My dad is the eleventh of twelve, and has a niece who is a year or two older than he is.  His parents were poor farmers and having lots of kids made sense in their world - more girls meant more help in the house and the dairy, more boys meant more labour for the fields.  My father talks fondly about his siblings and his childhood, but there’s no question that there was lots of deprivation, not just in material things but in parental time and attention.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, like your family, most of mine have limited their family size from 0-3 children, though one of my second cousins (granddaughter of my oldest aunt) has become a sort of hippy Quiverfuller and is at seven and counting.

Although the Duggars seem like nice folk, your citation of the evangelical “quiverfill” philosophy makes a lot of sense now that I finally looked it up.

Truly, some Christians seem to think that every child conceived is a tribute to God so (in their minds) why not go for as many as possible?

I just wonder how some can possibly afford such large broods, especially when the kids get older and basic expenses (e.g. food, clothing, transportation) become exponentially greater.

Huh, well Dr. Google tells me that pregnancy can predispose you to gallbladder problems, but then, we really don’t know if that’s why she’s having them.

I’ve made fun of her too, but I feel bad about getting too judgey, strictly in a reproductive-choices sense (skipping the environmental judgeyness, though as Americans, ain’t none of us too innocent there).  Not my job to tell her how many kids to have.

I don’t like her politics, her husband, or the way she raises her kids, it’s true. But she has the right to them.

And yeah, how many of us have huge ancestral families? My grandparents all came from large families, my dad from a family of six (his father died young) that probably would have been larger had my grandmother remarried. My mom was the oldest of four and went on to have four kids. But none of my siblings have that many; one has three, the rest one or two.

Just to add another element that I think is common to older days: fostering relatives’ children.  My mother’s foster mother not only had about ten children, she also raised late relatives’ orphaned children.  My mother’s family reunions are huge, with something in the order of twenty “siblings,” a good number of which are, technically, half siblings or just kids fostered in the same home.

I’m one of 6 kids, my mom is one of 13. My two oldest brothers are not my mom’s biologically. I have more first cousins on her sides than I can keep track of, and now they’re having kids too. I love having a big family, but I know it presents its challenges, to say the least.

One particularly anti-choice aunt by marriage (drags her kids to protest/pray at clinics with her) has, I think, six sons, one of whom is autistic. I honestly worry about their well-being as well as my uncle’s and her own, because she is mentally ill, and pregnancy/childbirth seem to make her illness much worse, but she thinks that birth control of any form is a sin.

And I’m no more distressed by the idea of people in the 1930s not using birth control than I am about the idea of them not using the MMR vaccine; science wasn’t there, so they did the best they could under the circumstances and produced some admirable human beings.

There was no pill, and IUDs were incredibly crude and dangerous.  But condoms have been around forever.  I’m not judging because the circumstances are so far removed from my life, not because the science wasn’t there.

It’s not that she’s having 19 kids…it’s how sanctimonious both Duggars are about having 19 kids—like they both discovered sex and God is doing something super special by ‘allowing’ them to get pregnant.

That, and the fact that while the boys can go to college, why would the girls need to, since they are simply walking wombs?

And the bullshit of holding themselves up as awesome parents, when Michelle hands the babies off to the girls to raise and breastfeeds for only six months so she can get pregnant again.  Blanket training?  Really?

They suck as human beings.  Nonetheless, they utterly have a right to choose to reproduce, and as long as Michelle isn’t being forced to gestate against her will, I really wish they would get the hell off of TV.  They aren’t newsworthy.  They’re just ignorant braggarts.

wow caren, I have watched the show and wonder which episodes I missed where they said the girls couldn’t go to college or where they held themselves up as awesome parents.  I don’t agree with their politics, but they seem to be nice people and the kids seem very nice, intelligent and respectful of other people’s right to do as they see fit.  My Mom had 7 of us and it didn’t kill me to help out with the younger ones.

I wonder how much of this you are just making up in your head.

“Respectful of people’s right to do as they see fit” does not describe a single Evangelical Christian I have ever known, let alone any of the Quiverful, who believe that any birth control at all is an abomination and raise their daughters to believe they have no choice but to be brood cows.

If they respected people’s right to do as we saw fit, they would be cool with their kids growing up atheist, feminist, queer, liberal and/or childfree. Want to guess what their reaction would be if they had the slightes suspicion their kids were any of those things?

I tend to look at huge families in the past as the norm, I guess because my dad was the oldest of eight and my mom the oldest of six. I think it’s not a coincidence that my mom, after having three, two of which survived, between 1967 and 1970, made sure to use contraception religiously afterward. (I think my sister happened because of a missed pill, but I’m not certain.) My sister is raising her husband’s grandson as her own, and I had only one child, a daughter, so the trend is definitely toward smaller in our family. None of my aunts or uncles had more than three, I think—the hardships of large families without money taught my parents’ generation a lesson or three it seems.

