Amy Duggar’s Son Speaks Out Shockingly About Alleged Abuse Within the Family.

Amy Duggar King is doing everything she can to protect her son from the difficult news surrounding the Duggar family.

While speaking with journalist Dory Jackson on a Wednesday, May 13 episode of The Dory Jackson Interview series on YouTube, Duggar King shared that she’s been trying to “shield” her 6-year-old son Daxton from the news surrounding the multiple Duggar family child abuse scandals.

“He doesn’t know that side of the family. He met them when he was a baby,” said Duggar King. “And that’s something I regret. 100 percent.”

“But I will always shield him from that. When he’s older, I’m going to explain, ‘Hey, mom was on a show,’ you know,” she continued. “And really kind of tell him, but until then, I get to shield him from a lot of that.”

Describing her son as incredibly social, Duggar King said it’s important to her to protect Daxton from “abuse and hard things” like a “child being hurt.”

“He’s 6-years-old. He needs to live in innocence. And I love that he’s having such a beautiful, happy childhood. A safe childhood,” she said. “That’s most important.”

Duggar King’s cousin Joseph Duggar was arrested on March 18 and charged with lewd and lascivious molestation of a victim less than 12 years old and lewd and lascivious behavior conducted by a person 18 years or older, per the Bay County Sheriff’s Office.

The charges are in connection with a child sexual abuse case involving a then-9-year-old girl who was on vacation with her family in Panama City Beach, Fla., in 2020.

Joseph’s arrest came over a decade after his older brother Josh confessed to molesting multiple young girls, including sisters Jill (Duggar) Dillard and Jessa (Duggar) Seewald, as a teenager. In 2022, he was sentenced to over 12 years in prison after he was found guilty on child pornography charges.

Speaking with PEOPLE in April, Duggar King shared that the scandal involving Josh “was just a huge eye-opener for me, and I realized I needed to distance myself.”

“There’s a lot more to the story, and I was just like, ‘No.’ And that’s when I started really questioning what I’ve been taught for so long, because I was adjacent to the IBLP,” she said, referring to the Institute of Basic Life Principles, a fundamentalist Christian organization with strict moral standards. (Self-described Baptists, Michelle and Jim Bob were inspired by Bill Gothard, founder of IBLP.)

“I wasn’t in it, but I was surrounded by toxic cycles and I did not really fully recognize that, and so I just started deconstructing and learning a lot about things and just educating myself.”