Screen cap of Zsuzsanna Anderson’s FB page “Are They All Yours?” Clipped out the photo of her 12 year old daughter providing childcare of her baby.

Disclaimer: We are talking about the Quiverfull homeschooling world here. Please do not bother pming me, posting comments or anything else complaining that the entire homeschooling movement is being harmed here. This is a blog about Quiverfull. You can safely assume that is the world we are speaking of. Not all homeschoolers.

Taking a look at the Facebook of Zsuzsanna Anderson, wife of banned hate pastor Steven Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church, raises some serious red flags. Questions revolving around that tried and true Quiverfull happening, when pre-teens and teenage daughters are pressed into service to run the household. The most famous example of this being one Jana Duggar, defacto “Mom” to many of her siblings, leaving her mother Michelle free to do whatever it is that Michelle does. Laze around being “joyfully available”? Who knows.

It’s no big secret why Quiverfull pushes the idea of the daughter-servant, the buddy system of child rearing. It’s telling that in official, state-licensed, legitimate organizations like schools, but most especially in day care environments there is a mandated adult to child ratio. In the younger ages that can be as low as five kids per adult.

In Quiverfull, when you are busy with ten plus kids someone else must pitch in, or chaos happens. Sadly enough this rarely seems to be the men who father these children. They are around for the impregnation, and work to provide a living, but many times seem rather curiously uninvolved in the lives of their offspring. Meaning mother must turn to her older daughters to help out with the laundry, the homeschooling, the cooking, the boots on the ground parenting.

Zsuzsanna has been having her older daughter pitching in to help during a recent lengthy bout of family illness. What is Zsu doing with her spare time? Making videos for her followers on home made medicines to heal many things, right up until Zsu was felled by the crud her family has. Zsu runs a ministry named Are They All Yours?‘ involving teaching women to be Quiverfull like her. Likely the older daughters are having to pick up the slack as Zsuzsanna recovers. Family will do what family must do.

There’s nothing wrong with having children pitching in with running a household, as well as Dad too. Sometimes it takes the entire family helping out to keep life tranquil and sane. What’s not good here is the over-reliance on mere teenage girls to do it all while you make videos.

Kids need time. Time to daydream, to read, to take part in pleasurable hobbies, instead of always being working as the second mom.

I will give Zsu a tiny amount of credit. She did write a pretty decent post on grief. It just grieves me to think that her tiny daughters were likely doing adult chores while Zsu wrote.

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So folks. I have no internet, and it’s taken nearly three weeks for Kolbi to even think about coming out to fix it here in Costa Rica. Just had to have my entire internet rewired at the house and am currently waiting for a new modem and router to be delivered and set up. Things happen slowly here, like sloth speed. I am on a huge estate, and can only access FB if I go to the back gate and hold my stupid phone up in the direction of the only cell phone tower not blocked by mountains. I’ll be back but this is why my posts here are getting so so weird and sparse. There will be no post tomorrow, but Monday it is likely I’ll be back, either here at the restaurant at Witch’s Rock, or if they fix our internet.

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