Fine, OK, pro-choice is pro-choice, so it’s not my business how many kids the Duggars have, but I sure wish they’d extend the same tolerance to my own reproductive choices.

He held several jobs, including one as a railroad porter.

Wow. Your grandfather was one of the famous African American railway porters? Isn’t there a whole museum dedicated to them? I believe (I’ll need to google it) that they are largely credited with helping build an African American middle class.

The way the Duggars make ends meet is they conduct seminars on financial independence which leave out TV show bucks and corporate sponsorships, so they’re lying sacks of shit, frankly. It’s well known the girls won’t be allowed to go to college. And frankly, telling somebody it’s all in their head is a great way to show yourself to be a shitty human being.

My maternal line great-grandparents had nine kids. All lived to adulthood, but only 5 (4?) survived the war. In my mother’s generation, there were 6 siblings-and-cousins. In mine, it’s 7. Next should be eight… we are still three short, though.

However, nine was considered a “brood” even in the 1920s, but they had a household of 21, including elderly parents, maiden aunts and servants, so it wasn’t that dramatic. I’ve never known anyone with property large enough to run a household that size.

I also like criticizing individual families for the umpteenth time in the misguided belief that it does anybody any good. Furthermore, I would like to see their medical records and procure $250K to go to medical school so that I may ethically interpret them.

My dad’s family, too, was quite large (10+ kids). In that case, I think there was a religious motivation, as they were Catholics…Irish Catholics. So yeah. My dad always says the “Every sperm is sacred” skit on Monty Python wasn’t all that far off. My mom’s family was comparatively tiny, just three kids.

Purple: Well I for one will now (a) refrain from availing myself of those services, (b) mention that my maternal grandmother was the youngest of ten children and educated after being orphaned in a Masonic Home, and (c) tell you that I have completed my first week of online studies on gall bladder disease.

My mom and dad had 11 and 17 siblings, respectively. Catholic domination of rural Quebec. Gotta love it.

My father was second of eight, my mother second of nine.  I’m eldest of four (I would be second of five, but my eldest sister was born too premature for 1974 to handle), and my parents’ brood was the largest of their generation.  No one else has had more than three.  Of my generation, everyone’s in the 0-3 range (I would be one of the zeroes), though I do have three fundy cousins - all children and congregation-members to one of my father’s brothers who happens to be a fundamentalist minister (You know the type: “We aren’t religious, we have a relationship with Christ”) - who look like they may start filling their quivers in earnest sometime soon.  I try to respect that, but when one of them declares that she wanted to start having children because she didn’t want to work outside the home anymore, I wanted to tear my hair out.  What, you needed an excuse?  You thought you absolutely needed to create massive new expenses for the household if you wanted to leave the workforce?

I think—the hardships of large families without money taught my parents’ generation a lesson or three it seems.

Indeed.  Both sets of grandparents had large numbers of children because that’s just what people of their time and place and religion (Irish Catholic) did.  It worked out okay for my father’s family, but I think my mother’s parents would have been happier if they’d had fewer children (that is, if they’d considered it a legitimate choice to control their number of children, given their time and place and religion).  They wanted to be members of their local country club (my grandfather is an avid golfer, and he was middle management at Corning Glass Works - I’m not sure which was a more important factor in this decision), so they economized with their kids - one can of tuna fish could make five sandwiches, and each kid got one such sandwich.  My mother and her siblings - except for one uncle who was raised as the crown prince - are a grab bag of dietary disorders, insecurity and general unhappiness to this day.

IIRC, the Duggars receive contributions from religious organizations supporting their highly visible quiverful advocacy and have their home registered as a church, with all of the attendant tax parasite benefits.

Remember kids: you’re responsible for paying your taxes and fixing your own damned roof ... and for paying extra to pay for the Duggars’ roof, too, via the taxes lost in all their religious write-offs. 

I must confess that hearing such people bitch that civil rights for gays are “special privileges” in the face of their own privileged tax position—owed solely to their belief in an invisible magic personality—grates on me something awful.

Yeah, Norbiz, like criticizing a religion and a mindset that makes women into cows and servants isn’t fit for a feminist message board. They teach those girls that their whole purpose in life is to be little handmaids to men, to pump out the babies, and to raise them to be good Xtian soldiers. They don’t believe in evolution or any of that secular shit. They stunt those kids’ minds in a lot of different ways but the girls get the worst of it. Fuck or not, have kids or not, but what they do with those kids—-especially the girls—-does become a matter of public discussion once they put themselves out there fairly deceptively with the more harmful, sexist aspects downplayed.

wow caren, I have watched the show and wonder which episodes I missed where they said the girls couldn’t go to college or where they held themselves up as awesome parents.  I don’t agree with their politics, but they seem to be nice people and the kids seem very nice, intelligent and respectful of other people’s right to do as they see fit.  My Mom had 7 of us and it didn’t kill me to help out with the younger ones.
I wonder how much of this you are just making up in your head.

