Jinger Duggar Says Her Siblings Feared They Didn’t Have Enough Food as Kids

Jinger Duggar is getting candid on what she and siblings went through growing up in the Duggar household.

“I remember a few times when we were very young some of my siblings would take their food, take their plate of food — get ready for this, it’s disgusting — in the bathroom,” Duggar, 30, shared on her and her husband Jeremy Vuolo’s “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast” on Wednesday, July 31. “They would carry it and put it on the bathroom counter, my mom would be like ‘Don’t do that.’ They’re like, ‘They’re going to eat it.’”

Jinger is the sixth child of 19 Kids and Counting stars Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar. The couple also share Josh, 36, John-David, 34, Jana, 34, Jill, 33, Jessa, 31, Joseph, 29, Josiah, 27, Joy-Anna, 26, Jedidiah, 25, Jeremiah, 25, Jason, 24, James, 23, Justin, 21, Jackson, 20, Johannah, 18, Jennifer, 17, Jordyn-Grace, 15, and Josie, 14.

Jinger went on to explain how her siblings brought their food to the bathroom because they thought it was the only way they would be able to eat.

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“That’s literally what they thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to eat my food because somebody’s going to take it and we might not have enough food for seconds today,’” she shared.

Jinger’s confession comes less than two months after she opened up about where her relationship stands with her parents now .

“I’m grateful for my childhood. It was not perfect. I shared a lot of difficulties that I struggled with throughout my childhood, but at the end of the day, I’m grateful for my parents,” Jinger shared during a June appearance on the “Unplanned” podcast. “I love them, we have differences, everything’s not perfect between us, but I think that at the end of the day, I love them and I know that they know that.”

Following the release of her memoir, Becoming Free Indeed: Disentangling Faith From Fear , in 2023, which delved into her experiences growing up with the fundamentalist Christian teachings of the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP), Jinger shared she had to have “hard” conversations with her parents.

“They don’t have to be happy about it, but that’s what I need to do,” she explained in June. “I chose to write the book from the perspective of the theology being the driving force, because I thought, ‘If my mom reads this, if my dad reads this, if my siblings read this, how are they gonna take it?’”

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Jinger noted she chose to avoid talking about family drama in the book because she didn’t want family members to “be offended” about anything she wrote about.

“I chose to keep it focused on the issues of the teaching that I was raised in [and] to keep it more broad where if anybody reads this coming out of a harmful teaching, they can be brought out of their teaching too,” she added.