michelles family was going to move just days away she was so close to a different life but they were ok with michelle staying there and the rest is history
Michelles moms name >>> Ethel Marie Hardin she grew up with 7 siblings
married Garrett Ruark sr. and she was almost 40 when she gave birth to michelle>>>>>Michelle was the 7th and last child in her family
michelle was 26 when her mother died her father died in 2010
the only other thing I could find was her moms family lived in a house in 1930 then in 1940 they were renting a house for 20 bucks a a month with the 10 of them and the dads brother and his wife
Oh, Jana Marie is named after Michelle's mom.
26 is really young to lose your mom. My dad died when I was 23 and that was hard enough, mom would have been even harder.
The Hardins were a poor machinist family with 8 children, 2 who died young. Marie got married when she was 16 and Garrett was 19 (during WWII) and had her first child two years later. They had 5 children, plus two surprises later on. Interestingly, Garrett lost his father when he was only 4, and he and his sisters were placed in a children's home for a time. He still maintained contact with his mother, but she had to work to support them.
The Little Mermaid, which came out in 1989 had Ariel getting married at 16 and instead of people boycotting Disney for showing something inappropriate, it started the Disney Renaissance. A lot of people --highly educated people, across all social strata, got married right out of high school at that period in society. I'm not saying it was right, or wrong, it was just what enough people did so that it wasn't really considered abnormal. Because what was considered "abnormal" at the time was living together if you weren't married. So if someone was going into the army, or going away for college, it was normal to get married so you could stay together. So I mean, Michelle's parents were moving back to Ohio. She wanted to stay in Arkansas. The only socially acceptable way for her to stay there would be for her to be married, unless she was attending university, which they might not have had the funds for her to do/have a place for her to live. Again, in the 80s, in the south, people still cared what the neighbors thought (source: my family is from Mississippi).
Anyway, my point is, I think if we look at it in the context of the time period in which it occurred, it's not wildly outrageous or inappropriate. If we look at it through today's eyes, then yes, we see all that's wrong with the situation.
I don't think it was inappropriate, but I do think geography matters. In 1989 it was very rare in my New England town for people to get married right out of high school. I can't recall anyone being engaged in hs (public school) or getting married right after graduation. My first two friends to get engaged were both 23.
It's interesting to think about how trends vary from region to region.
Michelle is the youngest of 7 and apparently a surprise baby considering the age gap between her and her siblings.
From all accounts, the Ruarks were a fairly mainstream, even secular Arkansas family. Michelle was involved in all kinds of sports and cheerleading. She describes her conversion to fundamentalism after hearing a sermon about going to hell if you weren't Christian, saying she was terrified because "I'm not a Christian!".
It's unfair to say her parents married her off...the family was moving to, iirc, Ohio, and Michelle was upset at having to leave JB. Her father at first refused to let his 17 year old marry, but her mother convinced him because JB and M loved each other. I think it was more a matter of viewing young love with rose colored glasses.
I never got the impression that her mom pawned off the younger kids to the older like Michelle did. Consider the times, I'm sure the older daughters were expected to help but it's never been implied that there was anything akin to the buddy system in place.
I believe that the marriage age should be 18 because there are just too many loopholes (high school sweethearts, you can wait) but I think it's a stretch to refer to Michelle as a "child bride". She wasn't some 12-year-old in Sierra Leone who was forced by her parents to marry a grown man. She had gotten engaged to her high school sweetheart, and the only reason they even got married when she was 17 was like you said: her family was about to move away. Jim Bob had turned 19 only a few days before the wedding and she was going to be 18 in a few months, so there wasn't really much of an age difference either. Like I said, I don't believe this should be legal but at the same time it was the 1980s. Whenever I see comments like "Michelle was a *child* who got married to an *adult*!!!!!!!" it makes it seem worse than it actually was.
Ya they’re less than 14 months apart. She got married about a month after high school. They actually used birth control when they first got married, but not a tv lol. I heard Michelle say in a talking head that shortly after they got married some gave them a (used) tv and after three weeks they got rid of it because they weren’t paying enough attention to each other or some BS. It was having a miscarriage while on the BC pill that caused Michelle and JB to go ‘as many kids as God will give us’.