Maybe you should use a little Google-fu, teresainpa.  In an interview, JimBob talks about saving money for the boys to go to college.  When asked about the girls…he totally flubbed it.  It never crossed his mind that he needed to save money for the girls’ college tuition.  B/c why would the girls need money for college?  They’re GIRLS.

I suppose the girls haven’t been forbidden to go to college, but the poor things are going to have to break away and make it on their own, unlike their brothers.

They make a big deal out of how each of the little ones has a “buddy”—Michelle is too busy being pregnant or with the latest newborn to take care of the rest—and, shit, you CANNOT expect JimBob to do woman’s work. 

They are damned lucky that none of their kids are special needs.

The entire premise of the show is that the Duggars are super-terrific-wonderful parents!  So organized!  Raising perfect little children who can play violin and piano!  Who have no debt whatsoever because they’re so Duggar-ific!  TLC paints the show that way b/c it makes money like that.  It’s not ‘reality’ in the slightest.

Did you catch the lovely episode where they trailed the poor newlywed eldest to their hotel room b/c they wanted a closing shot of the hotel door being slammed in the camera’s lens?  They totally got that shot, too!

Look up blanket training.  Michelle insists that she never actually hits the baby, just the floor near the baby, but judge for yourself how wonderful that parenting style is.

Again, I’ll fight for their right to worship whatever they want and to reproduce as they choose.  I just want their 15 minutes of hypocritical bullshit to be over.  They’re parasites.

Caren @ 9:

And the bullshit of holding themselves up as awesome parents, when Michelle hands the babies off to the girls to raise and breastfeeds for only six months so she can get pregnant again.

Sounds very 19th century, doesn’t it?

Yet a big reason that families were so large back then are high infant mortality rates, not that getting past the age of five meant that one was then safe health-wise. Consider the Lincoln’s; they only had one child (Robert) who lived a full life span. All the other Lincoln kids died of various illnesses before age 18.

Seeker @ 27:

IIRC, the Duggars receive contributions from religious organizations supporting their highly visible quiverful advocacy and have their home registered as a church, with all of the attendant tax parasite benefits.

I don’t know about registering one’s own home as a church, as outside of a property owned by a diocese, I can’t see the IRS not looking into that situation. Plus, it would open the doors for all manner of fraud - such as, “I proclaim my house the First Temple of Cthulu. So I expect to be non-taxable.”

But other than their properties, the Duggars’ chief revenue stream has to come from their TV money, just like the Gosselins (before Discovery pulled their plug). So in a way, it’s in their best interest to keep cranking out babies if each one means a new special on TLC.

We’re not supposed to criticize choices people make because? I think having more than 1 or 2 bio-kids in the year 2009 in the United States makes you selfish and short-sighted. Laws restricting reproductive freedoms are bad. But I think it’s becoming unusual or weird to have more than 2 or 3 kids, and I’m perfectly ok with that.

From the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services website: Who Reports Child Maltreatment? Anyone who suspects child maltreatment may report. Some people (for example, doctors, teachers and school counselors) must, by law, report suspected child maltreatment.  If you need to report child maltreatment, please call the Crimes Against Children Hotline at 1-800-482-5964.

From the IRS website: If you suspect or know of an individual or company that is not complying with the tax laws, you may report this activity by completing Form 3949-A. You may fill out Form 3949-A online, print it and mail it to: Internal Revenue Service Fresno, CA 93888.

There’s a great comment at the No Longer Quiverful blog here: http://nolongerquivering.com/2009/03/12/to-those-who-may-be-shocked-disappointed-and-hurt-by-the-news-of-my-apostasy/

Sure some QF families are wonderful, happy families, I have known a few myself. But you can’t get away from the abusiveness of the teaching because no matter how functional and happy the family is that happiness hinges on the children embracing the beliefs of their parents. If you are growing up in one of these happy QF families and find yourself:

Well, you know that if you pursue any of these things you will break your happy QF family. Your parents will see themselves as having failed if you pursue these ideas or feelings. ... Healthy families do not view choices outside of the parents choices as rebellion.

“I think I object to the romanticization of huge families by people with tv contracts and staff.”

Agreed. And I say yes to all of the things; their politics, their childrearing, their religion, their sexism, yes, criticize away. I hate all of them.

None of them are illegal, however distasteful we may find them. Probably not even the church-exemption bit, I would guess (they hold services in their home and people attend, I believe.)  Bad parenting is not the same as child abuse, though it can come very close, but there is only so much monitoring of families that the law can do without infringing on religious and personal freedom of all parents. We can’t set up laws for good parenting aside from “feed and shelter them and don’t batter or molest them.”  Which still leaves a screwy couple like this one to raise their kids in a fundie bubble and mess with their brains.

