“Saturday nights with my future Olympian. I think I finally found someone who likes practice more than I did.”
Jinger Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting fame and her husband Jeremy Vuolo are sharing their thoughts on screen time and movies for kids.
In a new episode of their podcast, “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast,” the couple did a deep dive on their limits surrounding screen time and what programs they think are appropriate for kids to watch.
Duggar explained that in her super strict Christian upbringing, she was generally not allowed to watch any Disney movies because they depicted magic, which was against their religious beliefs.
"Magic was something that they, I think it makes sense as a Christian, why you would want to avoid that," Duggar explained. "I don't know if that was a teaching of Bill Gothard or not, but definitely thinking about the spiritual world and those things that we don't wanna mess with, I think that was something that a lot of Christians shied away from."
While the couple are both Christian and raising their children as such, they are slightly more relaxed in their rules.
"I like the slower-paced movies, the older movies, even older Disney movies," she said in the episode. "It's kind of fun to let the kids watch that."
She then said that one Disney movie she would not allow her children to watch was The Princess and the Frog, due to its depiction of voodoo.
“I watched a section of it one time, and it goes into voodoo, and I'm like, I'm not gonna let my kids watch that because I don't believe that that's true. I don't want them thinking that's good," she explained.
However, the couple generally tries to limit screen time for their kids, regardless of the content being shown.
Duggar said that even as an adult, she can feel herself getting “sucked in” by her phone, and doesn’t want her children feeling that way.
“I do everything I can to keep our kids off of a screen, to the point where sometimes I’ve had to talk to you about it,” Duggar said to her husband. “I lean away so hard from a screen. [...] In certain seasons I feel like I’ll let them watch a little bit more, other times we’ll just, like, hardly let them watch anything. Maybe a Saturday morning cartoon, that’s it.”
