Years into his rift with his kids, Sister Wives’ Kody Brown is willing to hold space. But, he stressed on the Dec. 21 episode, the issues aren’t because “they or I did something wrong and offensive.” To hear Sister Wives‘ Kody Brown tell it, his ongoing rift with most of his adult children has little to do with the sins of the father.
While the family patriarch was willing to mend things with his former bride Christine Brown Woolley on the long-running TLC series’ Dec. 21 episode, he wasn’t interested in hearing her husband David Woolley espouse on the family feud. After Kody apologized to his second wife—who announced their separation in 2021—for saying he never loved her and “being the freaking victim, because I wasn’t,” David asked if he could provide a bit of advice.
“Start with your kids,” offered the widower, a father of eight himself. “Show that part. Because the women have moved on, but your kids still need to heal.” But Kody—at odds with most of the offspring he shares with exes Christine, Meri Brown and Janelle Brown—wasn’t willing to tend to that particular wound.
Noting that he’d “set a boundary with his kids and I’m setting that boundary with David and Christine,” the father of 18 explained in a confessional, “My whole purpose here is to apologize to Christine. Not to David. Not to anybody else.” Besides, Kody added, he worried that getting into the particulars of his feud with his children “will bring me back to an angry place.”
His issue with David offering his two cents, Kody explained, was that “he’s kind of just on the opposite side of this.”
What’s more, though David has spent time with the six children Kody shares with Christine—Aspyn Thomas, Mykelti Padron, Paedon Brown, Gwendlyn Queiroz, Ysabel Brown and Truely Brown—”He really just doesn’t know what’s going on,” the family patriarch insisted. “He thinks he does. He thinks he understands polygamy, but he only has a small perspective on it.” And Kody’s viewpoint is that the friction stems from his splits with Meri, Janelle and Christine.
“Those deteriorations happened as a party, not as an individual,” stressed Kody, who remains married to fourth wife Robyn Brown. “My bad experience with my children and their pain comes from an experience that we were in together, not that they or I did something wrong and offensive.”
And now, he continued, “I’m willing to have the conversation. I’m willing to hold space. ‘Dad, you did this, you did this, you did this.’ I’m willing to hold that space.”
What he, David and Christine did agree on was that everyone and their mother shouldn’t be running interference. “You guys can advise my kids to communicate with me,” stressed Kody, “but I shouldn’t have you guys involved in my relationship with my children.”
Agreed Christine, “It’s your relationship with your kids.” For David, he left feeling he’d tried his best. “When he cut me off on it, I’m like, ‘OK, I had to say what I said just to make sure,'” explained David. “Because I am around his kids and I do see them hurt and I’m hoping that he’ll reach out to every one of them and it’s not just on his terms. It’s on their terms, too. Trust me, it doesn’t work that way in a relationship with your kids.”
For her part, Christine had no intention of making sure what happened in Vegas, stayed in Vegas. With her, Kody and David making a trip to the Speed Vegas racing venue the afternoon after their tense talk, “I want to be able to go home from this and my kids to say, ‘How was it with dad?’ And I’ll go, ‘It was awesome,'” she explained. “They need to know that it’s completely fine to hang out with him.”
In order to get on the right track toward a reconciliation, she continued, “They need to go have fun with their dad and not just sit and have a meal and have a conversation.”