I guess I have tried to chill on indulging the hatred this couple does spark in me because that doesn’t help their kids any, or change any minds.

Also, part of the reason they are celebrities is that they *are* exceptional, and not mainstream. I don’t like Discovery for glamorizing them, but I also hate The Nanny and similar shows that make genuine dysfunction in families look like something you can solve with a scheduling chart. 

More than likely, some of these kids will break away, and tell their stories.  Maybe a great many of them. Michelle and Jim Bob won’t live forever; at some point, these kids will have to make their own choices about how to deal with the world. If our own family histories are any example, they’re not all going to follow their parents’ example. And in this case, the media attention means that any one of them will find a willing audience, and probably support, if they want to tell a different story than their parents do.

I bet condoms were markedly less effective more than 50 years ago. What sort of manufacturing controls were there to make sure they were effective before we had an FDA monitoring such things? One of my grandmothers relied on condoms after her first two kids because her husband was a drunk (but luckily, decent enough not to refuse to use condoms—surely there wasn’t much societal support for a married woman to insist on contraception over her husband’s objections). She had a third child because of a condom failure.

“The way the Duggars make ends meet is they conduct seminars on financial independence which leave out TV show bucks and corporate sponsorships, so they’re lying sacks of shit, frankly. It’s well known the girls won’t be allowed to go to college. And frankly, telling somebody it’s all in their head is a great way to show yourself to be a shitty human being.”

Aren’t these huge families basically getting subsidized by the rest of us, through child tax credits?

Free country, but it’s not a country where you get to be free from criticism, even if you haven’t made yourself a public figure.

No, making toxic choices like the Duggars’ illegal isn’t a good idea, but we should be making them socially unacceptable, especially the bits about brainwashing children. Not promoting them and making them look cutesy and harmless on national TV.

My grandmother was 7 of 12.  My friend’s dad was 14 of 14 and had five or six nephews and nieces who were a couple years or more ahead of him in high school, and teased him mercilessly about it.

This is what people did before readily available birth control at a time when large families were economically important (friend’s dad grew up on a dairy farm).  Amish have very large families - average 8 or 9 kids per woman - but they don’t get this sort of static (they also have an exceptionally small carbon footprint).

I come from a long line of Irish Catholics. My grandmother was one of 12, only half of whom survived to adulthood. My father was one of 9, but his father died when he was only 9 years old, and he started working as a carpenter’s apprentice at 11 years and 7 months old, because he had to.

Of course it’s understandable why grandparents had large families:

“Soon after the federal government passed the Comstock Act, over half of the states passed similar laws. All but two of the rest of the states already had laws banning the sale, distribution, or advertising of contraceptives. Connecticut had a law that prohibited even the use of contraceptives; it was passed with little or no consideration for its enforceability.”

I can’t believe no one else cited the illegality of contraception and then the stigma - yes, I’m old enough to remember when both tampons, pads and condoms were kept behind the pharmacy counter and had to be requested.  And whether one was in a city neighborhood or small town, this was an age before the anonymity of Walmart and Walgreens.  That could invite all sorts of speculation and social stigma onto a family. 

++++++++++++++++
And Ms Kate, even the Amish are having problems with those large families. Yes, they do shun even photographs, and they encourage the kids to explore other lifestyles in their late teens (but with little formal schooling, that often turns into a sham of a choice).  But the problems of obtaining land for all those multiplying kids has led to changes (some would say destructive) of the community itself.  Many are now employees instead of farming landowners and that has changed the lifestyle.

Agreed, phylosopher—Ms Kate, I think Amish insistence on large families and wifely submission/chastity can be every bit as problematic as Quiverful movements, we just tend to see far less of it, and what we do see or think we see is often romanticized bullshit. In talking to a lot of people about Amish I am always surprised by how little they actually know (and they understand less). I think the Amish are widely perceived as some cute, quaint sort of community.

Everyone keeps saying how it was just totally normal for people to have tons of kids “back in the day” but I’d like to point out it was only normal for SOME religions/cultures. I come from a Jewish family and as far back as I know about no one had more than 4 kids.

So it wasn’t normal for EVERYONE.

In a region and era that was relatively poor, my grandmother was 1 of 3 who made it to adulthood, and only 2 lived long enough to get married, abd she was the only one to have children: without modern health care and decent nutrition, it is hard for a woman to carry lots of pregnancies to term and hard for children born to live to adulthood.

Large families were really just a result of a confluence of an era with access to health care, sanitation, and good food while there were still restrictions on access to family planning. This was not the historical norm.

My grandmother was pregnant 8 times with 9 babies and had 5 children survive infancy. Much of her childbearing was done during World War II, in Germany.

