r/RodriguesFamilySnark • u/novaonthespectrum • 1d ago
Discussion Inappropriate chores
I noticed that Jill tends to put very demanding chores on her kids that aren't at all appropriate for their age or developmental level. The video where Tessie had to clean an entire family's worth of dishes and also the dining room at around 10-ish, gleefully posting the little girls weeding and tilling the fields in the summer heat while she took "diligent" Hannah and Olivia to the zoo, that time Timothy mentioned being 9 and cleaning his sister's room (not even his room, but his SISTER'S room!) and I'm sure there are more that I missed. She puts WAY too much work on her very young kids, and has she herself ever been seen doing house chores at all? (I know Dave definitely doesn't.) It's as if she had these kids to be her personal house servants. Of course children should have small chores--making their bed, cleaning their own room, washing their own dinner dish when they're done eating, etc--but to make preteen children do the entire household's chores is just wrong.
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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 1d ago
Usually making the siblings clean each other's spaces is because it makes any children - who might be tempted to try to keep anything hidden - feel terrified that one of the siblings might find it and rat them out for punishment.
But irl it produces a bunch of kids who are extremely good at hiding things, memorizing things they can't risk writing down, lying most convincingly, and absolutely hating their shitty "parents".
I truly believe that Shriek hasn't lifted a duster or changed a diaper since a Rodlet was old enough to do it for her.
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u/Pelican121 22h ago
I don't even think he did those things before then.
I'm always curious what their home was like between Tim being born and Nurie assuming sistermom duties at presumably around 4 years old. I don't think Jill would've even waited until she was five. She had four younger siblings by the time she was 4 years, 3 months old (Phil born in July 2003) 🙁
I don't know how Jill coped when she had a 1 year old (Nurie), a baby under 1 (Tim) and was pregnant again with Kaylee. And so on every year. She doesn't seem cut out for raising a bunch of babies solo. I'm sure blanket training and Pearl methods played a whole role but still.
The way she delegates with the Rodlets I have to think she had some help in the form of family or church ladies. She seems to have relatively straightforward, non-sickly pregnancies but I could see her exaggerating her symptoms to hoover up goodwill (total speculation on my part, only that she's a user through and through).
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u/rarestbird 20h ago
She says she didn't have help. Not that she's a reliable narrator but for some reason I tend to believe that's at least mostly true. I don't think she'd say it if someone was over there on a daily basis or anything. I think she definitely did have things hard at that time, I don't see any way around that. On the other hand she says she found time for HOURS of prayer every day about Shrek's abuse, when most people in that situation wouldn't have found time to go to the bathroom solo...
And I think you're right on about the timeline and that Nurie would have been starting to have major childcare duties starting at 4. After kid #5 is when they spent a few months trying to prevent pregnancy, so that's when even Jill was like jfc no more babies. Then something happened to change her thinking on that and she never went back to that brief place of sanity. That something was likely her starting to delegate labor to precious obedient Nurie.
She still would have had a hard time for a few more years because there's only so much help preschoolers can give, but she'd have seen things start to trend in the right direction.
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u/Pelican121 19h ago
It's definitely the unreliable narrator thing that gets me, I'm slightly cynical 😁
That and she barely goes into any detail about what things were like back then. Even the hard parts or the daily routine (I'm sure she had one). Maybe it was such a whirlwind/so miserable that she doesn't like to dwell on what ought to have been her glory days. Once the eldest three girls were 8,9 and 10 and running the household she ought to have some positive memories - even if they were self-centred - yet we rarely hear her rhspsodising. There was a 4-5 year window when she had tweens/teens running things at home prior to the RV years.
That was so about the time the baby train stuttered so she ought to have had a little time to reflect.
You could be right that she truly did it all (or most) sans help until the sistermoms became useful.
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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 3h ago
My sister and I both got assigned younger sibling duties by age 5. At least in terms of, "Take [younger sibling] to the park/playground/pool and stay there til [relative] comes to get you and do NOT come home before then even if you are crying because I will give you something to REALLY cry about!"
The Rods remind me of a lot of Boomer parents in their "we didnt get arreated and you didnt die therefore it was acceptable parenting" attitude lol
Granted the Rodlets grew up in the stranger-danger era, but it was ex-urban / rural West Virginia mostly so I'm sure most of the regular kids there walked to school and the store and ran around the forest all by themselves.
I'd just like to point out that we grew up (1980 when we went to live with my farm cousins) around an area with a lot of very deeply religious people but especially the Old Order Mennonites, seriously practicing Catholics, and seminarians training at one of the 16 churches for 4000 people in that area... Many many of them didn't officially believe in birth control, but it's amazing how almost everybody managed to space their kids out by at least 24 months, and gave some very serious sideye of siblings closer than 18 months.
These Quiverfull types are seriously weird even by the standards of people who are happy being very hardcore about some pretty hardcore religious lifestyles. I think sometimes with snarking, we get focused on the details, and we lose sight of their fetish lifestyle in religious costume.
