Some darned good questions. I'm not intimately familiar with the Duggars, so does anyone else know these details?
I don't see it being a problem. With a family of 20 kids there are more younguns to be looked after, but then again there are proportionately more older sibs to help out. I think it'd even out.
The question is, can the Duggar family make it work? I've seen lots of supposition from people who can't imagine it working out, but no actual evidence that it's been a problem fpr them.
That's an excellent example of "time management", a skill teenagers need to learn and practice before they get to college and move on to the real world.
Try telling your boss or a prof "I can't, I don't have time". Come back and tell me how well that worked out for you.
And again, I hafta ask if we have any solid reason for believing the Duggar situation is "a shame" beyond the assumption that it must be.
Time management does little to solve "Can you babysit from 330-730" and "I have work from 3-10". You can't manage your way out of direct conflicts. As one who partook in high school sports as well as jobs during high school, there are just times during the week where you simply have to be somewhere. If you have to be at the pregame practice from right after school on Friday until the game starts, can you time-manage your way into being able to babysit at 4pm that same day? Again, if it were a family of 5, I could see it working from time to time. But with a family of 20, you
know they need someone to watch the handful of babies every day. One CAN time-manage their way through work and school and sports if they have to baby sit once a week or so. But what about every day? I just don't see it being even remotely realistic that the eldest are developing their own lives when there are 15 or so other children with wants and needs
all the time. And yes, I do see that as a shame.
And Micro makes a great point, if the eldest are adult enough to take on the responsibility of rearing a family while the parents are busy with another van-load of kids; they are adult enough to decide that they don't want to do it and would rather work 25 hours a week or so when not in school or practicing for the school musical. All the responsibility and none of the privilege is a quick way to mess someone up.
I'll say it again, if I have kids, I'm going to have the number that I feel me and my wife can handle without burdening others. I see it as the same when some 20 year old has a kid, and then offloads it her own moms house or daycare while she works every day. If you can't handle the kid, don't have it. If you can only handle 2 kids with you and your wife, don't have 4. The moment you are required to burden someone else with your kids, is the moment you made a bad decision to have that many. I expect the 15-18 year range, basically high school, to be a time when the children are learning to
start their own lives, not pick up the slack of mine. If my 17 year old son wanted to do the Army's split-op program and go to Basic before his senior year of HS, I would be all for it. And I wouldn't let my need of a permanent in-house babysitter to get in the way of that goal. I personally was in a musical program during and after high school that involved me touring the country all summer. If my daughter wanted to play trumpet for a drum and bugle corps during the summer of her senior year, I would not let my own child-rearing needs get in the way of that either. And if either of my older kids wanted to get a job(something I would strongly recommend), I would not have them cut their own hours to take care of my decision to have more kids. Like I said, the high school years to me are a time for a teenager to start thinking about their own lives and future. They need to learn what it's like to do their own thing, pay their own bills, manage their own time, choose their own responsibilities and live up to them, and live up to their own standards. My decision to have more kids than I and my wife can personally handle would definitely infringe on that. I see that as wrong. When my decision to have more kids means others have to deny their own goals to make up for me, I have unjustly burdened others.
And I make these projections because I was a high school student not too long ago, and I still know what it was like. School from 630-230 every weekday. Tennis from 3-530 Mon, Wed, Fri. Symphonic band practice Monday night from 6-8. Drumline practice from 6-9 Tuesday and Thursday and from 9am-5pm Saturday. And try to have Gamestop schedule me some hours every week. If someone came up to me and said "I decided to have more kids than I can handle, I need you to quit your stuff and do my job for me" I would have told them to pound sand.