There is zero doubt in my mind that if she had had access to contraception she would have used it—a malnourished pregnancy wondering how you’re going to feed another mouth, followed by watching your twins starve to death, is not anyone’s idea of fun.

I have tremendous respect for women who managed these giant families back in the day when their choices were restricted, but I really would hope we’ve moved beyond that kind of thing now. The only reason the Duggars of the world can sing the praises of gigantic broods is that they’re privileged to be able to leech off a social system that prevents their kids from dying wholesale of disease or starvation.

Large families were really just a result of a confluence of an era with access to health care, sanitation, and good food while there were still restrictions on access to family planning. This was not the historical norm.

Good point. My grandmother was one of six, of whom four made it to reproductive adulthood. She had two…

I also point out that Tyro’s point was core of the human geogaphy element of my Geogrpahy GCSE. This is standard wisdom, not rocket science. People will discover they can reliably raise kids to adulthood. Then they will cut the number of kids they have.

Everyone keeps saying how it was just totally normal for people to have tons of kids “back in the day” but I’d like to point out it was only normal for SOME religions/cultures. I come from a Jewish family and as far back as I know about no one had more than 4 kids.

So it wasn’t normal for EVERYONE.

On the other hand, my Jewish grandmother is one of eight.

I’m suddenly realising how weird it is that I come from a line of Irish Catholics who, in the largest family I can recall real details of (my grandparents), had a total of five children.  Most of the family had one or two - I’m one of two, my father is one of two, his father was an only child, my mother had four siblings which I thought was extravagant as a child at family meetups…her mother was one of two, her father was an only child, and so on.

I have the family tree and it looks seriously pruned compared to others of the time.  The benefits of that in the current generation are obvious - money for schooling for my grandparents was available, and they passed the benefit on.

Amish have very large families - average 8 or 9 kids per woman - but they don’t get this sort of static (they also have an exceptionally small carbon footprint).

As my genetic teacher used to say, I’ll bet garbage to doornails that large Amish families don’t go on welfare as much as non-Amish ones.

Also, they follow the old outdated American custom of keeping to themselves, you don’t hear about them driving buckboards from place to place to evangelize their non-Amish neighbors like JWs and Mormons do using more modern means of transportation.’

My grandfather was one of 17 in his family, my mother was the first grandchild and I was the first great-grandchild.  The closest Grandfather Monk’s generation came to his mother was one sister had 12 children, as did one brother, but the rest tending more to 3 or four.

Illocano Avenger was one of 13 surviving children, she had a sister who died right before her who “made room for her”, even though she was later raised by an auntie because her parents didn’t have the resources for her.  Her father died when the youngest sister was 5 years old, so this sister naturally doesn’t have much in the way of memories of her father.

@Kat

I’m just getting into sorting out my family tree.  It’s mainly urban working class/rural poor in South Wales and the west of England.  I don’t know what methods they were using, but, right back into the mid-nineteenth century there’s usually no more than three or four kids per family (and often, at least one of those dies before adulthood).  The one big exception is the relatively well-off middle-class ancestor who owned his own building company, they had 12 children, all surviving to at least 21, and it stands out like a sore thumb among all the other small families.

As my genetic teacher used to say, I’ll bet garbage to doornails that large Amish families don’t go on welfare as much as non-Amish ones.

Comment #50: Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein on 12/08 at 06:41 PM

That will be rapidly changing, as more Amish move to non-farm employment.  I am guessing that we will see a greater number of Amish either leaving the community (20% do now) or smaller families.  A salary is much more fixed than the ability to simply plant a larger garden and obtain an extra milch cow.

Tyro’s point is important. Both my (Catholic) parents had six siblings, and both lost a brother to a childhood illness. I don’t think my grandparents had as many surviving siblings.

I was reading the saddest essay by a Victorian lady who was pregnant every year until menopause that she used to pray that her husband would start sleeping in the living room, because she loved him, but damn, she was really worn out.

It’s odd to think of it this way, but the huge amount of prostitution in Victorian Britain (and America, one assumes) was a kind of middle-class family planning, even if the result was seen in foundling hospitals and orphanages. There was a certain amount of fuzziness in the family trees of domestic staff too.

Still, I want to see what happens if/when the law of averages kicks in and one of the Duggar brood comes out.

I’ve gotten the “children are a gift from God” line from fundie types before, usually when I state that my wife and I intend to only have two kids.  With a new baby at home, and precious little sleep to be had, I tell them that they are welcome to come and feed the little gift from God at 4 a.m., but I’m too old for any more of this shit.

Love my kids to death, don’t want any more.

