Growing Up Duggar

ISBN-13: 9781451679205

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Howard Books

Publication Date: 03-29-2016

Pages: 288

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.60(d)

Jana, Jill, Jessa, and Jinger Duggar appear with the rest of their family on TLC's 19 Kids and Counting, which airs five times a week and is now in its tenth season. The Duggars have appeared on such national TV shows as the Today show, Good Morning America, The View, Inside Edition, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and more.

Read an Excerpt

Greetings
 
From Our Hearts to Yours
 
“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you,” saith the Lord,
“thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”
—Jeremiah 29:11
 
We’ve written this book to have the conversation we wish we could have with each of you one-on-one. The conversation that may have begun with a letter or an e-mail you wrote to us, or the one that started with a question you asked or a comment you made after we spoke to a group somewhere.
Maybe you’re that girl we met in the locked ward—we still call it the cage—in the orphanage in Central America. Jana sat with you there and shared your hope that someday you would see your mother again.
Maybe you’re the single mom whose baby Jill helped deliver as an apprentice midwife. You smiled and nodded when Jill asked if it would be okay if she said a prayer for your newborn babe.
You might be the mom who approached Jessa after we spoke at a women’s conference somewhere. You asked for ideas about how you could be more helpful and encouraging to your teenage daughter as she struggles with relationships involving boys.
Or perhaps you’re the girl Jinger met while she was ministering at the juvenile detention center. You could hardly bring yourself to believe God could really forgive you. But Jinger assured you He can. And will.
Maybe you’ve never met or contacted us at all, but you’ve seen our family’s show on television, and you’re curious.
Whoever you are—whether you’re the girl we met who goes to a Christian school and attends church three times a week but is still struggling inside, or the girl with five tattoos and multiple piercings, the one whose parents sent you to the Christian girls retreat Jana works at, hoping you could be “fixed” there—we’ve written this book to continue the conversation we started with you but couldn’t finish because time ran out and we had to go our separate ways. And we’ve written this book because the volume of letters and e-mails that come to us is more than we can manage individually and because we know how it feels to be curious about something.
We know how weird we must seem to a lot of you, with our different style of dressing and our conservative Christian beliefs. We know it’s unusual to be part of a family with nineteen children—one that’s featured on reality TV not for the outrageous things we do or say but for the adventures a family the size of ours can have doing ordinary activities.
And we’re curious about you, too. We’d like to know how we can impact your life for good. Even though we have never met most of you reading this book, we want you to know we love you and care about your future. We want to share our stories with you, knowing you have a story, too, and hoping something we say here might empower you to use your story, your life, to help others.
 
Racing Against Time
 
Several years ago, before anyone outside our circle of friends and family had ever heard of the Duggars, our parents prayed, “Lord, we pray that our family can impact the world for You!”
Mom and Dad look at life as a race against time. When they prayed that prayer, they were humbly asking God to keep each member of our family on the right track so that we might fulfill the purpose for which He created us, and that He would accomplish as much through us as possible during our time on earth.
At that point, they probably would have been happy if even a single person had become a follower of Jesus because of them. They couldn’t have imagined that instead we would be welcomed into millions of homes each week through television (which our family doesn’t even watch!). The way that happened is told in their two books, The Duggars: 20 and Counting and A Love That Multiplies.
Along with our brothers and sisters, we’ve grown up in the public spotlight (or as we describe it, living in a fishbowl). Now, as adults, we four oldest girls (Jana, twenty-four; Jill, twenty-two; Jessa, twenty-one; and Jinger, twenty) are humbled by the opportunity we’ve been given to reach out to other girls and young women to share the blessings and lessons we’ve experienced as we’ve tried to follow the Christlike way of life we have seen modeled by our parents.
Because so many people, especially girls and young women like ourselves, have expressed such curiosity about the way our family works, and because it’s just not possible to answer each question individually, we’ve written this book to tell you about our journey to adulthood, our goals and our faith—and how it all comes together in the work we’ve chosen to do.
 
