Little People, Big World fans are slamming Audrey Roloff and her husband Jeremy Roloff after they revealed that they are practicing “blanket time” with their 2-year-old daughter Ember.
The couple, who recently made the decision to exit the popular TLC series, made the confession during a recent post on Roloff’s Instagram Story when opening up about some of the parenting techniques they use.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“We would basically just say, ‘stay on the blanket,’ and if she crawled off the blanket we would just put her back on the blanket and only did it for, you know, a few minutes at a time when she was younger,” Roloff revealed, according to the Cheat Sheet.
Roloff added that as her daughter got older, she would “gradually increase the time” Ember would stay on the blanket. She explained that the method wasn’t a “super rigid thing” did daily, though she did practice it every week.
Her husband went on to explain that they are partaking in the method to teach Ember “boundaries and self-control zones, how to self-entertain, how to be disciplined, how to obey mom and dad.”
The couple of course are not the only TLC family to take part in the practice. The Duggars, the family at the center of Counting On, notably practice “blanket training” with their children, a practice described in controversial No Greater Joy Ministries’ pastor Michael Pearl and his wife Debi’s book To Train Up a Child — Child Training for the 21st Century.
The method involves placing infants on a blanket for an extended period of time. Should they roll over or crawl off the edge, parents are instructed to hit their child with a flexible ruler or another instrument. After a while, the child will learn not to venture off the blanket.
While Roloff did not reveal if she was inspired to try the method by the Pearls’ books, nor reveal that she doesn’t punish her daughter for wandering off, her confession still caused uproar among fans.
“45 minutes is like an eternity to a baby. That just sounds awful for Ember,” one person wrote on a Reddit thread.
“This whole method sounds confusing,” another added. “How will a child distinguish between time out and blanket time? [I don’t know] sounds super controlling and just weird. Let the kid be a kid.”
“It’s extremely controlling and bizarre. If you can’t keep an eye on your kid without them being confined to a small space on a blanket then you need some serious help,” a third wrote.
Another fan wrote that they “hate when people talk about TRAINING their kids. It’s dehumanizing.”
At this time, neither Roloff nor her husband have responded to the criticism.