If I can add something I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread yet:  The Duggars are not just quiverful, they’re Gothardites, members of a conservative Christian cult led by Bill Gothard.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gothard

What that means, besides all the patriarchy and misogyny, is that none of the kids will ever be allowed to go to college.  Any sort of outside schooling or university is considered a corrupting influence, so kids are encouraged to apprentice to learn a trade.  Several of the Duggar brood are over 18 and look at what they’re doing: The eldest is the owner of a car lot given to him by his father, the second oldest boy owns a towing business, given to him by his father, and the eldest daughter stays at home and raises the kids.  None of these kids have a bright future ahead of them, unless they break from the family.

Re the “they seem like nice people”, “they have a right to their children”, etc. - I’m sorry, but no.  Just no.  I mean, they only way they are able to HAVE 19 kids is because they keep their daughters out of school.  Which, last time I checked, is child abuse. 

I mean, yeah, sure, they are probably technically “homeschooled”, and nothing against homeschooling when it’s legit, but being assigned a couple toddlers to parent once you’ve got the rudiments of the 3 R’s down is not “homeschooling”.  It’s unpaid child labor*. 

I’m fairly sure that the only reason those kids haven’t been put in foster care (or at least had court orders requiring them to attend school) is because they live in Arkansas, where they are probably the most famous residents since Bill Clinton.

*And I’m the oldest girl in a big family, so believe me, I know from unpaid child labor.

outside of a property owned by a diocese, I can’t see the IRS not looking into that situation. Plus, it would open the doors for all manner of fraud - such as, “I proclaim my house the First Temple of Cthulu. So I expect to be non-taxable.”

1.  There are a GIGANTIC number of religious institutions in the US which are not part of a “diocese” or anything like it.  And, yeah, they all get tax exempt status. 

2.  People run this con quite a lot.  As long as you can provide some sort of documentation that the space is being used for religious purposes, and especially as long as your supposed religious institution is a Christian one, you’re good.

Aren’t these huge families basically getting subsidized by the rest of us, through child tax credits?

Yes, and the hilarious thing is that these are the people most likely to sit around the dinner table bitching about those Welfare Queens cranking out baby after baby just to get more welfare money they can blow on booze and gold teeth.

An important method of contraception, if you can call it that, in the Victorian period among the middle and upper classes was to avoid sex all together.  That’s how you get families with 1-3 kids among those classes, while members of other classes might have many more.  It helps that among higher classes life expectancy was probably quite higher and infant mortality lower by mid-19th century, than in the lower classes, so that you didn’t have to have a whole pile of kids to get a few to survive to adulthood.  But there was also this whole non-sexual (and generally helpless and pathetic) female trope at the time, and the idea of chastity in men was as popular as it’s ever been.

See Intimate matters : a history of sexuality in America by John D’Emilio & Estelle B. freedman, and For her own good : 150 years of the experts’ advice to women by Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English.

I also hate The Nanny and similar shows that make genuine dysfunction in families look like something you can solve with a scheduling chart.

oh my head.  I’ve seen that Supernanny show.  Some of those kids are in serious need of medication and therapy!  Scheduling charts and hugs aren’t going to help.  At least not much.

la la la, staying out of the atheism thread!

Some of those kids are in serious need of medication and therapy!

Not to mention that, over and over, the main issue in the family is that they have too many goddamn kids.

Seriously, y’all, just because you are physically capable of spitting out a kid every year doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.  I speak from experience, here.

Aren’t these huge families basically getting subsidized by the rest of us, through child tax credits?

No more than I am subsidizing you through your personal tax deduction.  You get a deduction for dependents because your income is supporting them.  That’s what a person-related deduction is.

I want to see what happens if/when the law of averages kicks in and one of the Duggar brood comes out.

May not come out. May just kill themselves. After all, I’m sure even straight people have been driven to suicide by the demands of these “lifestyles”.

Some of those kids are in serious need of medication and therapy!
Not to mention that, over and over, the main issue in the family is that they have too many goddamn kids.
Seriously, y’all, just because you are physically capable of spitting out a kid every year doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.  I speak from experience, here.

I admit taking far too much interest in the Gosselins (though never watching the series) b/c the first special came out while I was pregnant.

I’m still convinced that if they had done the rational thing and had a selective reduction instead of naming the sonogram images they’d still be happily married.  Happily enough, at least.

“No more than I am subsidizing you through your personal tax deduction.  You get a deduction for dependents because your income is supporting them.  That’s what a person-related deduction is.”

But once you’re up to 19 dependents, aren’t you going to have eaten up every bit of tax you’ve paid and be getting quite a bit back on your return?

I thought I read something about this on Salon a while back, but I couldn’t find anything.

I thought I read something about this on Salon a while back, but I couldn’t find anything.
Comment #66: witless chum on 12/08 at 11:39 PM

Earned Income Tax Credit?

Pam, your mom is so cute in that photo! I love black-and-white photos with solemn-looking young women in them. My favorite pictures of my grandma and great-grand-someones all have them looking very serious and thoughtful too (I know it’s kind of an artifact of the technology but I think it looks so nice anyways.)