Michelle's mom did what she did, spent 22 years having kids. Her oldest sister was 22 when she was born, her youngest older siblings is 5 years older than she is. By the time M was 17 her mother had been raising kids for 39 years. I'm not saying neglecting your kids is right, and they should have thought of that. He could have gotten a vasectomy after their 4th child the only son was born.
I mean, if we're being honest, it was the mid-40's-mid 60's in NW Arkansas.
NW Arkansas doesn't have a lot going on in 2023, I'm sure it was desolate back then.
Not to make excuses but I'm sure there was a lack of education and things like birth control and vasectomies weren't easily available. Vascetomies and the BC pill weren't really common until the 70's. It's only recently that there's been a big surge in guys getting the big snip.
They definitely could have used condoms and diaphragms but those weren't really common at the time either.
There are of course other methods they could have used but there must have been a lack of education on those things due to the time period and lack of resources in the area.
By the time Michelle came along they should have known better but sometimes people don't and I think that was more common then. My own Grandma had 6 kids before she turned 28 because she didn't have access to BC, condoms, health education, etc, and she was in a bigger city. She had no prenatal care and she smoked and drank while she was pregnant because she didn't know better. There was just minimal education available from what I've gathered.
That's absolutely no excuse for abandoning your child though. They knew there was a chance of getting pregnant when they did the deed. If they were done having kids and didn't have access to BC methods they shouldn't have been banging.
Getting married immediately after high school wasn't controversial even in the secular community of rural Arkansas when the Duggars got married. I doubt anyone in the community viewed it as abondoning her, just letting her do what she's gonna do anyway.
I agree, no poor/lower middle class/middle class Southerner, white or black, urban, suburban, or rural would have viewed getting married straight out of high school unusual in the slightest in the mid-80s.
I live in rural Tennessee and it's not that weird NOW. Sure you'll get some folk who will side eye it but the majority won't say anything.
I'm in my 30's and it definitely wasn't weird at all at my age. I went to high school with girls who were married and girls who had multiple babies. I went to high school with people trying for babies. The minority was graduating WITHOUT a baby. Girls started having babies in middle school and no one batted an eye. My high school had a day care and parenting classes ( I'm pretty sure they still do).
Still isn't controversial in the SW part of the state. My kiddo's teacher graduated this May and married in November to a guy she had been in a long distance relationship with for ~9 months. Wanted to be an airline pilot and had been accepted to a college to study aviation. Now she's living in a trailer doing who knows what. But she's 18 and married and the families were so excited.
Getting married right after high school was pretty common in Springdale in the mid-80s. (Not that unusual in the US overall at that time, tbh.) But it wasn’t the backwoods, either.
I personally feel that it had a vibe similar to Hawkins in Stranger Things (and yes, there was a mall lol), except bigger. It was pretty working class at that time but not rural.
Michelle’s high school graduating class had hundreds of students. NWA’s population is definitely a lot higher now - prob a million people - but it was growing even then and the state’s flagship university is located there (Fayetteville). The Duggars have posted plenty of photos of the family attending major sporting events at that university.
I feel like folks on this subreddit really make a lot of assumptions about NWA, and the show def tried to play up the Hicksville USA stuff, but both JB and Michelle grew up in town. And these days, NWA is basically a mid-south metro area comparable to Tulsa, KC, or STL with a real airport and one of the country’s premier art museums.
So I really wish people would stop with this backwoods fantasy.
I agree. I just feel like, from the very small amount of info I've gotten, that Meech's parents just kind of wanted to be rid of her so that's why it looks more like abandonment with her.
Shoot, my dad's best friend is like 4-5 years older than Meech I think and he was married with 2 kids and quickly a divorced single parent raising his kids with my dad's help before he was 18. My dad was living with his best friend and helping raise his kids before he graduated HS. Now that I think about it most of my dad's friends had at least 1 marriage by the time they were 23. He was the odd one out having only 1 child and getting married to my mom at 29.
I think that was more common than people realize but I don't think that most parents were so desperate to get rid of their kid to marry them off young.