Making a Difference in Your Relationships
 
We don’t have a perfect family, and we’re far from perfect ourselves, but all our lives our parents have encouraged us Duggar kids to have a daily goal of maintaining and strengthening our closest relationships. Those relationships begin with the way we feel about ourselves, accepting the way God created us and seeking His purpose for our lives.
Then we focus on the way we relate to our parents. Our parents have always worked hard to make their relationship with us a priority. They’ve established family traditions and practices that involve cultivating character and motivating us to maximize our life purpose. And on practical terms, they encourage us to talk with them about not only the small things in life but also deep matters of the heart.
Next, Mom and Dad encourage us kids to be best friends with each other, and so we talk about our relationships with siblings. Throughout our growing-up years Mom and Dad have taught us the importance of maintaining these close relationships, and step by step, they’ve guided us in how to get along, even though each of us girls now has eighteen siblings—including ten brothers! Of course, as happens in any family, conflicts occur, annoyances are inevitable, and hurt feelings spring up. But Mom and Dad have always taught us to quickly work out those issues so that resentment and bitterness don’t creep in and destroy our family’s closeness and unity.
Then, we take many of the lessons about getting along with our siblings and apply them to our relationships with friends. Mom and Dad have taught us the value of choosing our friends carefully and staying true to our own convictions if our friends’ behaviors and beliefs veer away from ours.
And then there’s the really hot topic we’re asked about a lot: boys. That’s a relationship that is frequently considered by just about every girl we know—including the four oldest Duggar girls! As we write this, we’re waiting for the young man God has for us—if marriage is in the future He plans for us. Meanwhile, we’ve thought a lot about what we want in a future husband and how we anticipate courtship will happen. As you might expect, it’s pretty different from the way many couples interact these days. For one thing, it may surprise you to know it doesn’t involve typical dating, but what we call courtship—or “dating with a purpose.”
Beyond our relationships with ourselves, our parents, our siblings, our friends, and boys, we also discuss our relationships with our culture, our country, and the world at large. As Christians, we believe that we are to be “in” the world but not “of” the world, as the Bible says; so we talk about how we relate to the Internet, movies, entertainment, and music. Then we’ll share our passion for being involved in the political realm and how we want to make a difference there, as well as our commitment and desire to reach out to people in faraway countries, showing Jesus’s love to people we don’t even know. The Bible teaches us to put others’ needs above our own and to treat other people the way we want to be treated. We call it having a ministry mindset, and it’s something that’s stressed in the Duggar home. We’ll tell you how that emphasis has led us to pursue the work we’re doing now.
Though the topics and stories will vary from chapter to chapter, the theme of this whole book is relationships; and the foundation for all our relationships with people—as well as our relationship with our culture, country, and the world—is our relationship with God. We don’t have a separate chapter on our relationship with God, but our message about that is woven throughout every chapter and topic of the book. We hope that as you read this book, you’ll gain a clear understanding of how everything we do is rooted in our faith in Him.
You’ll see that the length of the chapters in this book varies a bit—but every chapter is divided into short, easy-to-read segments. You can read as much or as little at one sitting as you like—whatever works for you. We have written this book with you in mind.
Most important, we hope this book will inspire you to let the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ empower you to make a difference through the relationships that fill your own life.
 
 
 
1
Your Relationship with Yourself
Getting to know and love the girl in the mirror
 
I will praise Thee;
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
—Psalms 139:14
 
