Posted on 12/10/2008 8:18:42 AM PST by Alex Murphy
They homeschool all those kids. The tax credits they’re getting don’t add up to anywhere near the cost to taxpayers of educating 2 children in public schools. They’re at least as self-supporting as any family with 2 children in public school.
A welfare leech is a welfare leech, no matter what they call themselves. All I know is that the Duggars are self-supporting, so I won’t criticize them.
LOL! Uh oh. Now she’ll find another hiding place. :)
Not if you drink it now :-).
Heh. It’s a bit early for me. :)
Add an egg.
Proper nutrition is important.
However, I want more for my older kids than taking care of younger kids. As it is, my older kids have done a lot - certainly much, much more than the average family. When you choose to have a large family, you are making sacrifices "for" your older kids, most assuredly. I do think it teaches them many valuable lessons but after a certain point, I feel like they're being deprived of their own lives. I just can't ask my kids to make that kind of sacrifice for my own personal ambitions.
If you're talking about yourself, you should probably change something you're doing, since you seem to feel badly about it.
If you're talking about others, these seem to be judgments none of us is really qualified to make about others.
Absolutely. You want curly hair, don’t you? Got to have those b-vitamins.
No offense taken. And BTW, I enjoyed reading it.
I'd offer you a Guinness, but you wouldn't appreciate it. Have a latte, you Morfordite.
If he's not going to drink that Guinness, can I have it?
Absolutely! You can have the one from post 60, since trisham isn't thirsty right now, or you can wait for Frank Sheed to bring more. I'd get it, but I have to pick my son up at driver's ed shortly!
It’s nice to hear someone with a big family acknowledge that the kids make sacrifices too. I’m the oldest of seven. My parents worked to make sure I didn’t have to do as much as some of the oldest daughters of big families I knew but I still had to do a lot.
I can’t tell you how sick I got of providing free babysitting, shuttle service, diaper changing... yes, I was glad to pitch in and it’s not like I was exploited but it got old and I wasn’t the one who had chosen that life.
It took fights with my mother and a lot of support from my father to get her to accept that I was going to college, going to study computer science, not nursing or teaching, going to grad school a thousand miles away...
Now I’m married, working on my own family. Four or five kids seem much easier than seven. I love all my siblings but sometimes seven is a lot.
I do have some curl in my hair. I guess I’m doing something right! :)
However, my point is that AFTER A CERTAIN POINT, I could not have asked them to do more, and if I had eighteen kids, I can assure you that the older kids would have had to help more than they did. That's not what I want for my kids. Other people may feel differently, but when we look at this family, we need to understand that they are asking their older kids to make huge sacrifices. I wouldn't be willing to do that if I didn't have to.
Sometimes sacrifices are inevitable - death, illness, loss of job, etc. can affect anyone. However, we don't choose those things. They simply happen to us, and we teach our kids to make the most of the situation.
I guess I just don’t see what huge value is being “sacrificed.” If a 15-year-old is cooking, he’s not just doing it for his siblings; he’s doing it for himself, too. The same with any other household tasks. Helping a younger child isn’t, perhaps, also a contribution to oneself, but helping those who need help is a duty of Christians of any age.
There seems to be an implication that the “ideal” is that no child should ever have to do something for someone other than himself, and that deviations from that ideal are an imposition. That’s not the value system I want my children to carry into adulthood, and it’s not the attitude I want for myself.
My teens look at other teens who don't know how to cook as if they're weird. LOL Chipping is is just a normal part of life around here.
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Exactly! Exactly right!
I don't see that as an obvious truth, as you seem to. Cooking a very large batch of something isn't more work than cooking a large batch. Same with dishes and laundry, if you have commercial-scale facilities, as the Duggars do, or divide the work among more participants. Same with general housecleaning, especially for a family that's well-organized and responsible.
What else ... changing diapers. Lots of people act like that's up there with Ice Road Truckers for the world's hardest and most dangerous jobs, but come on. Keeping a decent level of sanitation with multiple dogs is a lot more work than a couple of babies in diapers, but nobody seems to think a child with several pets is being abused and exploited. Toilet training - I'm terrible at this, and I hate it. I pay cash.
Supervision. Some families have kids who like each other and like doing things together. (This comes and goes with mine.) Keeping heads counted in a group of 18 takes some effort, but "oppression"? Only for those accustomed to thinking only of themselves. My oldest whines about "babysitting," if her dad and I are both out, but the hardship involved in sending some younger siblings to bed and then playing computer games all evening is massively exaggerated.
Either I'm missing something, or your argument sounds like a larger-scale version of the line we hear all the time, "I can barely manage with two children; I don't see how anyone can bring up eight!" And the sentiment seems impervious to empirical refutation (just as most criticism of the Duggars is): Look, here they are. Fed, beds to sleep on, clothes on, read write and add, drive a car, go to college, Senior Patrol Leader, reptile breeder.
The Duggars' children are accomplished far beyond mine - college-level educations at 18, play three instruments, speak three languages, run businesses. An incredible amount of effort by both parents and children goes into that level of accomplishment, and I admire it without feeling called to attempt the same. And I'm not going to sit here and think, "In spite of all the evidence, they must be doing something *terribly wrong* because they outshine ME. Heh - just like it's my fault (and my husband's) that we're not rich, it's my fault that three sons are in the kitchen cutting up paper plates while I'm typing and eating chips. Oh, well. Paper plates are cheap, and the vaccum is already out.
Just about every tax break has limitations. I note that the big-family people don't seem to mind that the child-care credit is limited to amounts paid for two kids, since they generally have the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle that doesn't qualify for such things. All I was suggesting was that maybe a limit of three or four child tax credits might be something to be looked at, you lose them when the kid turns 17, anyway.
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