Sister Wives' Kody Brown Says This Caused His Rift With His Kids
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."
Because at this point, many of Kody's kids have already delivered their thoughts. Check out what they've said about their fractured relationships.
For Gabriel Brown, it was far too late for dad Kody Brown to say sorry. Initially at odds over Kody's intense COVID restrictions, they continued to keep their distance even as stay home orders began to lift.
Kody's issue, recounted Janelle Brown, who shares sons Logan Brown, Hunter Brown, Garrison Brown and Gabriel as well as daughters Madison Brush and Savanah Brown, with the patriarch, was that he felt his kids hadn't been loyal to him and his rules.
"He kept phrasing it like I owed him an apology," Gabriel detailed to Janelle in an October 2024 episode of Sister Wives. "Eventually I was just like, 'Hey, unless you're, like, actually ready to have a relationship and fix things, then we're not going to talk anymore.' He came back a couple of days later and texted me. He's like, 'Hey, I've been, like, thinking about what you've been saying. I forgive you, Please forgive me.' I was like, 'Forgive me for what?'"
So tight with his dad he used to accompany him on business trips, he remains confused about what he did. But, he noted to Janelle, "I told Dad that if he doesn't change and he can't take accountability, then I just won't ever see him again. And I'm perfectly OK with that."
Kody may have meant for his love to be multiplied, but his time with his 18 kids has definitely been divided. Which is why Ysabel Brown feared that when David Woolley married mom Christine Brown in 2023, he might fully take over the role her father once played in her life.
"I worry," a tearful Ysabel shared in a confessional on a November 2024 episode, "that my dad and the chance of having a really close relationship with my dad is slowly going away."
Not that she didn't appreciate David as a stepdad.
"He comes off as a very present dad with his children, so I mean, how lovely would that be, right?" she noted. "So I would love to have a relationship that is as amazing with my own father."
And she's still holding out hope, admitting in a November 2025 episode, "My dad and I aren't like, close, close, close, close, close, close."
Still, why she thought of Christine as both mom and dad, she wouldn't call her relationship with Kody—who refused to fly cross-country when she had back surgery mid-pandemic—nonexistent. "I mean, he's still my dad," she insisted, "and I love him."
If Kody had his way, Paedon Brown—one of Christine's six kids—wouldn't say much of anything about him.
Speaking with YouTuber John Yates in January 2023, Paedon recalled receiving an "out of the blue" phone call from his dad. "It's like an hour-long conversation and it goes really, really well," he recounted. "And I'm like, 'OK, I might be getting my father back. This is wonderful.'"
Then he called his mom.
Talking to Christine—also mom to Aspyn Thompson, Mykelti Padron, Gwendlyn Queiroz, Ysabel and Truely Brown—Paedon learned that Kody had been working to convince producers not to let his children trash him, "trying to put it in our contracts that we are not allowed to say anything negative about him on our platforms."
But it was a deal he couldn't close. "My mom was like, 'No, you're not allowed to tell our children what they can and can't say about you. You have to earn their love back,'" explained Paedon. "And I realized he didn't call me because he wanted to talk to me. He called me because he doesn't want me talking negatively."
Admittedly, Gwendlyn doesn't fully recognize the Kody that parents his five kids with wife Robyn Brown. "It hurts so much to see him be a good father to others when I didn't really get that much," she acknowledged in a February 2023 YouTube video of watching him with youngest children Solomon Brown and Ariella Brown.
And while she's happy they get "an active father," she noted, "I don’t remember coming home from kindergarten or anything and seeing my dad being happy that I ate all my lunch, or that I made a friend at school."
That being said, she was still willing to play nice.
In a January 2023 YouTube video she labeled their relationship as "very flip-floppy."
In person, "My dad's sweet to me now," noted Gwendlyn, who invited Kody and Robyn to her and Beatriz Queiroz's July 2023 wedding. "We had our differences in the past, but we're getting better. And since we're not around each other as much, we can't really be angry with each other as much."
But when she tunes into the Sunday night episodes, she added, "I do tend to dislike him a little bit. And I just have to remind myself that he's going through a difficult time and it's just hard on everybody and, you know, he's still my dad and he's still kind to me."
One of the few Brown kids who was still close to both Robyn and Kody and Christine and Janelle, Mykelti took on the role of peacekeeper during Kody's three divorces.
But in the years since, she seems to have resigned from Team Kody, giving her take on the rift months after she and husband Tony Padron made the move to North Carolina with their three children.
"I think that if he took more accountability in any of his actions, his kids—maybe not all of them, but at least some of them—would reach out," she noted during an October 2024 fan Q&A shared on the Instagram account @withoutacrystalball. "Instead of blaming the children, or blaming how they feel about his relationship with his other wife or blaming the parents or blaming gossip or whatever, if he just said, 'Look, I understand I did blank wrong. I’m sorry. Can we talk about it?' I feel like that would go such a long way."
As for his stance that he shouldn't need to beg his children to repair their relationship, she wasn't having it.
“No matter what happens between myself and my kids, I would always sit outside that door, knock, apologize and ask, and ask, and ask, and just continue to try to do whatever I could to make that relationship stronger," the mom of three insisted, before referencing Kody's claim that his former wives had metaphorically stabbed him in the back. "I feel like that’s what you do as a parent. Sometimes you just have to take the knife in the kidney, get over it, and apologize."
A message worth interrupting their peace. Leon Brown has largely avoided the spotlight since their Sister Wives days. But Meri Brown's only child felt compelled to break their social media hiatus to address Kody's recent claim that he'd reached out to all of his kids "multiple times" and that if they don't have a relationship with him "it's because they're not reciprocating."
But Leon insisted there's no missed calls on their cell. "There's a ridiculous video of my father circulating where he says he reaches out to his children," they wrote on their Instagram Stories in November 2025. Noting they hadn't heard from Kody since brother Garrison's March 2024 death by suicide, Leon added, "kody blatantly blew me off at garrison's funeral. he is a liar. he is a joke of a father. that's all."
When it comes to her complicated relationship with her dad, Maddie isn't solely concerned with protecting her heart.
"I am open to reconciliation and forgiveness and closure," she shared on the Nov. 30, 2025, episode of the TLC series after welcoming fourth child Emilia in March 2025. But if her father wanted to fully be let into the life she shares with husband Caleb Brush and kids Axel, Evie, Josephine and Emilia "there would need to be a pattern of consistency."
And judging by her scathing October 2025 social media rebuke, she's still waiting.
Sharing an inspirational quote to her Instagram Stories about carefully deciding what is “worth your energy," Maddie explained how she was able to reach that point.
As she wrote in a DM to one follower looking for tips, "Your dad saying lies about you for the entire world to hear teaches it to you REAL QUICK."
Her main issue, she noted on a 2024 episode of her The Authentic Society podcast was that "he doesn't have any respect for boundaries. And you have to play by his rules, and I just don't care to do that."
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