I've been trying to catch up since day 2 and I'm still only near the end of thread #3
This post stands out at the moment
posted by enelram
I was curious who was the abuser of EJ, and this post says it was the father and that it started after LT left home. I think EJ was only about 9 at the time, which suggests to me that the father had lost his usual victim and had to move prematurely onto the next girl even though she hadn't yet hit puberty. That would be a very good reason for LT to want to elope. It would explain the father's attitude that was given in one of the newspaper interviews with the sister TR (I think it was the Daily Mail).
I suspect a number of girls who have had less than ideal childhoods/teen years have a deep desire for a baby, and I think maybe that contributes to LT's behavior, along with the religious 'ideal' of having a huge family of numerous 'blessings'. LT doesn't look very comfortable with her eldest daughter in the photo where the eldest daughter is about 18 months old? LT still doesn't look very comfortable in the picture with her newborn baby #13, she's not really cuddling the newborn baby but sort of holding it more like I associate non-parent males who are handed a baby to hold for a few moments and they don't really know how to hold the baby or what to do with it.
So I think all this behavior has very deep roots, with this deep need for a large and perfect family, but absolutely no emotional or life skills to achieve that. Instead we hear from the sister EJ that even when there were only a smaller number of younger children in the home that the children were strictly taught to only spoke when spoken to etc (which reminds me a little of the alphabetized DVD's...a control issue). LT's mother looks anorexic in the picture of that family prior to LT's elopement, though LT looks a very healthy weight, but does that somehow impact LT's thinking on food issues and how she perceives the looks of her children and their height/weight? The eldest daughter looks anorexically ill in all the pictures of her, but getting worse as time goes on, but does LT actually consider this some kind of 'ideal' based on what her mother looked like at the time she left? And if the mother was dealing with a husband who was abusing his daughters that could be a cause for eating disorder in the mother of LT. Thinking about what I'm saying, maybe I am effectively suggesting some kind of Munchhausen by proxy in that LT might be using the children's weights and feeding as a proxy for her own issues instead of starving herself (and maybe part of her knows she can't starve herself if she wants to be pregnant every year or two) but it also combines with controlling the lives of the children and presumably punishment.
This abuse must have started to get very severe before the eldest was 16-18 years old, because somehow they've made a subconscious or conscious decision to not allow their children to grow into adults in the normal way, to go to college, get a job, move out, marry and have their own families. LT and DT are adding to their own life problems by holding onto these adult children, but once they'd made that decision with the eldest, they'd dug this hole that they couldn't get out of... assuming they could have got out of it before. They could well have fallen into this decision due to the fear of the elder children leaving home and telling someone about the conditions in the home....which we have heard may have precipitated the move to California from Texas.
When we think of the so-called Quivering families, most of us think of the Duggars as a 'model'. There's a lot of things that go into it, the homeschooling, the religion, the beliefs against contraception and the more children the better, the Gothard way, and the borderline to actual abuse that can go on in some of those families, yet there's a particular presentation to the 'public' (whether that's neighbors, church friends, whatever) of well-dressed, often identically-dressed in home-sewn dresses for the girls that wouldn't look out of place many decades ago but do look out of place on a child over five in this era, and polite, well-behaved children who don't talk back, and maybe don't even initiate a lot of conversations (don't speak unless you're spoken to). But even if you compare to a family like the Duggars, there are a whole host of differences that seem far more important than the similarities. Like the health of the children, and that the Duggar children actually get to grow up!
So, to DT's elderly parents I think that's the image they have of their son and his brood, and to them they'd probably see something very positive (of course there are positives in the image of well-dressed, well-behaved children!). But it can't be just his elderly parents, other people saw those pictures of skinny children, anorexic-looking children, grown adult women dressed like five-year old girls. Did any relatives who knew the ages of those 'children' ever ask what the adult children were doing with their adult lives? Living at home would not seem unusual in this culture, it would likely seem normal for an unmarried adult child, but what about college or jobs or courting? What about any of the children doing things other than posing for occasional full-family photos?
I don't know what else to say other than I hope these young people continue to get amazing support, both on the physical and emotional levels and that somehow they can figure out, and be supported in achieving, a positive outcome for themselves.