Duggars' 19 kids

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/02/carefully-scripted-lives-my-concerns-about-the-duggars.html

I read through the above article and found many points to be similar to /many/ parents I've known.  The tendency to overpower a kid, make them believe what the parent does, make them act the way a parent does, this is universal and has nothing to do with a large or single-kid family and is regardless of social status and religious or other beliefs.

My mother did not have lots of kids but I still raised myself, and her too in many ways, didn't have much of a childhood or teenage years, and in different ways.  While these kids might have their whims literally beaten out of them, mine were put down and called evil and whatever else might make me more like the nut that doesn't fall far from the tree.  I know I'm not alone... lots of kids can recount such things in either direction, my own mother included.  Patterns repeat themselves for a reason.  Even if you're not pushed into it, you still want to be accepted and loved by your parent.  It is of note that not all kids become like their parents.  Some become "black sheep" of the family and are ousted, much to their own joy.  So an upbringing is not going to MAKE you into anything, it'll shape you, but you still end up deciding in the end whether you're going to be a mini-them or a major-them.

Further, we are only recently as a human race (in this country) able to have small families where kids do NOT raise each other.  Farms needed boys and girls to help keep things going.  It wasn't thought of as a horrible thing at the time.  However, now that we have smaller families, the children still mentor each other on playgrounds, in schools, in daycare.  Kids naturally gravitate to their older peers, siblings or not.

They think females need to dress modestly.  We are now putting down this culture of theirs because it's no longer mainstream, but it used to be, and in many places still is.  We are afraid of them spreading their crap through our culture, but it is us who spread our crap through their culture.  Their culture was in this country before ours!!  So who is the real danger?  Why is their way so far-fetched and dangerous?  Why is it more dangerous than ours?  Ours is full of drugs, murder, rape, and sex plastered all over the TV.  Do we seriously fear people acting nicely towards each other?  Letting our teens be teens certainly doesn't seem to be helping, either.  Maybe we're just human?

And yes, kids are naturally curious, but so are dogs and cats and we send dogs, our loving companions, to obedience school because we want them to act a certain way.

The point I'm trying to make is that nothing above is necessarily wrong, it's simply how various people hold their own beliefs, and one particular culture is not any better than another - it's because we were raised differently that we think ours is.  We need to be stroked and be agreed with, it's our human nature.

That being said, of course they wish to isolate their kids.  There aren't as many like them now.

Not that I'm condoning them.  That lifestyle would drive me nuts.  But again, I was raised very differently.

~nv