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There’s been much discussion over the years about the Duggars’ parenting practices.

That makes sense, of course, as cranking out babies and raising them according to a very strict set of fundamentalist religious guidelines is literally what the Duggars are famous for.

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And since Duggar women take on the vast majority of the tasks associated with child-rearing, it stands to reason that they would also bear ther brunt of the criticism.

You can complain all you want that the dads don’t do anything — and you would be right to do so — but the Duggars have repeatedly demonstrated that they’re immune to that particular gripe.

Anyway, the point is that when Duggar fans talk about "parents," what they really mean is moms.

And the debate over which mom is the messing up her kids the worst is a common one in Duggar-focused online communities.

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Michelle would probably be the top pick in terms of most incompetent mom, but these days, the debate centers around her daughters — and you might be surprised which one is taking the most flak.

Jinger Duggar married Jeremy Vuolo back in 2016, and she stunned fans by waiting more than a year after her wedding to get pregnant.

Duggar girls are taught from a young age that procreation is their primary reason for being, as well as the sole reason to get married.

So the fact that Jinger was married so long (by Duggar standards) before getting knocked up was enough to spark speculation among fans that she wasn’t as eager as her sisters were to become a mom.

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Speculation about Jinger’s mental health has been circulating for years, and there’s a theory that motherhood has caused the 26-year-old to sink into a depression.

“Jinger’s eyes went from dead to more dead with motherhood,” one Reddit user wrote this week.

The comment appeared in a thread about which Duggar daughter has shown the most ineptitude when it comes to parenting.

“I agree with Jinger being at the bottom. She only ever looks happy when doing something fun in LA,” another user wrote.

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“Jinger seems totally checked out,” another person commented.

“Jinger acts like her daughter is a doll and shows no bond with her,” 

Of course, all of this is based on what fans have observed on Counting On, as well as Jinger’s Instagram posts.

And it seems that many of the observers are taking quite a leap, as they so often do when voicing their opinions on the Duggars.

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Jinger’s 1-year-old daughter Felicity appears online about as often as any of the other Duggar offspring, and Jinger is usually beaming in the pics.

While it’s true that Jinger is certainly living a very different life from her sisters — having relocated to LA, while the rest of them remained within a few miles of home — that doesn’t mean she’s any less capable as a parent.

If anything, Jinger deserves credit for raising a child without the large familial support network from which her sisters have benefitted.

Is Jinger depressed?

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Possibly — frankly, we have no idea.

But even if she is battling some sort of mental health issue, there’s no indication that it’s affected her parenting.

It seems that what we have here is a case in which the public is reacting to Jinger in a way that’s unsettlingly similar to the manner in which she’s regarded by her family:

She’s different, they reason, so she must be bad.

It’s a line of thinking that’s been used to justify an astonishing amount of idiocy over the course of human history, and it seems Jinger is its latest victim.