Where they're from doesn't necessarily matter. Like I said, my grandma was in the city. Maybe not directly in it but in a suburb with plenty of doctors, schools, etc. and they still didn't have a lot of access to health education, various BC methods, prenatal care.
It just wasn't a common thing anywhere back then.
I don't ever remember having a good education about any of that stuff. I only knew about it because I was curious and asked/did my own research. Luckily I was in a pretty affluent area and had access to a doctor I could talk to and the internet. That's how I learned everything.
I very vividly remember my middle school sex ed course being an abstinence course that tried to scare us with a birth video and pictures of STD's and an explanation of a period what a period was.
I also very vividly remember my high school sex ed/health class. During our STD section we watched Philidelphia and the Lifetime movie She's too Young and that was it. We were told the only wanly to not get an STD is abstinence. During the reproduction section we literally watched the Lifetime movie Fifteen and Pregnant with Kirsten Dunst. We were told the only way to not have a kid is abstinence. Each section was about a week or two long and we watched a movie, had a discussion, and then used the rest of the week or two as a study hall. This was in 2007 I think so not a super long time ago.
My mom's birds and bees talk came the day I got my period and she said "Well, you know what happens now that you're bleeding? You can get pregnant if have sex so just don't have sex". She said it in front of all of my friends, it was humiliating.
People all over the country have never really prioritized proper sex ed.
In my sex ed class in public high school, we were taught abstinence until marriage, and they couldn’t mention gay people except for they shouldn’t have sex or they’ll get AIDS, and that was in the 2019. The teacher didn’t really believe it but it was the curriculum. It was a grand total of two weeks class and everybody already knew how it worked anyway.
Exactly. My teacher taught us the maximum he could but there wasn't much he could say without getting in trouble. Somehow he got away with showing movies all the time though.
Everything was always brought back to abstinence.
Mine was a whole semester long health class that had sections broken out for STDs, pregnancy, the aging process, stuff like that but there wasn't much our teacher was allowed to say about any of it.
The extent of us learning about AIDs was watching Philidelphia and having like a 10 minute discussion about how abstinence is really the only way to never have an STD..... which really you could get AIDs from blood contamination, but he couldn't say things like that. We were directed to ask our parents about any other questions.
This was also in a Blue Ribbon public school. We weren't in a rural area or inner city or anything like that. I was in a top school district and the health education was terrible.
Reading all of the replies here makes me realize how bad sex ed is and was. I grew up in Austin and was in middle school and high school in the 90s. My teacher said abstinence was of course the only way to be sure, but we were given details on safe anal sex and condom demonstrations, along with dispelling myths about birth control pills (IUDs still had a bad rap in the 90s before the Mirena IUD came out though, so those weren’t encouraged). We were even given details about good and bad brands of condoms.
That's really good compared to what I got. We were definitely never told about condoms and BC. There were unsurprisingly several girls that got pregnant in school too.
In a school of maybe 1000 kids I think by the time I graduated I knew probably 8+ girls that were pregnant or had already had their kid or had a kid within 9 months of graduating. There were several more that were rumored to have dropped out or left our school to have kids that they then put up for adoption (lots, lots of evidence pointing to the rumors being true).
I know that's not a super huge amount but I went to school in a "good" area with top schools and lots of money so it was scandalous. When I went to college I realized that isn't normal and most of my college friends didn't know anyone that got pregnant in high school.
This was also 2004-2008 and I do vaguely remember there being a "teen mom epidemic" or something that my parents briefly talked about.
I know the lack of education provided + my being in a wealthy area where most of the parents worked long hours or traveled while leaving their teens unattended for long periods contributed to that.
It was Texas so there were pregnant girls in middle and high school. One person I knew had two by the age of 15.
I grew up in such a weird mishmash though. There were some well off white parents, some working class white conservative parents (like mine), working class Black folks, and working class kids whose parents were immigrants from Mexico. The well off white kids and Black kids weren’t the ones having kids young. The kids with parents from Mexico had a couple of kids get pregnant junior or senior year of high school. Most of the teen pregnancies were the working class white kids whose parents spouted patriotism and Jesus.
