The Duggar family infamously bans women from wearing anything “immodest,” but the family’s modesty extends as far as having the TLC show blur their knees.
Fans of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On are familiar with the Duggar family’s modest dress code, which includes a ban on pants and anything baring the knee or shoulder, but it turns out that the TLC shows also have a history of conserving their modesty by blurring out the Duggar women’s knees.
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The trend first began in 2011 when matriarch Michelle Duggar showcased her more adventurous side while the family was vacationing. Hopping on a wakeboard, Duggar donned a skirt and leggings, though when not even that was enough to keep her knees covered during the extreme sport, she went to the show’s producers with a single request: please censor her knees.
“I don’t like my knees to be uncovered, I feel like that’s my personal conviction… I asked if you guys [TLC] could please cover my knees,” she explained, according to In Touch Weekly. She even joked that they could “add a tan on there” if they wanted to.
While the show opted not to give Duggar a tan, they did place individual black boxes over each of her knees to censor them, starting a trend that would continue throughout the two series.
Since the original censoring, the series has seen Jill (Duggar) Dillard‘s knees blurred when she went for a pedicure with Derick Dillard and his mother during a 2015 two-hour special. Jessa Duggar has also gotten the censored-knee-treatment. While flying to Texas with Been Seewald and their children, her knees peeked out from her skirt, leading to their blurring.
The censoring of their knees seems to only apply to the TLC series, though, as many of the Duggar girls have shown their knees to their thousands of Instagram followers, and despite the strict dress code, many of the Duggar ladies have broken them at times with “scandalous outfits.”
