KATE GOSSELIN: HOW SHE FOOLED THE WORLD - THE RISE AND FALL OF A REALITY TV QUEEN (39 page)

Some people will argue that they have the right to discipline their children in any way they see fit. Some of these same people seem to be incapable of making the distinction between discipline and abuse.

Physical abuse vs. Discipline

In physical abuse, unlike physical forms of discipline, the following elements are present:

Unpredictability
: The child never knows what is going to set the parent off. There are no clear boundaries or rules. The child is constantly walking on eggshells, never sure what behavior will trigger a physical assault. (See the “Katie Dearest” chapter for examples of this.)

Lashing out in anger:
Physically abusive parents act out of anger and the desire to assert
control
, not the motivation to lovingly teach the child. The angrier the parent, the more intense the abuse.

Using fear to control behavior
: Parents who are physically abusive may believe that their children need to fear them in order to behave, so they use physical abuse to “keep their child in line.” However, what children are really learning is how to avoid being hit, not how to behave or grow as individuals. (Read “Mommy’s Journal” for examples of this.)

The following text was taken from an article that was published in
The National Enquirer
on June 22, 2009. Kate Gosselin, her Network family, and her followers dismissed it as a crazy pack of lies from a disgruntled, former Gosselin employee, just as they always dismissed every negative story that any tabloid ever wrote about Kate.

“An ex-staffer of Kate Gosselin, who worked for the Gosselins for more than a year before recently resigning, claims they have witnessed Kate using corporal punishment on the couple’s 8-year-old twins and 5-year-old sextuplets.

“When one of the boys closed a door on another one once, Kate got in their faces and yelled, “You tell me the truth about what happened!”

“The children just stood there terrified.
Then she dragged one of the boys into the bathroom and spanked him five or six times with a large plastic spoon.”

“You could hear Kate forcefully whacking the child and the child screaming at the top of his lungs. People told me it happened more than once, but it was off-camera because Kate didn’t want it in the show.”

Now read this quote from Kate Gosselin about how “real” her show is, and how they don’t hide anything from you – the viewer:

“We know we're doing the best for our family, and I'm sorry if you're unhappy. How about that? I'm not always happy with what you see (on the show), nor is Jon. But we are certainly not going to hide our imperfections.”

- Kate Gosselin

The problem with Kate’s statement is that she did, indeed, make every effort possible to hide the forceful spanking and physical “disciplining” of her children. I don’t recall ever seeing Kate smacking any of her children around on her TV shows, but her writings tell us it most definitely happened.

You
just read for yourself how Kate Gosselin describes,
in her own words
from her personal journal, how she treated her children, and you can decide if you think the former staffer was lying or telling the truth. You decide if Kate was hiding anything from you as you were tuning in to watch her wholesome “reality” show. And you decide if this is an appropriate way of disciplining children of this age, or any age. The sextuplets were
2 years old
and in diapers at the time of these incidents, as recorded by Kate in her journal. Here are a few more.

September 2006

Joel had gotten out of his crib at nap time, I guess because he wasn’t tired anymore. Kate heard him getting into drawers so she went upstairs and spanked him and put him back in his crib. After the designated naptime was officially over, Kate made Joel stay in his crib while everyone else got to go downstairs. She wants him to know how serious she is about naptime and that she will not tolerate crib climbing!!!!! She says she hopes he got the message but isn’t sure because of the glazy look in his eyes when she talks to him!!!!!

October 2006

Four little toddlers in diapers got into the tissue box on Grandma’s desk AGAIN. Kate says they did it yesterday as well and she spanked all six of them and put them in the corner.

May 2007

Kate talks about Aaden’s fifth day of potty training. He had an accident and pooped on the floor. Kate said she screamed at the top of her lungs as she picked him up. She spanked him after the clean up because, as she says, they are not dogs and Kate felt that five days was more than enough time for a two-year-old boy to become potty trained.

Think about these words from Kate’s journal:

“
I
spanked them so hard!!!!”

“I felt like I may hurt his children.”

“I grabbed him and spanked him as hard as I could and thought I may seriously injure him.”

“I was out of control.”

Now read them again, and picture six tiny children in nothing but diapers, being brutally spanked by their enraged and clearly out-of-control mother. That is not a loving parent disciplining her children. That is violence and abuse. And remember – these are the things that Kate was comfortable documenting in her journal as source material for possible inclusion in her book,
I Just Want You To Know
–
Letters To My Kids On Love, Faith, and Family.
These are normal, everyday occurrences in the Gosselin children’s lives. These are things that Kate was prepared to share with the world if an editor at Zondervan hadn’t gotten his or her hands on them first.

Reading about this harsh reality, it begs the question:
What were the things that even Kate Gosselin knew better than to put into writing?

We’ll never know … not until one of the kids gives their first interview in a few years.

