What to Know
Now that they’re both adults and moms raising kids of their own, Jinger Duggar and her younger sister, Joy-Anna Duggar, are besties, but it wasn’t always that way. As kids, Jinger and Joy definitely didn’t have the same bond, and when Joy appeared on The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast this week, she and her big sis opened up about why they thought they didn’t have a close bond when they were children.
Jinger said their “age gap” made it difficult for them to bond.
When Joy appeared on Jinger’s podcast last week, they got to talking about what it was like to grow up together. And even though they were (obviously) living in the same house, Joy admitted that as sisters, “the bond was not really there.”
Jinger’s explanation? The four years between them were too much to overcome when they were younger, since Jinger was considered part of the “older girls” group including Jana, Jill, and Jessa, while Joy was lumped into the younger batch of kids in the oversized family.
“I felt like the age gap was segregated by sections,” Jinger said, adding, “I was, kind of, in the older section for many years. The six oldest is what it was. So when we would go to like political events or whatever we did, I was in the older half. And then I just kind of felt like you were one of the little kids, and you were sandwiched between, you know, a lot of boys or whatever.”
They also didn’t have much in common.
In Joy’s opinion, their lack of closeness had less to do with their ages and was more about the fact that, as kids, they basically had nothing in common. If you watched 19 Kids & Counting on TLC, you probably already know that Joy was a bit of a tomboy, running around barefoot outside with her brothers, while Jinger seemed to be more traditionally girly.
“I think part of it is because I was so like, I will not be a girly girl. I will not wear nice clothes,” Joy said. “And anytime we had to go anywhere, it was a constant battle. Like, we are going to get Joy out of this nasty t-shirt that she’s been wearing for three days. And she’s going to wear a nice shirt.”
She continued, “I would always wear the boys’ t-shirts. So, I think that was part of it, too, is we just had very different interests, and I was like, ‘I will never understand why they like shopping so much.'”
Today, Joy and Jinger are closer than ever.
They’re both married moms of three who have distanced themselves from the IBLP, the oppressive religion they grew up in, and at 32 and 28, that four year age gap isn’t such a big deal. Even the distance between them doesn’t seem to be a factor in their closeness, since Joy and her family visit Jinger in California every chance they get.
Plenty of siblings only become closer as they get older, so it’s no wonder it happened for these two, too.
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