Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the stars of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting, recently did a very, um, interesting interview with Covenant Eyes, an Internet software company that helps keep the Internet as pure as possible by blocking controversial or naughty sites. Not only does it provide parents with report of every site visited by their kids, but it also allows adults to block themselves from sites that they feel are too tempting.
Anyway, Jim Bob and Michelle aren’t much for technology; as viewers know they do not have televisions in their home, and strictly monitor the Internet and cell phone use of their children. In the interview, which was done last month, Jim Bob and Michelle discussed how they have struggled to keep the latest technology from hurting their children.
The interview is chock-full of quotes that will make you scratch your head and roll your eyes. For fun and giggles, The Ashley has compiled a list of the five strangest things Jim Bob and Michelle revealed during this recent interview.
5. Their daughters can have smartphones but their sons can’t because it’s too risky.
Usually being a Duggar daughter means you get the short end of the stick, compared to the sons. However, this is not the case when it comes to their cell phones. Michelle and Jim Bob say that because there’s much more temptation for young men than young women, the boys can’t be trusted with fancy phones that have a gateway to naughty InternetLand.
“Young men would have more of a struggle seeing bad stuff, so what we’ve done with the smartphones that we’ve had, we’ve actually locked out Safari and any Internet search at all, and then we’ve just had basic apps,” Jim Bob said. “We have emails and just the basic things on the phones for the guys. But…even on the maps and things there are some ways to see some bad things, and that’s a struggle.”
How do the Duggars handle this situation? They get their sons “Zack Morris” cell phones!
“For most of the boys, we have actually gone back to the basic, cheap phone—the 1995 phone. All it has is phone calls and you can text on it,” Jim Bob said. “Some of our sons have [smartphones] but most of them just have the cheap, basic phones.”
And these rules don’t just apply to the Duggars’ sons; even Jim Bob isn’t allowed to have Internet on his phone!
4. If a Duggar kid wants to go on the Internet, their siblings have to stare at them while they surf the web.
Although all of the Duggar family computers have this “Covenant Eyes” software installed on it, and are placed in the family’s main room, extra precautions must be taken when a kid/teen needs to go online for schoolwork or research. That means getting a sibling involved to become an “accountability partner.”
“We prefer that any research that they’re doing on the Internet will be in the main area [of our house] with at least one other set of eyes watching on,” Michelle added. “They get permission and then myself or one of my older daughters will punch in the password and let them get on [the computer],” she added.
Michelle said that sometimes, despite all of their efforts to keep their kids off the World Wide Web, the kids have come face-to-face with Internet naughtiness.
“There’s going to be temptation and we explain that to them,” Michelle said. “Temptations are designed by Satan to distract us from God.”
3. They bribe their kids to memorize the Bible.
The Duggars love them some Bible study and they want their kids to love it too, so Jim Bob and Michelle say they pay their kids to memorize chapters.
“We’ve also put a challenge out to our kids, that if any of them will memorize the whole book of Proverbs, that we will give them $1,000,” Jim Bob revealed. “Our son Jeremiah has taken us up on this; so far he’s memorized the first 26 chapters. Each one of our children are wise, but I think that’s given him an extra measure of wisdom.”
2. Even The Andy Griffith Show is evil.
The Duggars have mentioned that they sometimes indulge by watching wholesome shows such as The Andy Griffith Show on their video projector; however, even happy-go-lucky Andy and the gang are sometimes too risque for the Duggars.
“The Andy Griffith Show is…a very wholesome show, but when a crisis comes up, they leave God out of the equation,” Jim Bob said. “They don’t pray to God asking for his help. Usually they solve the problem with deceit or manipulation. It’s really teaching how to live your life without God. Even though we watch those shows, we usually have a discussion afterward about how things should have been done differently.”
And don’t even get us started on that wicked Barney Fife!
1. Smartphones have the “potential to steal somebody’s soul.”
Nothing will top this quote, uttered by Jim Bob during the interview. (The Ashley did not make this up for comedic reasons; Jim Bob actually said this.)
The Duggar parents were discussing the importance of limiting Internet availability, especially on their kids’ cell phones.
“It so important not to have open Internet that you can go see anything, do anything, any time you want,” he said. “Especially now with the smartphones. They can go off by themselves and take it out in a hurry. It has the potential to steal somebody’s soul.”
Jim Bob said that he prefers to keep his children (and adult children, we can assume) away from the temptation to surf onto an ungodly website.
“It’s not that we don’t trust our children, but we don’t want to open them up to temptation to go and look at bad stuff or go down that path,” he added.
This may explain why so few Duggar kids are on Twitter– most don’t have access to the Internet.
If you’d like to listen to the interviews themselves, click here and here. (They are quite long and were separated into two parts on the site. The Ashley pulled out most of the good parts for this story. You’re welcome.)
(Also, just for the record: The Ashley completely agrees with the Duggars that teens and tweens do not need smartphones, and that childrens’ Internet use should be monitored. However, the reasons why we feel this way are completely different.)
Photos: TLC
31 Responses
The Duggars: Potentially the only family in the known universe that can make the Amish look like harlots by comparison.
Right? Can you imagine Jim Bob and Michelle signing off on rumspringa?
I can’t wait til one of these kids come out of the closet. With 19 of them, there’s bound to be at least one.
