With more than 20 years of reality TV experience under their belts, most of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar‘s children ended up growing up on camera, but there’s still so much fans never got to see that went on behind the scenes. Jinger Duggar is now opening up about the unusual ways her parents managed to keep so many young children on their best behavior, and although some methods are stranger than others, some actually do make a lot of sense – even for smaller families.
Jinger looked back on the Duggars’ first TV special.
Originally airing on Discovery Health in 2004, 14 Children and Pregnant Again first introduced the Duggar family to audiences. On this week’s episode of The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast, Jinger looked back at scenes from the special and ended up sharing a lot of interesting details from her childhood in the process.
They had to follow ‘Code O.’
As most of us can probably imagine, wrangling that many little kids while out in public has to be a challenge, but Jinger said Michelle and Jim Bob had it down to a method called “Code O.”
“They’d say ‘Code O!’ And we’d hop in line in birth order, youngest in the front, oldest in the back, and we would walk around like that. Like a pack of ducks,” she said on the podcast. “Otherwise, everybody is spread out. You know how hard it is to keep the little two that are walking in our family around because they’ll see a fountain and they’ll be like ‘Let’s go splash in the fountain!’”
There was a very specific procedure when it came to loading into the car.
Fans who tuned into 19 Kids & Counting know that when all of their kids were still young enough to live at home that they usually traveled around in a large van, which would make it hard for Jim Bob and Michelle to make seat belt checks.
Instead, when they’d get into the car, Jim Bob would tell his kids to buckle up, and they had an incentive to buckle those seat belts as quickly as possible.
“The first person to say ‘Click’ would get a penny, and then it would add up over time,” Jinger explained. “It was like a game.”
Jim Bob and Michelle were methodical about their one-on-one time with the kids.
Jinger’s parents would take a kid or two along with them any time they ran an errand or went somewhere outside of the house to get some rare one-on-one time with their children, but at the same time, they had to keep track with a list they kept on the wall or risk someone being left out.
“They would start with the oldest and work your way down, and they would get to go with mom and dad to whatever errand they were running,” she said on the podcast.
Though some of these methods do sound odd to those of us who didn’t grow up with 18 siblings, Jinger did admit she is stealing some of her parents’ tricks when it comes to parenting her own children, Felicity, Evangeline, and newborn Finn. One example is creating an emergency kit to keep in the car that contains items such as a “first aid kit, hair ties, hair brush, probably an extra pair of socks for each kid, underwear.”
“I think I might end up implementing that as well,” she said.