When our parents were planning to build our current house in northwest Arkansas, they asked us kids how many bedrooms we thought the house should have. It was an easy question for us to answer: we wanted to be together. So, upstairs in our house today, there’s one big room for all the girls, one big room for all the boys, and our parents’ bedroom with an adjoining nursery.
Jana and I (Jill) sleep in double beds with our youngest sisters, Jordyn and Josie, and the other girls sleep in twin- or youth-sized beds. It’s always an exciting time when the littlest sister gets to move from the nursery to the “big girls’ room” with us, although they’re always free to toddle back to Mom and Dad’s room if they need to. We love the late-night conversations and falling asleep each night surrounded by our sisters.
One night a few years ago as I was putting my retainer in my mouth at bedtime, my sister Johannah, then probably five or six, asked what it was. I told her it was something I slept with to help keep my teeth aligned now that I didn’t have to wear braces anymore.
“Can I wear it?” Johannah asked.
We Duggars do love to share a lot of things but, thankfully, dental appliances aren’t among them. I smiled and told her no, it was made just for me and it wouldn’t fit her mouth at all.
Thinking about that conversation later reminded me that we can’t conform ourselves to other people’s molds. But we try sometimes, don’t we? It’s inevitable that human beings, particularly teenagers and especially teenage girls, go through times when they may try to remake themselves into something, or someone, they’re not. Every girl has a tendency to compare herself to other girls, noticing how they dress or style their hair, how much they weigh, how they talk, the words and phrases they use, and how guys respond to them.
You may think that kids like the Duggars, who are homeschooled and don’t watch TV or read secular magazines, are immune from feelings like that, but we’re not! We’ve experienced some of those same negative feelings about the girl in the mirror that you may be feeling right now or have felt in the past.
All of us have gone through times when we’ve felt we needed to lose weight. And we’ve all looked at the girl in the mirror and sometimes found things that just didn’t seem to measure up.
Are you going through a time in your life when you’re being critical of the girl in your mirror?
 
Accepting the Girl in the Mirror
 
That’s hard, isn’t it? You’ve looked at that girl in the mirror all your life and had made friends with her, and then one day you look at her and notice the blemish on her forehead or the nose that isn’t as cute as your friend’s nose. Maybe the girl who seemed just fine yesterday now seems too short or too tall, too thin or too heavy. Maybe her clothes, the ones that were your favorites yesterday, seem completely wrong today. And that hair. It’s ridiculous!
Suddenly the girl who looked just fine yesterday seems like a total loser today compared to those cute girls at the mall . . . or your school . . . or your homeschool group . . . or even your church.
So then what happens? You reject that girl in the mirror, and in your heart you worry that she’ll be rejected by others, too, including those you admire. Fear of rejection is one of the major problems facing teenagers and young adults today. It affects almost all of us, including the Duggar kids, at one time or another.
For example, I (Jill) can remember a Sunday morning when we were getting ready for church and I went through multiple outfit changes because I was trying to measure up. The night before, I had stood in our closet for at least ten minutes trying to decide what  I would wear the next day. (Ever been there?)
Finally I chose an outfit I thought was suitable. I took it upstairs and laid it out so it would be ready the next morning. But when I walked out of the bathroom Sunday morning, dressed and ready to go, I noticed how great Jessa looked wearing an adorable outfit she had recently found at a thrift store. Plus, she had the cutest aviator sunglasses perched on her head and a stylish leather bag slung over her shoulder. Suddenly the outfit I had chosen for myself the night before seemed totally wrong. I wanted to look as cute as Jessa did.
So I hurried back downstairs to the closet and stood there for what seemed like another ten minutes, trying to find something to wear. Then I heard Dad’s voice over the intercom saying, “Everyone hurry up! It’s nine forty, and the first vanload is leaving for church.”
I grabbed a skirt off the rack and tried it on, but then I remembered that the shirt I usually wear with it was dirty. I hurriedly put that choice back on the hanger and found a cute denim skirt—only to realize the zipper was broken. I was growing more frustrated and about to settle for the original outfit I had put on that morning when my eye landed on a brown-striped skirt. Perfect, I thought. Why didn’t I think of this in the first place?
But then I had to change my shoes to go with the skirt, and—or where were those sandals that looked so great with this skirt? I finally rushed out of the clothes closet and around the corner to the bathroom mirror. Oops! With all the changing, my hair had gotten messed up. I hurriedly worked to restore order to it and then discovered we had run out of hair spray in that bathroom. Running to another bathroom to grab some, I could hear the car horn honking as the second load of churchgoers waited for me.
It was nearly ten o’clock—church time—as I rushed out the door. Not exactly the way one would want to prepare for a morning of worshipping our Creator! And it all started because I compared myself to one of my sisters and felt that my appearance fell short.
It seems like such a trivial matter now, looking back on that morning, but it’s so typical of teenagers, especially young ladies. It’s easy for us to compare ourselves to others and think we have to be like them to measure up or to be accepted. But too often it’s impossible to meet the goals of perfection we set for ourselves, and as a result, we end up dealing with all sorts of destructive feelings: poor self-worth, lack of confidence, jealousy, discontentment, and so much more. Before we know it, momentary concerns about our outward appearance turn into lies about ourselves that swirl constantly through our minds, telling us, “I’m not good enough.” “I’m a failure.” “Nobody loves me.”
Ultimately, we lose sight of what’s most important: our inward character.
 
