sleep in, date, go to college. Having that freedom to pursue their own goals and dreams is not something they have the option of exploring.
Just going shopping at a mall would be a treat as the show has had numerous scenes of them shopping at thrift stores. Michelle did clarify to say they buy new socks and underwear, lol.
When Jill got married last year, there were scenes of her cooking for herself and Derick and saying how strange it was to cook for 2 as she was used to cooking for 20.
I always wonder what exactly Michelle does all day as the older girls seem to be raising the younger ones and handling all of the chores.
What will happen as the older girls marry off and there’s no one to take care of the younger ones? Or will JB control it so there’s always someone old enough to watch the little ones?
I wonder about the littlest children, when they get older they will not have younger siblings to take care of, not on the same scale anyway, but I guess they will be taking care of Michelle and JB.
Has no one on the “19 and Counting” crew ever broken the silence about what goes on in that home when the cameras aren’t operating? Or is there some “we will destroy you if you ever talk” clause in their contracts a la American Idol contestants?
Well, again, making all those children takes time, and I doubt that she had all those pregnancies without having some morning sickness and needing to take it easy. Then, once they were born, if she was breastfeeding (which she says she does), that takes time, until the next pregnancy.
@LucieTheLakie - I think I posted last week sometime that about three weeks ago, they aired an episode where they turned the cameras and had the family produce the show and the real production crew was filmed and interviewed. It was quite obvious that this crew has gotten very close to this family over the years. The girls helped deliver (played doula basically) one of the producer’s baby when she went into labor in China as they were filming there. How do you not have a bond with someone like that?
JB and Michelle have a tight control over all those kids, and my bet is they act pretty much as you see them on film, even when the crew is not filming, but is around. The crew did say they’ve been known to step in and do something when no adult was around - i.e., one of the kids was climbing a tree and got stuck. I think if anything, the crew was sometimes seen as another set of adult hands who would step in if they saw some danger, which I think is unfair to the crew.