This physical abuse is the Gosselin children’s “normal,” as Kate would say. Being smacked is their normal. To a child who is beaten every day, or burned every day, that is their normal, too. It doesn’t mean it is ever acceptable or should be allowed to continue.

In hindsight, the clues were there for all of us to see, right out in the open on the TLC episodes of
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht
. During the second episode of Season 1, Kate cutely says to the camera, “They’re always biting, hitting, pulling hair, slugging, wrestling. They even beat up on the girls. I wonder where they learned that?”

There really is no need to wonder. These children were displaying these behaviors as babies, still in diapers and still in their cribs. They were the same age as when Kate was writing about her physical and verbal ragings against them. Children learn what they live.

Watch the clip of that episode. It’s from “Sextuplets and Twins: One Year Later,” when Kate returns home from her tummy tuck surgery. It’s chilling to watch, knowing now about how Kate was beating these tiny angels at the time.

Kate had been gone for a week and the kids were at home and very happy. Pay attention to what happens when Kate arrives back home and goes to greet them in their cribs. Poor little Alexis is instantly frightened and starts crying, only to be subdued by Kate’s “soothing” voice. Kate explains it away on the show saying that she looked different and that’s why the kids were afraid.

Kate has held this moment up on several occasions as her favorite moment ever of her children on the show.

THE “DISCIPLINE” EPISODE

“If there was no discipline, there would be chaos 24/7.”

– Kate Gosselin

During Season 3 of
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht
, Discovery/TLC created an entire episode about discipline, which aired in June 2008. The sole purpose of this episode appeared to be an attempt to whitewash any potential rumors about Kate being abusive to the children – before any such rumors were even widely circulating. They knew what they saw, and were aware of what was happening to the children while they were at the house filming.

When watching the “Discipline” episode, I thought I would finally get to see and hear Kate Gosselin explain her views on corporal punishment. I was wrong. This episode appeared to be carefully scripted and focused on showing the world that Kate is a strict disciplinarian, who DOES NOT spank her children. There was absolutely no mention whatsoever of spanking in this entire episode about discipline; not even a setup question thrown at Kate from her crew interviewer/producer who crafted the episode. Wouldn’t that be a normal question to at least throw out there during an episode about discipline?

Here’s one of Kate’s quotes from the “Discipline” episode: “The struggles that we face are being consistent. Because discipline for us is about a 24 hour a day job.” Consistent.

They even made a point of showing one of the sextuplets hitting another child, which happened all the time during these episodes (they used the footage to get laughs) and showing Kate saying loudly,
“Oh no, we don’t hit!”

Later, in this same “Discipline” episode, Jon told the viewing audience, “The most common offense in the house is hitting.”

Where do you suppose the kids learned to hit each other?

During the Season 3 episode of
Jon & Kate Plus Ei8ht
entitled “A Day In The Life” from January 2008, Alexis hit Collin and Kate yelled, “Go sit in time out!
We don’t touch other people! We keep our hands to ourselves!”
Kate does many, many things to confuse and frustrate her children, and then she wonders why they act out.

So how does Kate Gosselin discipline her children, according to the TLC show?

“Usually they go to time out and they sit in the corner,” Kate tells us.

I certainly don’t doubt that they do go and sit in the corner … when the camera crew is in the house filming. It’s what happens to them when the crew goes home that concerns me most.

The part that sickens me in this episode is TLC putting all of the sextuplets on the interview couch and showing us an obviously scripted, three-second clip of the kids answering a simple question from the TLC interviewer.

“What happens when you’re naughty?”

The six kids look like this is probably the fourth or fifth take of answering this question, and in very unrealistic form for six children that young, they all answer EXACTLY the same, and somewhat robotically.

“Go in the corner.”

“Go in the corner.”

“Go in the corner.”

Having three young children of my own and having been around children for years at the kids’ schools, I can tell you from experience that that would never happen. It is far more believable to think that in an earlier take, Collin yelled out “Mommy spanks us!!!” and the crew and parents quickly yelled, “cut! cut! cut!” “Take two. Take three. Take four.” Get out the jellybeans to bribe the kids! “We need to get this right!!!”

Later, on the interview couch, when it’s just Jon and Kate together, Jon says this about discipline, “I give very stern looks to my kids.”

Kate couldn’t even give Jon that. She had to turn it back to herself, saying in her smug, condescending way, “You do? I don’t know if I ever see them.”

In a different Season 3 episode about discipline, Kate lectured Jon on the interview couch, saying, “Don’t scream at him. If you’re too upset to discipline him quietly and explain what he did wrong, and help him to learn to do better, than don’t deal with it. Deal with it when you’re calmed down.”

In that same episode, after Jon yelled at Collin, Kate said to Collin sympathetically, “Collin, I’m sorry. It’s fine. Ignore Daddy. He’s mean.” This from the same woman who wrote about really losing it, pulling Collin up by the hair, and spanking them so hard.