 
Giving Power to Others
 
For many years, I (Jessa) couldn’t care less about what I wore and how I looked. I was the typical happy little Duggar kid, filling my day with homeschool work and playing with my siblings and friends.
But life changed for me when I was about twelve or thirteen. Whenever I was around friends outside our family, I became very quiet and self-conscious—really insecure about the way I looked, dressed, and acted.
I had friends who were really beautiful, and whenever we were together I compared myself to them and always came up lacking something. These critical feelings caused me to have a mistaken view of my friends and myself—thinking they were perfect and I wasn’t. I felt so ashamed and awkward that I couldn’t even talk to anyone about my feelings. I felt overwhelmed and stuck in that negative mind-set.
I remember during that stage of my life having mixed feelings when I was invited to a friend’s birthday party. I was eager to go to the party but overly concerned that I had to look and act just right. What a dilemma, worrying about what clothes I would wear, what I would say, what gift I would bring!
I can still feel those butterflies fluttering in my stomach as we drove up to the birthday girl’s big yellow house. I was excited but nervous at the same time. I was thinking about all the conversations I’d had with the girl and our friends that focused on outward appearance—who had cute clothes and who didn’t, whose hairstyle we wanted to copy and whose hair was always a wreck. The butterflies continued to churn as I arrived at the front door with another guest.
“Oh, I love your outfit!” the birthday girl said to the friend beside me.
She didn’t say anything about what I was wearing, so I immediately assumed she didn’t think my outfit was as perfect as the other girl’s.
Soon the party was under way, and I enjoyed all the games, but after we’d sung “Happy Birthday” and settled around the living room for cake and ice cream, the topic of movies came up. I hadn’t seen the popular movie the other girls were talking about, and I felt out of place. The critical thoughts came bubbling back up: Jessa, you don’t fit in. It’s obvious you’re not as cool as the other girls.
Looking back, I can see how my inward struggles grew worse because I craved the birthday girl’s approval—as did several others in this group of friends. I wanted her to like me. Receiving her approval made me feel good about myself. But when she let me know, or when I assumed, that she didn’t quite approve of my appearance or something I said or did (or didn’t do), I felt worse about myself. I felt as though I had failed—and I carried those feelings with me for days after we’d been together.
My friend seemed to be the perfect picture of the girl I was not. She was tall with beautiful hair and big, brown eyes. She was slender and attractive. After being with this girl, I would look in the mirror and see frizzy hair, ordinary eyes, and a body that wasn’t as slender or as beautiful as hers. Constantly comparing myself to her was the perfect recipe for jealousy and discontentment.
 
Accepting the Unchangeables
 
What power I was giving my friend by allowing her to make me feel that way about the girl in the mirror! The same girl who all my life had smiled back at me each day and been an accepted and essential part of me now became someone I looked at with a constantly critical eye.
Thankfully, about that time, I heard a Bible teacher share an inspiring message about how God has perfectly designed each one of us with ten aspects of life that, without extraordinary action, we cannot change and that He wants us to accept:
 
1. Who our parents are
2. Who our siblings are
3. The order in which we are born into our family (oldest or
youngest, etc.)
4. Our nationality
5. Whether we’re a girl or boy
6. Our mental capacity
7. The time we were born in history
8. Our physical features
9. The natural aging process
10. The date we will die
 