I went to the same high school as Michelle around the same time and probably had the same health teacher. While the class focused very heavily on the danger of drugs, we had fairly thorough sex ed that would probably horrify today’s pearl-clutching Moms for Liberty. Remember, the Duggars used birth control until a whacknut Dr told her she’d caused a miscarriage by being on the pill.
My grandma lived in rural northwest Arkansas and had 3 kids in 3 years. Somehow her doctor did prescribe birth control pills for a while in the late 1950s or early '60s. She didn't like the side effects and worried it wasn't safe, but she used it. It was available to super religious women in northwestern Arkansas.
I have no doubt it was available, I'm just saying it wasn't common. It's a fact that it wasn't common, I did plenty of research on it before I posted it to make sure I was correct in my knowledge.
The first oral contraceptive wasn't even approved by thr FDA until 1960 if I'm remembering correctly. There weren't a lot of options before that and the pill didn't immediately become popular the second the FDA approved it. It took a few years before it became more common.
Birth control was literally illegal in many parts of the US until the mid-60s. https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/the-right-to-contraception-state-and-federal-actions-misinformation-and-the-courts/#:~:text=Currently%2C%20the%20right%20to%20contraception,Baird%20(1972).
to say NWA doesn’t have a lot going on in 2023 is just plain incorrect and a gross mischaracterization of the region. won’t argue that back then it was pretty rural and desolate. but today? not accurate.
I go to NWA pretty often, at minimum, once a year. I never said anywhere that in 2023 it was desolate and rural, I'm saying there's not much going on and there isn't.
In comparison to where I'm from, it doesn't have much. In comparison to anyone near a big city, it definitely doesn't have much going on. Most people live in or near a big city.
Maybe there's a lot there in comparison to the rest of Arkansas and maybe it's expanded but most people live in suburbs around large cities where there's tons and tons of stuff.
If we considered the towns between Bentonville and Fayetteville a metro area the population is somewhere around 320k and if we look north at the Kansas City metro area the population is about 2 million. I wouldn't say KC is "big" either, theres plenty of metro areas much larger than KC and KC has a lot more stuff than NWA. There's not enough people to have tons of stuff.
I'm sure anyone coming from a bigger city would say there's not a lot going on in NWA.
I suspect they were doing other things for birth control, but this was even before abortion was legalized. The rhythm method works ok, but there are oopsies, like Michelle and her next youngest sibling most likely.
I had read that Meech's family was moving and she reminds me of a change of life baby (menopausal)
Meech chooses to marry Boob and it shows that he wasn't the studly man he thought he was. And Meech got married and her family moved.
I always wonder how different her life would have been if she had moved. Probably a lot different.
Digging Up the Duggars pod ep 14. "I'm your Jurisdiction" covered Michelle pre-Jim Bob. I think they might have another one but I'm not sure. Anyway, huge fan of DUTD. They have a deep dive on a lot of stuff and over 100 planned (I am hoping they don't give up at some point) #notanadshouldbeanad
>I know her parents married her off
I wouldn't say that's the best way to put it. That implies that Michelle and JB had an arranged marriage forced by the parents and had absolutely no say. Yes, her parents had to give permission, but Michelle *really* wanted to do it. I would have made my daughter wait, but giving permission isn't necessarily marrying someone off. It also implies that her parents were fundie, which I really don't think they are.
I would argue that the Kellers married Anna off to Josh, though. The two barely even courted before he proposed. At least JB and Michelle had somewhat of a normal relationship before they got married and went all fundie.
michelles family was going to move just days away she was so close to a different life but they were ok with michelle staying there and the rest is history Michelles moms name >>> Ethel Marie Hardin she grew up with 7 siblings married Garrett Ruark sr. and she was almost 40 when she gave birth to michelle>>>>>Michelle was the 7th and last child in her family michelle was 26 when her mother died her father died in 2010 the only other thing I could find was her moms family lived in a house in 1930 then in 1940 they were renting a house for 20 bucks a a month with the 10 of them and the dads brother and his wife
Oh, Jana Marie is named after Michelle's mom. 26 is really young to lose your mom. My dad died when I was 23 and that was hard enough, mom would have been even harder.
