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Watch: Kody Brown and Robyn Brown Leaving Sister Wives

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Inside Sister Wives Alum Kody Brown’s Rift With Most of His 18 Kids

Watch: Kody Brown and Robyn Brown Leaving Sister Wives After 20 Seasons

Safe to say Kody Brown‘s brood is officially divided.

Because 16 years after the father of 18 eagerly told Sister Wives viewers, “You can meet my family. They’re special, you’ll like them,” the series will return to TLC Oct. 4 without the patriarch or his sole remaining wife, Robyn Brown.

“I was actually surprised when I was told that Kody and Robyn weren’t coming back to the show,” Meri Brown, who revealed the end of her 32-year union to Kody in 2022, admitted in the season 21 trailer.

Same, same, noted a “flabbergasted” Janelle Brown, while Christine Brown acknowledged she “didn’t know how to process it all.”

But it’s not as if his ex-wives were the only ones who didn’t want the man.

While Janelle (who revealed a new red flag-free romance in August) and Christine (celebrating her third anniversary with David Woolley Oct. 7) announced their respective separations 13 months apart in 2021 and 2022, their children have also been vocal about their splits from Kody.

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Sister Wives: A Guide to Kody Brown’s Kids With Janelle, Christine, Robyn and Meri

While he remains close to Robyn’s eldest Dayton, Aurora and Breanna (plus younger siblings Solomon, 14, and Ariella, 10) Janelle has estimated that Kody is “alienated from 90 to 95 percent” of his children.

For a while, Christine’s daughter Mykelti Padron served as the rare holdout, maintaining a connection with both Kody and Robyn and her siblings.

But, “right now, we don’t have a very deep relationship,” the mother of three acknowledged during a November appearance on the Pop Psych YouTube series. “We’re not talking, but we’re not not talking.”

Though she said the Special Forces star had been reaching out, “It’s hard because with me, I’m a package deal,” she continued. “You gotta treat my whole family nice, you gotta treat my kids nice. You gotta talk to all of us, you can’t just have me.”

Photo by Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic

Which means, she’s going to query him about his status with Leon Brown (Meri’s child has dubbed Kody “a joke of a father”), Christine’s other children Aspyn Thompson, Paedon Brown, Gwendlyn Queiroz, Ysabel Brown and Truely Brown, plus Janelle’s kids Logan Brown, Madison Brush, Hunter Brown, Gabriel Brown and Savanah Brown (Janelle and Kody’s son Garrison Brown died by suicide in 2024).

“I’m going to ask him, ‘Hey what’s going on with you and Truely? What’s going on with you and Ysabel? What’s going on with you and Savannah?'” Mykelti noted. “And he’s going to be like, ‘I want to have a relationship with you right now. My relationship with them is separate.”

The way she sees it, however, is that their love was meant to be multiplied, not divided.

“He wants to figure out each relationship individually as they go,” said Mykelti, “and I want to be like, ‘Well why can’t we all just get together be happy and love each other?'”

The answer depends on which of her siblings you speak with. Here’s what they’ve each shared about their ongoing estrangement.

Gabriel BrownFor 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, Gabriel 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.”

Ysabel BrownKody 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, while 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.”

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Paedon BrownIf 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.”

Gwendlyn Brown/Instagram

Gwendlyn QueirozAdmittedly, 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.”

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Mykelti PadronOne 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.”

Leon Brown/Instagram

Leon BrownA 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 2025 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.”

Instagram/Madison Brush

Madison BrushWhen 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 a November 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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