This teacher said that if we reject our physical features, we reject our self-image and often assume that others will reject us, too. This assumption can cause us to make poor decisions based on our own misperception of ourselves.
That’s right where I was in my relationship with my “powerful” friend. I realized I had been ungrateful to God for the wonderful way He had made me. I had pushed aside what the Bible tells us—that God looks on each one of us as His uniquely beautiful creation—and instead I let an immature teenage girl make me feel bad about myself.
When my parents realized what was happening, they wisely helped me rethink the priority I had put on this friendship, and they encouraged me to ask God to forgive me for not appreciating the way He had created me. Looking back, I feel sad to think what it must have been like for God to see me, His unique and carefully designed Jessa, looking in the mirror and disliking the girl He’d created with such love.
Have you been there? Standing in front of a mirror with a negative attitude about the girl you’re seeing? You’re not alone! All of us, including the Duggar girls, have had times when we compare ourselves with the way other girls dress, do their hair, how much they weigh, how they carry themselves, and how guys respond to them.
But if we’re upset with that girl in the mirror, it means we’re upset with God for how He designed us. We may start to think He messed up when He designed us or even that He doesn’t love us. And that leads us to put our confidence and trust in someone else—such as a teenage peer who somehow gains a more powerful influence on our lives than God.
If that’s where you are right now, we’re here to help you see yourself through new eyes—God’s powerful, love-filled, encouraging, and forgiving eyes. We hope to convince you that God loves you more than anyone else in the world loves you and that He has a unique plan for your life. We’ve learned through firsthand experience that when we make Him the priority in our lives and seek His way and His approval, He will fill us with a humble confidence that gives us inward strength and makes us immune to the sometimes-harsh judgment of others who don’t have our best interests at heart.
Our parents worked hard to instill that idea within us as we were growing up.
 
Honoring How God Made You
 
Ultimately, how we care for ourselves (hair, makeup, clothes) tells others what we think about the way God made us. So our primary goal is to honor the Lord with our appearance. A friend of ours said it this way: “A girl’s outward appearance should send a message that says, ‘This is who I am,’ not ‘This is what I do.’ ” We want to maintain this perspective and keep our focus on pointing others to God.
Accepting the way God has uniquely made us helps us not to be so concerned with how others view us. Many people have demonstrated that truth to us. One of them was a sweet, Christian woman I (Jill) met last year when we were on a trip out west. She invited us to her home for dinner one evening, and while we were there, she and her husband showed us around their place and told us a little about themselves.
She shared that she came from an Italian family, and then she joked that a lot of Italians have long noses. She said when she was about to graduate from high school her mom came to her with a check that was a gift for her to be able to get surgery done to make her nose smaller.
The woman told us she was taken by surprise—and so was her mom when the daughter told her she wouldn’t be carrying on the family’s  “nose job” tradition. “I’m content with the way God made me,” shesaid.
That conversation really made an impact on all of us girls, reminding us that none of us can choose the design God selected for us when He created us, but we can choose how we respond to His design. Contentment is realizing that God has provided everything we need for our present happiness.
Another key is recognizing the “unchangeable” things in our life and choosing to live joyfully with them. For this lady, it was accepting her Italian nose. For us it may be our ears, height, shoe size, gender, parents, siblings, or any number of other things.
Sure, it’s technically possible to change some of these things. You can renounce your citizenship and pledge your loyalty to another country, and you can have surgery to change some of your physical features, but before you do, we hope you’ll carefully and prayerfully consider what God originally gave you when He created you. If you go through life comparing yourself to others, you can always find someone who is smarter, better-looking—whatever—and it’s easy to become discontent, depressed, or even angry at God.
But if we choose to be grateful and thank God for the unchangeable things in our lives, whether it is facial features or a birthmark we were born with—or even physical scars that have come about later in life from accidents such as burns or being injured in a car wreck—it changes our whole perspective on life. We will finally be able to overcome fear of rejection and live confidently and contentedly with these unchangeable things that we did not choose for ourselves.
 
