Less kids, better values
Leia Minch
Issue date: 5/6/09 Section: Opinion
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I had never heard of the Duggars because I don't have cable, and even if I did, I wouldn't watch TV much. So when my friend told me of the family with 18 children who have their own show on The Learning Channel, I was completely in shock. It baffled me how a couple could have 18 children without entering a mental institution. What's more is that they intend to reproduce even more. The book, written by the two parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, is a 227-page autobiography on the start of their family and how they raise 18 children. But after reading the book and watching a couple of their shows on The Learning Channel, their family felt like something I would watch in an episode of "The Twilight Zone."
According to their book, Jim Bob and Michelle married right out of high school and had their first child in 1988. Twenty-one years later, the family now has an overabundance of children and more than a peculiar set of values. All of their children are home schooled because their main goal is to educate their children about God. "We teach them that any kind of vocation is a way to minister to others," they said.
Being a Catholic myself, I am not saying that being raised with a set of moral religious values is a bad thing, but I feel they take it far beyond what God would want for His people. In educating their children, they only let them read books from Christian authors whom they respect. I have more than one problem with this: First, their children will lack the power to think for themselves and the power to challenge thought. Second, it's putting their children in a nice, perfect little bubble where no harm or evil doings occur.
This is bogus. They are setting their children up for failure or disappointment. The world isn't nice, and it's far from being kind. They also have four computers with Internet access, but they are only allowed "seventy-some Web sites that the kids can visit." If they want to go anywhere else, they have to have their mother, or oldest sister type in a password, then they will stand behind the child and monitor the access. It's a whole new level of censorship.
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