After reading this thread, I looked up the Duggars’ website, which appears to have been made with their consent by a publicist (and if I may be snarky, one who does not understand the correct use of the apostrophe in the English language). Each of the kids who was older than four when it was made (it looks like parts of it were updated recently and other parts have not been updated in two years) had a goal/dream. There was no indication of how long ago they were asked about this dream. Some of the little ones wanted to be a father when they grew up (interesting twist as it’s usually girls who are socialized to want to be a mommy), some wanted to be a firefighter which is pretty common for small boys, but I was especially struck by the older kids. Josh wanted to be an attorney. He’s 21 now, and is he anywhere on that path? No, he’s not pursuing an undergraduate degree and studying for the LSAT. He’s married with a child and sells used cars. Jana wanted to be a midwife. Is she in nursing school training to be a CNM? Or doing an apprenticeship with a direct-entry midwife? No, she cleans the kitchen in the house with her parents and 16 siblings and plays mother, in wait for a man to do as her brother just did with his wife’s family. Does anyone doubt that an age-appropriate son of one of the families we see them visiting on television will ask Jim Bob and Michelle if he can court Jana, and soon she will be married off too? Another of the older girls wanted to be a beautician. I imagine she is the one who trims and perms the other girls’ hair and loves that, but does anyone really think she’ll be allowed to go to cosmetology school and learn about hair styles and make-up? I wonder if she owns any nail polish. Drawing attention to ones appearance doesn’t sound sufficiently modest.

I have some hope for the kids if they ever do want to break away. It’s going to be hard for them to ever decide that, because they will be losing their family even more so than an Amish youth who leaves the community. An Amish youth is still allowed to see his or her parents, though the rest of the community will shun him or her. Would the rest of the Duggars accept a daughter who chose a career, or a gay son? But the Duggars are not completely isolated from the rest of the world. The girls babysit for families in which the children are wearing jeans. They do go to stores. I think if, as a young adult, one or more of the kids wanted to leave the fold, he or she could. It would be lonely, but someone said upthread that people will want to hear their story. Someone would pay for a Duggar-tells-all book.

Kat, I think the size of Jewish families has really varied. Two of my grandparents were each one of three, one was one of eight, and while the fourth was the only child of her parents’ marriage, she had at least ten half-siblings as both her parents were widowed with other children when they married (and I don’t know how many of her siblings died of the 1918 flu, only that it’s how her parents came to be widowed). I think my father’s grandfather was one of six, and my mother’s grandmother was one of five or six. Both were born in Poland.

I’ve read that the Amish usually send their kids to real schools in normal clothes,  so that the child can make a decision as an adult to embrace their family’s way of life or live in the secular world. I suppose it varies by community, but at least some of them make an effort to give the children real options.

With the Duggars—the adult children own businesses set up by their father—but are they or he the real owners?

I wouldn’t be too worried about a special-needs child being born into the Duggar family, because it would have plenty of older siblings (or just sisters) to take care of it.

Some studies have shown that boys who have more older brothers are more likely to be gay, and that’s what worries me.  Also, just the sheer amount of children means that chances are good that at least one of them will turn out in a way that the family doesn’t approve of.  If any of the children is gay, they will probably still get married and have a bunch of kids, and then have some kind of major crisis later in life.  I have an uncle who is married with an 18 year-old son, and he recently came out as gay, and he’s getting a divorce.  I feel bad that he had to go through life denying himself, but imagine how much worse it would be for any of the Duggar kids, especially after they have 10 kids of their own. 

I also worry about mental illness in the children.  I doubt that these people take it seriously, and they probably think Prozac is some fancy, elite, luxury drug that people take to try to fill the gap where God should be.  A different uncle of mine, on the other side of the family, had severe schizophrenia and he actually had an exorcism in the 1960s, although that was more because his family couldn’t afford real treatment rather than any religious conviction.  Still, if it’s one of the girls, even if she takes mental illness seriously and gets treatment, she’ll probably be guilted out of taking any medication because she’ll be pregnant all the time.

I wouldn’t be too worried about a special-needs child being born into the Duggar family, because it would have plenty of older siblings (or just sisters) to take care of it.

I’m sorry, but that is about the most ignorant thing in this thread.  I don’t think you meant it that way, did you?

I have a sibling and a child with special needs.  I may have been the bestest big sister on the planet, but that doesn’t change the fact he needed specialists and therapists to reach his potential and to become as independent as possible (which, frankly, isn’t that much since he lives in a group home in a large complex).

It’s not a matter of simply loving the baby.  Loving someone isn’t enough when there is a real health issue.  You get that depression is a real illness, but a child who is mentally or physically retarded needs even more care for a lifetime.