Statistics are definitely in favor of one or more child being gay, but I hope that isn’t the case. That poor soul would be condemned to a life of shame, confusion, and misery, with some creepy re-indoctrination “you can’t come home until you are ready to marry somebody of the opposite gender” camps thrown into the mix. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
I didn’t know the Lord when I was raising my children now that I know the Lord and studying the Bible my life has change the Holy Spirit that teaches us how to renew our mind and how to have a christ-like mine now that I walk with the Lord Jesus Christ I’m very careful and sensitive to the Holy Spirit to not watch certain TV shows movies and not engage in gossip I just in the word and I speak what God says to speak and teach what he says to teach a lot of people don’t understand about the Word of God and you don’t understand until you humble yourself before him and surrender all to himthe enemy wants people to compromise their walk for counterfeitit just talk about it in the Bible about false teaching false prophesying beware of the one that comes in sheep’s clothing and it’s so important so very important to keep God 1st in all things and when he says don’t do it don’t stray away no matter what people say because we’re not here to please people we’re here to honor God and to help the lost to come to God so they are not perish
I am not that much into the Duggar family as I was. The show and stuff has become worldly. You can see a difference in the girls how they used to dress until now. Even Michelle changed
They were too much makeup. Skirts got shorter. You can speak and claim everything that you don’t do but your actions speak louder. Their actions and such blend into the world more than showing who Christ is.
All they (the Duggars) are doing is trying to live a Christ-centeted life and avoid temptations that can distract that. Yes it might seem abnormal to some, but they choose to live a life devoted to God in a world that doesn’t know Him.
OMG that Andy Griffith section had me in tears from laughing so hard. “Nip it. Nip it in the bud! Haha
I WISH I had been as good a parent as the Duggars. I whole heartedly agree with their views. MORE parents should be like them.
Think about that closely-do you truly wish that you had raised your children in a bubble in which they were homeschooled with a curriculum that amounts to fill-in-the-blank indoctrination until you have them get their GED at 16, after which point you forbid them from furthering their educations? That your older daughters be essentially raising their younger siblings and running the house? And that in the end you still have children that you ‘re unable to trust to watch “The Andy Griffith Show” without talking it through with you afterwards, lest they get dangerous ideas?
By all means, keep your kids from watching porn. They don’t need a phone when they’re eleven, period. But an entire world of the Duggars would quickly collapse.
Only a few of them get GED’s. When Jinger and Joseph had their ‘graduation’ party, they were showing off computer generated ‘diploma’s’.
Smart parents. I wish more parents cared this much about their kids and took proactive steps to allow them to be innocent children a little longer.
Right?! And they show absolutely NO trust in their kids. At all. I mean, good grief-why on Earth would anyone need a chaperone at the table with them at a restaurant in broad daylight? Why not just make your twenty-year-old have all dates via Skype while sitting in your lap?
The Bible says to flee from evil. I absolutely agree with the Duggars . They will be blessed for protecting their children and themselves from any potential unforseen sexual immorality the Internet may reveal. Their moral compass is Christ not the changing of times.
there is being a good parent and then these people.
If you agree with them, get your ass off this site.
What I don’t get is that these people claim to be die hard Christians, yet the bible talks all the time about God giving people self-control and wisdom when faced with temptation or a difficult situation. Why wouldn’t they trust God for help, rather than create ridiculous structures/barriers to anything remotely unsavory? I thought their courting was nuts, but now this? IMHO, I believe God gives us strength for the tough things so that we don’t have hide from EVERYTHING in the world.
I totally agree with you, AT. The bottom line with ma and pa Duggar is a huge lack of trust. They don’t trust their kids because they as parents, don’t trust themselves. Instead of looking at the positive in situations, they constantly look for the worst case scenario. A huge part of faith is trust. It’s a constant theme throughout the entire Bible, so it’s apparent that the Duggars don’t trust God. For people who claim to be a faith believing people, they sure are a contradiction to what they’re preaching. And they want people to look up to them and follow their example of “faith”? For one who used to like the Duggars, I’ve jumped off that train awhile ago.
The funny thing about this is that the men in the family that are on their own, working a career and are providing for their family most likely all have smart phones. Didn’t one of the girls just recently move to DC area with her husband because he works for the Family Counsel. I guarantee they have handed him a phone for work or they have a cell phone. Landlines are just not a thing anymore…
It was the only oldest son that moved to DC with his wife. The two daughters that are married still live close to their parents.
No. It’s the oldest son, Josh, & HIS WIFE who relocated to D.C. That was so he could “work” for the Family Research Council as their Executive Director. The Family Research Council is political lobbying hate group. He was given the job due to his father’s political connections from the time he spent in the Arkansas House of Representatives.
The Duggars have carefully scripted lives.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/02/carefully-scripted-lives-my-concerns-about-the-duggars.html
Baseline Duggar weirdness aside, does their undercurrent of “boys need to be protected from everything because they can’t be expected to have self-control” to have some rather dark implications?
Yes, I was thinking the same thing.
I’m a diehard duggar fan, but man they are making it harder and harder to defend them!
How could you ever? Everything about them screams repression, bigotry, and insanity. Even in the early specials the kids seemed off, and they looked down their noses at anyone who was NOT EXACTLY LIKE THEM. This family is a cult, and nothing more.
Can’t wait until one flees and writes a book about their experiences “Growing Up Duggar Crazy”, or some such thing.
That is hilarious. First the book then the movie with Brad and Angelina in the starring roles lol
Your captions are so freakin funny!