Woman Raised With 44 Siblings Opens Up About Life Inside a Polygamous Family

At age 8, Janet Zitting felt sorry for a girl who told her she only had one mom. Zitting had four. Raised alongside 44 brothers and sisters in a polygamous household, she assumed every family looked like hers until a single conversation changed everything. Now 32, Zitting has turned that origin story into a viral phenomenon, answering the internet’s most pressing questions about growing up in a family most people can barely imagine. 

“I remember when I was 8 or 10, I was talking to one of the neighbor kids,” Zitting recalls. “She’s like, ‘What do you mean? I only have one mom.'” Zitting remembers thinking the girl’s life sounded lonely, not the other way around. For her, four mothers was the baseline. That exchange became her first clue that the world outside her front door ran on entirely different rules. 

Zitting grew up with her father and four mothers, including her biological mom, inside a group called The Work, an offshoot of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints once led by Warren Jeffs, who is currently serving a life sentence for child sexual assault. Members of The Work practice polygamy, a marriage arrangement that stays illegal nationwide but carries only the weight of an infraction in Utah, the equivalent of a traffic ticket. That legal gray zone shaped nearly everything about her childhood.

Inside a House With Four Moms and 44 Kids

Privacy was a luxury Zitting rarely had. She shared a bedroom with seven sisters, and during one home renovation, as many as 16 children slept in a single room. She would sneak into a blanket closet just to nap alone. Meals, chores and childcare ran on a constant rotation split among mothers and older siblings. “We had people raising the kids, cleaning the house, cooking food,” Zitting says. “It was a constant flow, every single day, nonstop.”

The family lived on a small farm, raising animals and growing produce to offset grocery costs for dozens of mouths. Even then, trips to warehouse stores added up fast. Zitting remembers one holiday Costco run totaling around $1,500. Birthdays and Christmas were skipped entirely growing up. Her parents called celebrations “worldly,” though Zitting now suspects money, not doctrine, was the real reason behind the rule. 

Despite the chaos, Zitting insists she never lost track of who was who. She can name every one of her 44 siblings and knows their birthdays too, a party trick that routinely stuns her followers online. The gap between her oldest sibling, 48, and her youngest, 15, spans three decades. Today they stay connected through a sprawling web of group chats, proof that a childhood built on numbers never diluted the closeness.

Why She Finally Walked Away

Zitting became one of the first of her siblings to leave The Work, over 13 years ago. About half of her brothers and sisters eventually followed. She did not sneak out under cover of darkness. “A lot of people ask if I had to escape, but I just told my parents that I was moving out,” she says. The reaction from those still inside the community, she adds, came fast. 

Leaving a tightly bound religious community rarely comes without friction. Zitting remembers a family deeply convinced she was making a mistake. “Everyone’s so passionate about it, so they think you’re making a mistake,” she says. “But I knew I wasn’t. I just knew that it wasn’t for me.” Half her siblings remain committed members of The Work today, a divide that could easily have fractured her family for good. 

Instead, Zitting describes many of the siblings still inside the group as her closest friends. “They’re just all so loving, so kind, and they’re so beautiful inside and out,” she says. What she rejected was the control she felt the religion exerted over her own life. Her family remained something she cherished, a distinction she is careful to draw whenever the subject comes up online.

Her New Normal, and the Internet’s Disbelief

Zitting’s videos explaining her upbringing have racked up millions of views, and not everyone believes her. “Some people are saying it’s AI. Some people are saying there’s no way,” she says. “But it’s just funny that my life, what is normal to me, can have such a big reaction.” For a woman who kept her family structure secret for years, the disbelief has become an odd form of validation. 

Now a mother herself, Zitting hopes for one or two more children, a modest number compared to the family she grew up in. She describes herself as spiritual rather than religious, far removed from the strict rules of her childhood. Having helped raise several younger siblings, she says the experience already gave her a preview of parenthood long before she had a child of her own.

Zitting does not frame her exit as a rejection of the people who raised her. What she left behind was the box the religion built around her, not the family inside it. Forty-four siblings, four mothers, and one blanket closet later, she has landed on a version of normal built on something her childhood never allowed her to have out loud: honesty.