Joy-Anna Duggar grew up with her 18 siblings on TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting and its spinoff Counting On. Today, however, their relationships aren’t as close as they once were.
On the March 19 episode of Joy-Anna’s sister Jinger (Duggar) Vuolo‘s podcast with her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, the trio talked about staying connected to their siblings—many of whom are married with families of their own, or have moved away from Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar‘s Arkansas home base.
“It’s hard,” Joy-Anna admitted. “I live probably 35-ish minutes from everybody that lives in Arkansas. It’s definitely hard to keep up with all the siblings because…If we had one sibling over a week, it would take 19 weeks to get through everybody. That’s a lot of time that goes by.”
Unsurprisingly, Joy said that she naturally has closer relationships with some of her brothers and sisters than she does with others.
“I think we naturally connect with some more than others,” she continued. “Whether it’s we go to church together, we’ll see them or whatever. And then some of us just, I’m just really close to a couple of the sister-in-laws, so we see each other quite a bit [and] working out together.”
“It is harder to stay connected to everybody, but I feel like we all have a good expectation for everybody,” Joy-Anna told Jinger and Jeremy. “We don’t feel pressure, like, ‘We have to do this together’ or, ‘I haven’t talked to this person this week.’
Joy-Anna and her husband, Austin Forsyth, are pretty busy with their three young children, Gideon, 7, Evelyn, 5, and Gunner, 22 months.
Every six months or so, Joy said she and Austin host one of her siblings at their home.
“I have my own family to take care of, and so it’s hard to balance how much do I reach out, how much do I not,” she confessed. “And I want to spend time with all of the siblings.”