Improving the Changeables
   
Now, sometimes there are changeable things in life that can use improvement—
our weight, for instance. When we were younger, most of us could eat about anything we wanted to and not gain weight, but those times have changed. We’ve found that most of us older Duggars have a tendency to gain weight.
Over the years, Mom has done her best to prepare nutritious meals for us, and she has always kept healthy fruits and vegetables around for us to snack on throughout the day, whether they are grown in our own garden or purchased from the local farmers market. We have chosen to avoid pork, and instead we choose grassfed beef or lean poultry. While we do eat some processed foods, we try to be selective, and we do not keep a stash of sodas, potato chips, or Pop-Tarts around the house.
And the Duggar children are very active, whether we’re building a tree fort or playing our favorite sports together—some of which include basketball, kickball, football, foursquare, and volleyball (and we have enough players to make up at least two teams!). But just the same, we have found that as we grow older, it can be challenging to stay fit and in shape.
Just last year our oldest brother, Josh, decided to lose some weight, and he felt like the first thing to go should be his sweet tea and sodas. With his work and busy schedule, he had not been watching his intake of those sweet drinks, so he was surprised when he hopped on the scale one day and realized he had gained more than twenty pounds. When he cut out the sugary drinks, started drinking more water, and exercising a little, he saw the weight drop off.
Mom told us she put on nearly forty pounds a few years ago throughout the course of several pregnancies. She tried several weight-loss programs but began to think she would never be able to slim back down. Finally she tried Weight Watchers and learned about making wiser food choices. During one of the weekly meetings the leader said, “When it comes to losing weight, it’s really eighty percent diet and twenty percent exercise. You can eat more calories in a few minutes than you can burn off in an hour-long workout.”
Weight Watchers taught Mom about portion control, and it provided a great accountability system. She also started exercising three miles a day on an elliptical machine. By working to keep in shape, she looks and feels great, and she’s been a big inspiration to the rest of us!
A couple of other changeable things in life are makeup and hair. We heard a pastor say one time, “Any ol’ barn looks better with some paint on it!” Our goal when we wear makeup is to look natural, so no wild colors and it’s not painted on an inch thick. But cosmetics can help cover blemishes, accent natural beauty, and draw attention to your countenance (another word for your face).
It’s the same with hair. When cared for properly and thoughtfully styled, it too can be a beautiful frame to draw attention to your countenance.
We Duggar girls choose to wear our hair rather long, but we could wear shorter styles if we wanted to. Our hairstyle is our choice, and we choose longer hair based on our understanding of 1 Corinthians 11:14–15. It says that even nature itself teaches us that, while it is a shame for a man to have long hair, a woman’s hair is her glory. We figure, if God says our hair is our “glory,” then He must have considered it a gift to us, and we want to take care of it and put a little effort each day into styling it.
But if we become obsessed with having the perfect hairstyle and spend two hours in front of the mirror every morning making sure every hair is in place, that’s going a little too far. (And it would also be nearly impossible in the Duggar household, given the limited number of bathrooms and the seemingly unlimited number of people needing to use them at any given time!)
One thing we’re trying to do in this book is to share not only what we’ve been taught but also what we’ve learned through firsthand experience. I (Jana) can tell you I learned an important lesson about hair— and also about making rash decisions.
One day several years ago when I was a young teenager, some of us girls were talking with a friend and she mentioned something about how you could put highlights in your hair by simply using peroxide or lemon juice. It was certainly inexpensive and sounded easy to do, so I decided to try it. I wasn’t making a big change to my sandy-brown hair, just adding some highlights, so I didn’t consider it a big deal and didn’t ask Mama about it—and didn’t mention my plan to anyone else. I didn’t know exactly how to do it, but I was sure I could figure it out. I mean, how hard could it be to put one simple liquid on my hair?
So, a few days later, I got some peroxide and put a rather generous amount on my hair, dabbing it on and then combing it through. I stood there looking in the mirror, not seeing any change, and