Jill Duggar's Relationship With Her Dad Jim Bob Is Worse Than You Think

The Big Picture

• Reality TV isn't always what it seems and the Duggar family scandal revealed a dark truth behind their shiny facade.
• Jill Duggar bravely speaks out against her oppressive upbringing, shedding light on exploitation & trauma.
• Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets exposes the family's controversies and manipulation.

With reality television being as thrilling as it is, it can be easy for fans to forget just how real their favorite programs are for those actually in them. Anyone who was ever a fan of 19 Kids and Counting learned that years ago. The TLC series created by Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar focused on the couple's titular 19 children and their strictly religious lives. It offered a warm lens of their subtly strict household, one that cast the large family in a heartwarming light — a light that was quickly shattered in 2015 when the family's eldest son, Josh Duggar, was revealed to have molested multiple young girls when he was a teenager.

The ensuing scandal saw audiences take a closer look at the family's home life and just how archaic many of the teachings that guided their lives were. These controversies are showcased in the docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets on Amazon Prime Video, with second-eldest daughter Jill Duggar especially speaking out about how deeply the family's patriarchal way of life impacted her and the other children. She has done this in the face of the family and their community telling her not to, a thoroughly brave act that is even more impressive when viewers begin to understand just what her relationship with her father, Jim Bob, looks like.

Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets

Docuseries exploring the truth beneath the surface of reality TV's mega-family, The Duggars.

'19 Kids and Counting' Had a Dark Secret

While they definitely didn't look like your average family, the cast of 19 Kids and Counting captured America's hearts when their show premiered in 2008. This reality series focused on the family's daily life handling such a packed household and how they tried to live in a way that their religion, Independent Fundamentalist Baptists, saw as holy. While not everyone shared their stringent religious views, it's undeniable how compelling many people found the show; through TLC's glossy lens, the rigid way of life was portrayed as a quirky yet heartwarming, one that celebrated their beliefs and created a fun life for the children despite the many rules they must abide by.

Somehow, the series even managed to paint the patriarchal gender roles applied to the girls as something understandable, with the mother and daughters aiding this by often expressing joy at never being able to do things like wear pants or kiss before marriage. It's always good to respect someone's religious beliefs if they choose to follow them with conscientious consent, so watchers took joy in seeing these people lead the religious lives they claimed to want — though that view quickly changed when the family's first big scandal emerged.

In 2015, police reports revealed that eldest brother Josh Duggar molested young girls — including his sisters — from the ages of 12 to 16, horrible crimes that his parents were aware of and attempted to conceal from the public eye. This revelation is covered extensively in Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, the docuseries that covers both this event and the audience's shock that the family they'd been admiring for years worked so hard to hide this dark secret. This, and the parents' clear choices of keeping the brother safe at the expense of their daughter's safety, resulted in the show's cancelation — though it wasn't long before a spin-off was announced.

Counting On continued the Duggar story with an initial focus on Jill and Jessa as the young women tried to move past the controversy to lead their own lives. It ran for multiple seasons before being canceled in 2021 as the family faced yet another scandal, this time with Josh being found with child pornography and being sentenced to 12 years in prison. This multi-year devolution of the family's public image reoriented every viewer's thoughts on them, and as Jill especially began to speak about what she experienced as one of the older daughters, fans were shocked to learn just how badly they'd been fooled.

These "Shiny Happy People'" Had Too Much Darkness

The creators of 19 Kids and Counting put in hard work to portray the family's life in an approachable, friendly way, a fake veneer that has dissolved completely in recent years. This has been aided in large part by Jill, who has spoken openly about the immense pressure put on her as a woman in their family and of the constant stress heaped onto her by parents (and producers) trying to keep her "in line." Along with Independent Fundamentalist Baptists, they are members of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a Christian organization that has long been called out for the way it shames survivors of sexual assault and the archaic principles it orders women to live by — namely, that their sole role in life is to serve their husband and have children.

Jill has discussed how growing up, any attempt to express individuality through appearance or ideology was admonished by her parents, with her father especially guilting the young woman into thinking that her "free spirit" would damn the family. He told her that because she was an older girl she always needed to set an example and that her doing something as simple as wearing pants (they believed women are only supposed to wear skirts or dresses) was derailing her younger siblings' holy lives. It was textbook gaslighting that became even worse once the man began making money off of his children and their lives.

Jill has released a novel with her husband, Derick Dillard, titled Counting the Cost, and is featured prominently in Shiny Happy People. Both platforms allow her to express the great pain she's endured by having so much of her personal life spotlighted in the media and her parents' refusal to let her live in any way that didn't benefit them financially. She details how private moments like the birth of her first child and life milestones were forced to be documented on camera, and her father fooling her and the rest of the children into signing contracts that allowed TLC to document them as much as the network wanted, no matter the person's preference.

The only person to receive payment for any of this was Jim Bob himself, with the man offering $80,000 to his kids if they signed another contract that further sold off their rights to whatever television opportunities he wanted to pursue next. One of the worst cases of just how terribly the man treated his daughter is when he testified in court on behalf of Josh in his latest trial, claiming to "not remember" anything about the assault his son put his daughters through when they were children — choosing to defend him over validating Jill and her sister's terrible experiences with a predator. This mirrored when Jill was seen on Fox News defending Josh shortly after the initial scandal, an interview that the young woman has said she was coerced into doing to lessen public backlash against the Duggars with no regard for how it may affect her mentally.

Jill Duggar Reveals What Almost Ended Her Marriage

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Jill Duggar Refuses to Stay Silent

The experience of Jill Duggar, and the rest of the Duggar siblings, is a traumatic one that no child should ever have to undergo. How the young woman has persisted through such hardships is absolutely extraordinary; not only enduring the sexist restrictions of her father and community but having such intimate details about her trauma be discussed on a national scale and being exploited for financial gain for years. It's astounding that Jill Duggar has found the courage to speak about her difficult life in the ways that she has, and it's a lesson to everyone that actions like her father's and mother's only ever serve to deeply hurt those they're forced upon.

Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.

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