Though if it’s a girl, and they don’t expect the girls to do anything but clean and breed, life in the Duggar complex might be best for a handicapped child as opposed to the non-disabled siblings.

People without children qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit.  Yes, people with children qualify for considerably more, because, again, that money is supporting more people.  Our system of deductions is far from perfect, but it basically works along a principle of giving a certain deduction for the number of people your salary supports.  Again, you are no more subsidizing my child than I am subsidizing you.

And yes, it’s possible that if you have a low enough salary and enough kids, you will be paying no taxes and even getting some net money, although according what I’ve been able to see, it caps at three children.  So no more of your tax money is going to these large families than is going to a family with three children.

Caren,
After your comment, I realize that I was wrong and hadn’t really thought through my opinion.  I know parents of special needs children and sometimes requires a lot more time and effort just to take care of their daily needs.  While special needs kids could get that in a big family, that’s just not enough by itself, which you have reminded me of.  You’re right that they would miss out on the education and special treatment that they need to have a more independent life.  Sorry for not thinking enough before posting.

Re the possibility of someone like the Duggars having a special needs kid - my main concern is the fact that the mother hands off each kid to an older <strike>sibling</strike> sister as soon as it’s weaned.  And with 19 kids, it’s not like any one kid is really getting a substantial amount of one-on-one interaction with the adults.  And your average 12 year old is really not qualified to notice disabilities beyond the obvious stuff, nor able to “inform” the parents that it’s a real thing.  How many kids growing up in the middle of a huge Quiverfull family have undiagnosed learning disabilities, mental illnesses, or developmental issues?

most women, given the tools, and given a reasonable degree of security, do not choose to be permanently pregnant. ... for the most part, it seems like most women with the tools and the education will prevent most pregnancies most of the time.

This is what really gets me. If the Quiverfull people were right and women don’t actually want to use contraception/actually are happier squirting out a kid every year, then it wouldn’t make any difference to them whether contraception were available—even available to their own daughters. It wouldn’t change anything, because those women and daughters wouldn’t choose to use it.

But as we know, women do want contraception, and when they get the chance to use it, they do. These people are restricting access to contraception because they know women want it, which is just fucking evil.

One of these days menopause is going to sit in, and Lady Clowncar is not going to have pregnancy to keep her from spending time with her brood, and she’ll have little option but to sit back and survey her work, and, as Jayne would say, that’ll be an interesting day.

Do we really have to call Michelle Duggar “Lady Clowncar”? We can disagree with her TV show, with her subservience to her husband, with how she treats her daughters, and even with her hairstyle without resorting to name-calling that mocks her reproductive choices.

I’m the eldest of 12 children, my mom is the eldest of 7.

I’m 38, and have siblings half my age and much younger. One of them is still a pre-teen, although she’s a foster sister (only foster child in the family). Most people have a hard time believing that we all (except the last one) have the same parents or that the younger kids aren’t the children of the older kids.

Mom had her first child at 22 and her last child at 45. Only one set of twins.

I should add: None of my mother’s children have more than 2 children of their own - and that’s just one of them. In fact, I have a brother with 2 children, another brother with 1 child, and a sister with 1 child that is the result of an accidental pregnancy. None of the other 6 sisters have children. However, only one brother is childless. This is probably a result of our brothers having fewer childcare duties as kids, and our sis-in-laws not having as much childcare experience as my sisters and me.

We don’t really have to. I choose to.

That’s what choice means to me!

I find it useless to lament the large families of the past. We know better now and no one realistically needs a large family. My dad is 4 of 12, and 6 of his siblings pretty much vowed to never have kids due to the strain of growing up in a large family. My dad has stated on a few occasions that his parents had him and his siblings so they could do work. Work they did, every summer. My grandparents would postpone the celebration of my dad’s birthday in late July because it was during raspberry season. School was a blessing after all that work, and my dad was one of those few for whom “free time” allocated from the Navy was a novelty.

No one needs 12 kids to do work like that anymore. We know better now, or at least we should, but people like this are animals with only a slight sense of memory. They think, “My parents did it, so I will too”. Your mother’s large family, like that of my father, is an anachronism. In an ironic (or maybe unfortunate) twist of natural selection, those most incapable of adapting to the new environment are the ones breeding the most. Unlike many who find fault with wealthy and intelligent people (but mainly women) having fewer kids, the way to prevent Idiocracy is to FUND PUBLIC EDUCATION, including good sex ed.

My dad has stated on a few occasions that his parents had him and his siblings so they could do work.

I don’t know what ethnicity your father is, but there’s a Mexican saying that “every child comes into the world carrying a loaf of bread”  which reflects that attitude.

I doubt anyone is still reading this thread, but it turns out that the latest Duggar baby was just born really premature.  The whole thing is just so sad.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/12/11/nineteenth_duggar/index.html?source=newsletter