The Quiverfull Daughters are Tired

A guest post from Abbi Nye

I’m pleased to welcome Abbi Nye to guest post today about her experience as a daughter raised in a Quiverfull family.

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“You don’t see how much it killed me to play ‘Mommy Two.’ You don’t understand why there are a million things I’d rather do than become a Mom now. Come on, Mom—an eleven-year-old can’t play mommy.”¹

When I testify about the exploitation in Quiverfull² families, I invariably receive pushback from people who have not experienced these abusive households.

Are you saying kids shouldn’t do chores?

Kids have always contributed to the household!

It’s crucial to differentiate between developmentally appropriate household chores and the exploitation that I’m describing. Everyone benefits when children contribute to household maintenance. Parents learn to train and delegate, children develop important life skills, and everyone builds a good family work ethic. That’s all great.

No one benefits when children are expected to shoulder their younger siblings' emotional, spiritual, educational, and physical well-being. This is what is happening in Quiverfull families. Children—particularly eldest daughters—are required to serve as surrogate parents. This disrupts healthy attachment between parents and their children, does a disservice to younger siblings, and most importantly—it destroys the caregiving daughters.

I’m the oldest of nine children. My mother worked hard, but I worked harder. She was an adult with a degree in elementary education and her brain was fully developed when she started bearing children. As a teenager, I was expected to carry many of the same responsibilities without any training or experience.

Hillary McFarland, first-born of eleven children, exposes the cruelty of the Quiverfull system in her book, Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy:

“While Quiverfull teaching exalts children as supreme blessings, it doesn’t reveal its grim underside—the silent reality that takes place in hundreds of homes every day and of which I learned: I am only a blessing when I’m useful, helpful, obedient, cheerful, kind, unselfish, submissive, compliant, and responsible. And only these kinds of blessings deserve love—at least, love as we understand it, the kind that busy parents have time for and use to curb behavior.”³

Returning to household chores, the fundamental difference between children-as-humans and children-as-resources means that the division of labor will look quite different in a Quiverfull family. While our society as a whole is hostile to children’s rights,⁴ the consequences of that anti-child attitude multiply with every baby that joins a large Quiverfull family.

To illustrate the fundamental difference between these two models, consider the standard lists of developmentally appropriate chores from pediatricians.⁵ These lists encourage parents to include children in household tasks like folding laundry, doing the dishes, and mowing the lawn. If the child messes up a task—which they will—nobody dies. When a child is old enough to babysit (about 12-13 years old), it’s recommended that they do so with an adult in the house so another child’s life isn’t on the line if they make a mistake.

In a Quiverfull household, here are some of the responsibilities placed on young daughters, often starting at eleven or twelve years old.

• Wake up in the night to soothe a crying baby or change a diaper

• Homeschool younger siblings

• Spank younger siblings into compliance

• Cook meals for siblings

While I didn’t homeschool my siblings, I was responsible for the rest of the list above.

Here’s what some of the Quiverfull daughters told McFarland:

“I was never patient or perfect enough. But I was 12, 13, 14 years old, and watching children all day! . . . I cried into my pillow at night, but no one saw. What made it worse is that I was always so tired. And people thought I was looking for an excuse to be lazy. But I wasn’t—I just never felt rested or that I ever got the sleep I needed.” —Elizabeth⁶

Lack of sleep is a common thread in these voices. We, the daughters, were—and still are—exhausted.

“I was only fourteen and had to cook at least half the week’s meals, so I did what I could. But when I turned fifteen I began thinking that maybe I didn’t want to marry. Not out of rebellion; I just felt so exhausted and couldn’t handle the possibility of being this tired, misunderstood, and controlled my whole life.” —Diana⁷

It is crucial to understand that the Quiverfull exploitation is done in the name of God. We are polished arrows for God, intended to fly beyond our parents’ sphere of influence. But here’s what no pastor will say about arrows: unless you’re using them for target practice, you only get one shot with them. If you lose an arrow in a battle, you don’t get it back. It’s expendable. That’s why you need a whole quiver of them.

By treating children as cannon fodder, Quiverfull parents teach their children that God views them as expendable too. My friend Marissa calls this a “stowaway doctrine”—how we treat our children in God’s name teaches them more about God than any sermon.

I was raised to believe that submission meant letting God crush me.

One of my homeschooled peers chose a revealing verse from the book of Job as her graduation theme: “though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”⁸

This adds the weight of divine authority to exploitation, which is spiritual abuse. As Heather says in Quivering Daughters, "It feels like they are pushing me down under water because God wants them to. And that He wants me to learn not to breathe while being happy about it."⁹

But Christ welcomed children as children, not as expendable resources.

Parents may flinch at my assessment, but if you require your daughters to shoulder their younger siblings' emotional, educational, and physical well-being, you are exploiting vulnerable children that God has entrusted to your care. The daughters of my generation cry out in warning—your young ones need parents who will not delegate the responsibility of parenting to mere children.

Kana shares the heartbreaking truth: "No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't be exactly what my siblings needed. And I lost my own childhood as well. In fact, I never had a childhood; what I had was spent being a second mother."¹⁰

By all means, expect your children to vacuum the house and pick up their toys and help with dinner prep. But do not expect them to carry the weight of parenting their siblings under a divine mandate. That’s called abuse.

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Abbi Nye is an abuse survivor, advocate, and archivist. Committed to amplifying underrepresented voices through archives and advocacy, Abbi holds a BA from Wheaton College and an MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. You can read more about Abbi's survivor-advocacy work at CFCtoo and ACNAtoo, or subscribe to her substack, The Quiverfull Archivist.

1. Hillary McFarland, Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy. (Darklight Press, 2010), xxiv.

2. Quiverfull: an ideology that promotes Christian patriarchy homeschooling, and rejects all forms of birth control.

3. Quivering Daughters, 13.

4. I highly recommend reading R. L. Stollar’s book The Kingdom of Children to understand the true extent of anti-child attitudes in our society.

5. Examples here: https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/chores-for-children.

6. Quivering Daughters, 76.

7. Ibid, 60.

8. Job 13:15

9. Quivering Daughters, 97.

10. Ibid, 143.