Joy-Anna Duggar Reveals If She Plans on Having 19 Kids Like Her Parents Jim Bob and Michelle
Joy-Anna Forsyth (née Duggar) revealed if she plans on having 19 kids like her parents, Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar, did.
While participating in a recent Q&A with fans via her Instagram Stories, one person asked Joy-Anna, 27, if she has “any desire to have 19 kids.”
“No, not 19 …” she responded alongside a photo of her and her youngest son, Gunner. “I want to be able to effectively and intentionally raise [sic] my kids for Jesus so whatever number that is for us: Maybe 4 or 5.”
Joy-Anna and her husband, Austin Forsyth, are already the proud parents of kids Gideon, 7, Evelyn, 4, and Gunner, 22 months.
While Joy-Anna and Austin, 31, have stepped out of the spotlight following Counting On’s cancellation, the father of three previously admitted he didn’t want their eldest son’s birth featured on the TLC reality show.
“I don’t remember us having really big, like, ‘Oh, no, y’all can’t show this or whatever,’ [but] I think we did push back about having Gideon,” Austin explained during the February 19 episode of “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast.” “I didn’t want any film crew there. I took a lot of heat for that.”
After noting that some of Joy-Anna’s sisters featured their children’s births on the show, he claimed that a precedent had been set for the other family members. “That’s something which Jessa and Jill, I believe, had already had Spurgeon and Israel [on the show], so I should have thought about it,” he continued.
“It’s not something that, as a single guy, crossed my mind like, ‘One day, I’m going to have to make the decision if I’m going to have the network with cameras in our face,’” Austin said. “There’s a lot you just don’t know how [to handle].”
Austin admitted he “didn’t really trust the producers or the camera guys” when it came to filming the birth.
“I remember the producer telling me, ‘It used to be so hard getting stuff out of you and you always seemed like we were trying to entrap you or you always would think a long time about your answers and we just wanted something spontaneous,’” he recalled.
Joy-Anna and Austin’s early days of parenthood were documented on Counting On, and she admitted to having a hard time adjusting to being a mother during a 2018 episode of the show.
“Being a mom is in a lot of ways easier than I thought and in a lot of ways harder than I thought,” she said after she welcomed baby No. 1. “I knew that my mom had gone through a lot with all of us kids, but like I didn’t think it was that hard just because I’d always taken care of kids myself. But it’s given me a whole new appreciation for moms out there that have kids.”
Meanwhile, Austin shared that becoming a father came with a lot of firsts. “I hadn’t really ever changed a diaper before we had Gideon,” he said at the time. “And then with Joy’s C-section, and her being kinda bed-ridden and just not really being able to get out of bed much… She probably changed maybe five diapers the first two weeks. So [it was] like diaper boot camp. I got broke in.”