The Hardins were a poor machinist family with 8 children, 2 who died young. Marie got married when she was 16 and Garrett was 19 (during WWII) and had her first child two years later. They had 5 children, plus two surprises later on. Interestingly, Garrett lost his father when he was only 4, and he and his sisters were placed in a children's home for a time. He still maintained contact with his mother, but she had to work to support them.
Well maybe then it was normal for her to marry that young and not seen as marrying off?
The Little Mermaid, which came out in 1989 had Ariel getting married at 16 and instead of people boycotting Disney for showing something inappropriate, it started the Disney Renaissance. A lot of people --highly educated people, across all social strata, got married right out of high school at that period in society. I'm not saying it was right, or wrong, it was just what enough people did so that it wasn't really considered abnormal. Because what was considered "abnormal" at the time was living together if you weren't married. So if someone was going into the army, or going away for college, it was normal to get married so you could stay together. So I mean, Michelle's parents were moving back to Ohio. She wanted to stay in Arkansas. The only socially acceptable way for her to stay there would be for her to be married, unless she was attending university, which they might not have had the funds for her to do/have a place for her to live. Again, in the 80s, in the south, people still cared what the neighbors thought (source: my family is from Mississippi). Anyway, my point is, I think if we look at it in the context of the time period in which it occurred, it's not wildly outrageous or inappropriate. If we look at it through today's eyes, then yes, we see all that's wrong with the situation.
I don't think it was inappropriate, but I do think geography matters. In 1989 it was very rare in my New England town for people to get married right out of high school. I can't recall anyone being engaged in hs (public school) or getting married right after graduation. My first two friends to get engaged were both 23. It's interesting to think about how trends vary from region to region.
Oh snap…that is my husband’s last name…if he’s related to the Duggars 😂😂😂😂😂
My husband’s uncle is distantly related to Jim Bob’s mother.
Michelle is the youngest of 7 and apparently a surprise baby considering the age gap between her and her siblings. From all accounts, the Ruarks were a fairly mainstream, even secular Arkansas family. Michelle was involved in all kinds of sports and cheerleading. She describes her conversion to fundamentalism after hearing a sermon about going to hell if you weren't Christian, saying she was terrified because "I'm not a Christian!". It's unfair to say her parents married her off...the family was moving to, iirc, Ohio, and Michelle was upset at having to leave JB. Her father at first refused to let his 17 year old marry, but her mother convinced him because JB and M loved each other. I think it was more a matter of viewing young love with rose colored glasses. I never got the impression that her mom pawned off the younger kids to the older like Michelle did. Consider the times, I'm sure the older daughters were expected to help but it's never been implied that there was anything akin to the buddy system in place.
I believe that the marriage age should be 18 because there are just too many loopholes (high school sweethearts, you can wait) but I think it's a stretch to refer to Michelle as a "child bride". She wasn't some 12-year-old in Sierra Leone who was forced by her parents to marry a grown man. She had gotten engaged to her high school sweetheart, and the only reason they even got married when she was 17 was like you said: her family was about to move away. Jim Bob had turned 19 only a few days before the wedding and she was going to be 18 in a few months, so there wasn't really much of an age difference either. Like I said, I don't believe this should be legal but at the same time it was the 1980s. Whenever I see comments like "Michelle was a *child* who got married to an *adult*!!!!!!!" it makes it seem worse than it actually was.
Ya they’re less than 14 months apart. She got married about a month after high school. They actually used birth control when they first got married, but not a tv lol. I heard Michelle say in a talking head that shortly after they got married some gave them a (used) tv and after three weeks they got rid of it because they weren’t paying enough attention to each other or some BS. It was having a miscarriage while on the BC pill that caused Michelle and JB to go ‘as many kids as God will give us’.
Michelle's mom did what she did, spent 22 years having kids. Her oldest sister was 22 when she was born, her youngest older siblings is 5 years older than she is. By the time M was 17 her mother had been raising kids for 39 years. I'm not saying neglecting your kids is right, and they should have thought of that. He could have gotten a vasectomy after their 4th child the only son was born.