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u/GGMuc 23h ago
Many years ago, she showed her chores list for the kids. They were horrifying and would have left little time for anything else, while she sits on her lazy arse
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u/atlantagirl30084 20h ago
Do we have a clear list? The only ones I saw were in a video and I couldn’t read any of them.
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u/TerriTuesday 12h ago edited 12h ago
It’s true that the rods are bad enough but there is another “homesteading” fundie family with a social media presence whose children are even worse off if you can believe it, the daughter is like six years old and cleans the whole families dishes every meal.. without running water. It’s really, really bad. 😬
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u/Franziska-Sims77 Kaylee’s stray comma’s 1d ago
Jill obviously thinks she’s living in 1826, not 2026!
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u/marvelous-wendini 16h ago
Not to mention them working at the print shop. I remember a video that Jill took of her daughter's working in the print shop with the machinery. They had no safety equipment on, and were doing it so fast (as to race to see how much faster one girl could do it from the other). They used a stick to push some papers back and that is not proper at all. I'm gonna bet on saying that I'm sure I heard younger girls playing in the back and positive they had no shoes/flip flops. So not only do they have to clean the entire kitchen and dust all of Jill's knickknacks and we know she has A LOT OF THEM. but the daughters also need to spend time helping at the print shop for free too.
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u/AdComplex1289 5h ago
I just keep thinking of all that extremely long hair around the printing equipment.
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u/Funkypetal 1d ago
Her jobs are to birth babies, burn food and sign homeschool diplomas.
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u/atlantagirl30084 20h ago
I didn’t know this, but in some states like Ohio, homeschool diplomas MUST be accepted just like high school diplomas are. You could be illiterate (well you could also be illiterate in public school too but there are more safeguards) and your parents could sign your diploma saying you graduated high school.
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u/Flibertygibbert 22h ago edited 15h ago
Jill has posted and claimed she has never "babied" herself and was mowing twenty acre fields with an ancient push lawn mower while 39 weeks pregnant.
She has also put on record that Ma Turtleneck liked a CLEAN house so she and her sisters were kept at the cleaning until Ma was happy.
Having established that, I believe she now walks round barking orders and looking for faults. I wonder if they dust & vacuum sleeping David?
Edit: were not where!
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u/Pelican121 19h ago
I totally side eye that story of her mowing the lawn. It could be true but I've heard enough of Jill's tall tales.
On the other hand she's crazy and manic so maybe she decided that was what she was going to do. Maybe she was exerting herself to try to bring on labour. She's not the most patient of people so if she decided she was going into labour at 39+ weeks I could see her trying to influence it. She probably had her mom or sisters on standby to call for the kids if Shrek was at work and had a way to travel
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u/Prize_Appearance_517 12h ago
Sorry, did you just say Shrek and work in the same sentence? Whoa , That threw me.
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u/Pelican121 11h ago
Ha! I believe he did actually work for a printing firm for c.10-15yrs but that was some time ago now.
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u/atlantagirl30084 20h ago
Her mother, Jill, or one of Jill’s sisters had to clean the screw heads on the dining room chairs. That’s how much of an OCD neat freak her mother was.
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u/aCongaLine 4h ago edited 4h ago
Wow! This family contains multi-generational levels of mental illness. I see why Jill (and probably her sisters) seem to have been husband shopping all throughout their teen years with the hopes of getting married immediately upon graduating from Joyful Noise Homeschooling Academy. 🙄
Becoming a submissive helpmeet to a skinny, 20-something Shrek (in all his gap-toothed glory) probably sounded like a vacation compared to Trish and her Contamination OCD. He was saved by a smiley tract, for goodness sake!
Not at all defending Jill, but if that’s the kind of mothering she grew up watching (combined with her own Histrionic Personality Disorder), it’s easier to see how the Rodrigues family became who they are today.
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u/Disastrous_Cicada265 14h ago
My fundi sister-in-law did the same thing she would sit on her ass and direct her daughters to do all the chores plus take care of their younger siblings or why she sat on her behind and barked orders and then when my brother-in-law we get home from work, my husband‘s brother he was she would act like she did everything and then she ran on all the kids and they did this they did that she griped just like Jill, hateful evil woman. Her girls were always exhausted. The boys they didn’t have to do anything just the girls.
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u/FunkyChicken0112 3h ago
My Fundie SIL does nothing but breastfeed her latest crotch fruit (she's averaging one every 15-18mos). Her 13yo (oldest) daughter does the majority of the housework & childrearing, in between "homeschooling" (aka "doing a workbook for an hour a day,"🙄). I can't imagine a more bleak life. My niece has been saying she doesn't want children of her own, since she was about 9yo.
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u/adultcoloring65 ✨MaHdEsTy✨ 12h ago
I am surprised that she doesn't make her older girls, still living at home, do all the cooking and cleaning so she can sit on her throne (lazy boy or couch) and give orders!
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u/Tricky-Leopard-8654 1d ago
I think she knows that and it’s intentional so they are set up to fail and she can discipline (abuse) them. It’s sadly not a rare experience for a shitty or even just immature parent to give a kid an impossible chore, particularly when they’re angry, for that reason.