Unlike much of the Duggar brood, Jill Duggar and Derick Dillard don't abide by Jim Bob's tyrannical rules.
One example of many is Jill exposing her children to media that isn't Duggar approved or even nominally Christian in origins.
Jill Duggar has uploaded a cute and cozy photo.
She is seated upon a black leather couch with her sons, Samuel and Israel, seated beside her.
Jill has a book open and is reading to her precious boys.
"Love reading with my boys!" Jill gushes in the captions of this sweet family photo.
Prompting engagement, she then asks her fans and followers: "What are some of your kid’s favorite books?"
She revealed that what she was reading at the moment was The Little Engine That Could.
In any normal family, this kind of mother-children activity would be extremely normal.
Among the extended Duggar family, however, it is exceptional.
Why? Well, basically, because the titular character of The Little Engine That Could manages to succeed by believing in himself -- anathema in the Duggar family's cult.
Snark aside, fans have asked themselves for years why there doesn't seem to be a single bookworm in the entire Duggar family.
It's normal for at least some children from any sample of human beings to be avid readers.
Conventionally, families that subject their children to homeschooling have an above-average amount of bookworms, due to a number of factors. Why not the Duggars?
Well, basically, the Duggars want to isolate their children from the real world until the children are so dependent upon the family's way of doing things (and also married) and can't imagine living their life another way.
That means no secular reading. The Duggar kids can read the bible or they can read devotional Christian writing.
They are not known to read much at all in the way of even conservative Christian fiction, possibly because even that might be too mainstream for Jim Bob and Michelle.
But there's more to it than the desire to prevent their children from having any original thoughts or exposure to other ways of living.
The Duggars also want to center their children, not only in Christianity, but in their cult's very specific version of it.
As such, many activities put the cult's values at their core. The Little Engine That Could may teach good values, but not by Duggar standards.
But this is nothing new for Jill, and ultimately small potatoes compared to her and Derick's decision to (gasp) enroll their children in real schools.
Public schooling is not part of the Duggar lifestyle, because it exposes children to other people and ideas -- dangerous for any cult that plans to be multigenerational.
Jill and her siblings may have been denied many basic human rights, including access to actual educations, but her children will not be.
Ultimately, this is bittersweet for Jill, who gets to give her kids a better childhood than she had but in the process distances herself from her siblings and their families.
Jill is already banned from the Duggar house. Who wants to bed that Samuel and Israel won't be allowed to hang out with their cousins unsupervised as they get older, for fear that they'll "contaminate" them with independent thoughts?
This separation from much of her family is painful for Jill, but she's doing it all for her boys.