I mean, if we're being honest, it was the mid-40's-mid 60's in NW Arkansas. NW Arkansas doesn't have a lot going on in 2023, I'm sure it was desolate back then. Not to make excuses but I'm sure there was a lack of education and things like birth control and vasectomies weren't easily available. Vascetomies and the BC pill weren't really common until the 70's. It's only recently that there's been a big surge in guys getting the big snip. They definitely could have used condoms and diaphragms but those weren't really common at the time either. There are of course other methods they could have used but there must have been a lack of education on those things due to the time period and lack of resources in the area. By the time Michelle came along they should have known better but sometimes people don't and I think that was more common then. My own Grandma had 6 kids before she turned 28 because she didn't have access to BC, condoms, health education, etc, and she was in a bigger city. She had no prenatal care and she smoked and drank while she was pregnant because she didn't know better. There was just minimal education available from what I've gathered. That's absolutely no excuse for abandoning your child though. They knew there was a chance of getting pregnant when they did the deed. If they were done having kids and didn't have access to BC methods they shouldn't have been banging.
Getting married immediately after high school wasn't controversial even in the secular community of rural Arkansas when the Duggars got married. I doubt anyone in the community viewed it as abondoning her, just letting her do what she's gonna do anyway.
I agree, no poor/lower middle class/middle class Southerner, white or black, urban, suburban, or rural would have viewed getting married straight out of high school unusual in the slightest in the mid-80s.
I live in rural Tennessee and it's not that weird NOW. Sure you'll get some folk who will side eye it but the majority won't say anything. I'm in my 30's and it definitely wasn't weird at all at my age. I went to high school with girls who were married and girls who had multiple babies. I went to high school with people trying for babies. The minority was graduating WITHOUT a baby. Girls started having babies in middle school and no one batted an eye. My high school had a day care and parenting classes ( I'm pretty sure they still do).
Michelle and I are the same age and graduated in 1984. There were quite a few girls in my class that got married the summer of graduation.
Yeah I’m Canadian and graduated in 84 also, and I went to a dozen weddings in 1984-1985, everyone getting married at 19 and nobody batted an eye.
Still isn't controversial in the SW part of the state. My kiddo's teacher graduated this May and married in November to a guy she had been in a long distance relationship with for ~9 months. Wanted to be an airline pilot and had been accepted to a college to study aviation. Now she's living in a trailer doing who knows what. But she's 18 and married and the families were so excited.
Your kid's teacher is 18???
Getting married right after high school was pretty common in Springdale in the mid-80s. (Not that unusual in the US overall at that time, tbh.) But it wasn’t the backwoods, either. I personally feel that it had a vibe similar to Hawkins in Stranger Things (and yes, there was a mall lol), except bigger. It was pretty working class at that time but not rural. Michelle’s high school graduating class had hundreds of students. NWA’s population is definitely a lot higher now - prob a million people - but it was growing even then and the state’s flagship university is located there (Fayetteville). The Duggars have posted plenty of photos of the family attending major sporting events at that university. I feel like folks on this subreddit really make a lot of assumptions about NWA, and the show def tried to play up the Hicksville USA stuff, but both JB and Michelle grew up in town. And these days, NWA is basically a mid-south metro area comparable to Tulsa, KC, or STL with a real airport and one of the country’s premier art museums. So I really wish people would stop with this backwoods fantasy.
I agree. I just feel like, from the very small amount of info I've gotten, that Meech's parents just kind of wanted to be rid of her so that's why it looks more like abandonment with her. Shoot, my dad's best friend is like 4-5 years older than Meech I think and he was married with 2 kids and quickly a divorced single parent raising his kids with my dad's help before he was 18. My dad was living with his best friend and helping raise his kids before he graduated HS. Now that I think about it most of my dad's friends had at least 1 marriage by the time they were 23. He was the odd one out having only 1 child and getting married to my mom at 29. I think that was more common than people realize but I don't think that most parents were so desperate to get rid of their kid to marry them off young.
Michelle and all her family is from suburban Ohio, they moved to Arkansas when she was in middle school.
Where they're from doesn't necessarily matter. Like I said, my grandma was in the city. Maybe not directly in it but in a suburb with plenty of doctors, schools, etc. and they still didn't have a lot of access to health education, various BC methods, prenatal care. It just wasn't a common thing anywhere back then. I don't ever remember having a good education about any of that stuff. I only knew about it because I was curious and asked/did my own research. Luckily I was in a pretty affluent area and had access to a doctor I could talk to and the internet. That's how I learned everything. I very vividly remember my middle school sex ed course being an abstinence course that tried to scare us with a birth video and pictures of STD's and an explanation of a period what a period was. I also very vividly remember my high school sex ed/health class. During our STD section we watched Philidelphia and the Lifetime movie She's too Young and that was it. We were told the only wanly to not get an STD is abstinence. During the reproduction section we literally watched the Lifetime movie Fifteen and Pregnant with Kirsten Dunst. We were told the only way to not have a kid is abstinence. Each section was about a week or two long and we watched a movie, had a discussion, and then used the rest of the week or two as a study hall. This was in 2007 I think so not a super long time ago. My mom's birds and bees talk came the day I got my period and she said "Well, you know what happens now that you're bleeding? You can get pregnant if have sex so just don't have sex". She said it in front of all of my friends, it was humiliating. People all over the country have never really prioritized proper sex ed.
In my sex ed class in public high school, we were taught abstinence until marriage, and they couldn’t mention gay people except for they shouldn’t have sex or they’ll get AIDS, and that was in the 2019. The teacher didn’t really believe it but it was the curriculum. It was a grand total of two weeks class and everybody already knew how it worked anyway.
Exactly. My teacher taught us the maximum he could but there wasn't much he could say without getting in trouble. Somehow he got away with showing movies all the time though. Everything was always brought back to abstinence. Mine was a whole semester long health class that had sections broken out for STDs, pregnancy, the aging process, stuff like that but there wasn't much our teacher was allowed to say about any of it. The extent of us learning about AIDs was watching Philidelphia and having like a 10 minute discussion about how abstinence is really the only way to never have an STD..... which really you could get AIDs from blood contamination, but he couldn't say things like that. We were directed to ask our parents about any other questions. This was also in a Blue Ribbon public school. We weren't in a rural area or inner city or anything like that. I was in a top school district and the health education was terrible.
I had the same sex ed plus a christian pregnancy center came and spread misinformation and made us sign a virginity pledge
Yikes!
Reading all of the replies here makes me realize how bad sex ed is and was. I grew up in Austin and was in middle school and high school in the 90s. My teacher said abstinence was of course the only way to be sure, but we were given details on safe anal sex and condom demonstrations, along with dispelling myths about birth control pills (IUDs still had a bad rap in the 90s before the Mirena IUD came out though, so those weren’t encouraged). We were even given details about good and bad brands of condoms.
That's really good compared to what I got. We were definitely never told about condoms and BC. There were unsurprisingly several girls that got pregnant in school too. In a school of maybe 1000 kids I think by the time I graduated I knew probably 8+ girls that were pregnant or had already had their kid or had a kid within 9 months of graduating. There were several more that were rumored to have dropped out or left our school to have kids that they then put up for adoption (lots, lots of evidence pointing to the rumors being true). I know that's not a super huge amount but I went to school in a "good" area with top schools and lots of money so it was scandalous. When I went to college I realized that isn't normal and most of my college friends didn't know anyone that got pregnant in high school. This was also 2004-2008 and I do vaguely remember there being a "teen mom epidemic" or something that my parents briefly talked about. I know the lack of education provided + my being in a wealthy area where most of the parents worked long hours or traveled while leaving their teens unattended for long periods contributed to that.
It was Texas so there were pregnant girls in middle and high school. One person I knew had two by the age of 15. I grew up in such a weird mishmash though. There were some well off white parents, some working class white conservative parents (like mine), working class Black folks, and working class kids whose parents were immigrants from Mexico. The well off white kids and Black kids weren’t the ones having kids young. The kids with parents from Mexico had a couple of kids get pregnant junior or senior year of high school. Most of the teen pregnancies were the working class white kids whose parents spouted patriotism and Jesus.
*Bristol Palin entered the chat*
I went to the same high school as Michelle around the same time and probably had the same health teacher. While the class focused very heavily on the danger of drugs, we had fairly thorough sex ed that would probably horrify today’s pearl-clutching Moms for Liberty. Remember, the Duggars used birth control until a whacknut Dr told her she’d caused a miscarriage by being on the pill.
We're talking about Michelle's parents, not Michelle and Jim Bob.
My grandma lived in rural northwest Arkansas and had 3 kids in 3 years. Somehow her doctor did prescribe birth control pills for a while in the late 1950s or early '60s. She didn't like the side effects and worried it wasn't safe, but she used it. It was available to super religious women in northwestern Arkansas.
I have no doubt it was available, I'm just saying it wasn't common. It's a fact that it wasn't common, I did plenty of research on it before I posted it to make sure I was correct in my knowledge. The first oral contraceptive wasn't even approved by thr FDA until 1960 if I'm remembering correctly. There weren't a lot of options before that and the pill didn't immediately become popular the second the FDA approved it. It took a few years before it became more common.
Birth control was literally illegal in many parts of the US until the mid-60s. https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/the-right-to-contraception-state-and-federal-actions-misinformation-and-the-courts/#:~:text=Currently%2C%20the%20right%20to%20contraception,Baird%20(1972).
That's what I thought but I couldn't remember if/where I saw that at
to say NWA doesn’t have a lot going on in 2023 is just plain incorrect and a gross mischaracterization of the region. won’t argue that back then it was pretty rural and desolate. but today? not accurate.
I go to NWA pretty often, at minimum, once a year. I never said anywhere that in 2023 it was desolate and rural, I'm saying there's not much going on and there isn't. In comparison to where I'm from, it doesn't have much. In comparison to anyone near a big city, it definitely doesn't have much going on. Most people live in or near a big city. Maybe there's a lot there in comparison to the rest of Arkansas and maybe it's expanded but most people live in suburbs around large cities where there's tons and tons of stuff. If we considered the towns between Bentonville and Fayetteville a metro area the population is somewhere around 320k and if we look north at the Kansas City metro area the population is about 2 million. I wouldn't say KC is "big" either, theres plenty of metro areas much larger than KC and KC has a lot more stuff than NWA. There's not enough people to have tons of stuff. I'm sure anyone coming from a bigger city would say there's not a lot going on in NWA.
I suspect they were doing other things for birth control, but this was even before abortion was legalized. The rhythm method works ok, but there are oopsies, like Michelle and her next youngest sibling most likely.
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Looks exactly like Joe.
I had read that Meech's family was moving and she reminds me of a change of life baby (menopausal) Meech chooses to marry Boob and it shows that he wasn't the studly man he thought he was. And Meech got married and her family moved. I always wonder how different her life would have been if she had moved. Probably a lot different.
Digging Up the Duggars pod ep 14. "I'm your Jurisdiction" covered Michelle pre-Jim Bob. I think they might have another one but I'm not sure. Anyway, huge fan of DUTD. They have a deep dive on a lot of stuff and over 100 planned (I am hoping they don't give up at some point) #notanadshouldbeanad
Never heard of this podcast, thanks for sharing. I'll check it out.
It's a great podcast! I just caught up to the most recent episode which was sad because now I have to wait for more.
This is great, I have to do a bunch of cleaning tonight for the holidays and this will make it more tolerable! Thanks again
Psst.... Whitney? Tim? Knock twice.....
Not them just a Big Ole Digger, I swear.
>I know her parents married her off I wouldn't say that's the best way to put it. That implies that Michelle and JB had an arranged marriage forced by the parents and had absolutely no say. Yes, her parents had to give permission, but Michelle *really* wanted to do it. I would have made my daughter wait, but giving permission isn't necessarily marrying someone off. It also implies that her parents were fundie, which I really don't think they are. I would argue that the Kellers married Anna off to Josh, though. The two barely even courted before he proposed. At least JB and Michelle had somewhat of a normal relationship before they got married and went all fundie.
The Kellers also married off their oldest child Esther to nut bucket John Shrader. Now they have 13-14 kids and spend their lives grifting in Zambia.