Sister Wives stars Christine Brown and Janelle Brown are coming to terms with the failure of plural marriage in their family. Christine announced her split from Kody Brown in November 2021, and Janelle followed in December 2022, although she was still struggling with the relationship during Season 18. And so far, each of their adult children to marry has chosen monogamy.
“None of our children have chosen to live polygamy,” Janelle says. “We don’t even have any really that are in the Mormon church, the mainstream [LDS] church.” As Christine’s son Paedon flatly declared in last week’s episode, polygamy no longer “works in my family.”
“When they were growing up,” Janelle continues, “we always just encouraged them to have a relationship with God, and I think many of them do in their own way … I think polygamy is hard … and you really do have to have a religious conviction. And they just don’t.” People is spilling some exclusive tea.
Polygamy no longer works for the Browns
“Some of our kids have seen how hard it is,” Christine admits. “And some of our kids have seen the separation.” The Brown family contains 18 children, ranging in age from seven to 29. Their four moms are Meri Brown, Janelle, Christine, and Robyn Brown (Kody’s only legal wife).
Christine adds of the grown children, “They see how hard it is and they’re like, ‘No, no, no, no, no. No, that’s not for me.'”
Janelle shared that she and Kody originally committed to raising all of their children under one roof. “We had this vision [of raising all of the children from the various moms] together as siblings … We tried living in one house as long as we could until we didn’t fit anymore … That big picture was our dream.”
In January 2023, Meri and Kody announced their split. They had legally divorced in 2014 so that Kody and Robyn could wed and Kody could legally adopt her three children from her previous marriage. But even though three of his four wives have left, Janelle says all of the older kids are still close.
A fractured family
“The kids are all the same,” she says. “They all interact, and I interact with the kids the same as I always did. The kids all really feel like … siblings.” The exception may be Robyn’s three older children, who came into the family in 2010 when she and Kody married spiritually. They have never really been accepted by the other older kids, since they never lived in the same house and didn’t grow up together.
Janelle and Christine have also remained “very close” and still spend time together. Even though Kody, Meri and Robyn remain friendly, Janelle claims “to some degree, it’s still very polite [and] superficial.”
While the Brown family is pretty fractured these days, Christine hopes that changes. “I’m hopeful that … someday we can function as a family again,” she says. “I think we have smaller separate families that bump into each other like boats on the water, and it causes ripples and it’s bumpy. Sometimes it’s very rough waters, but eventually, hopefully, we can be around each other and it will be calm.”
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10/9c on TLC.
TELL US – DO YOU THINK THE BROWN FAMILY WILL EVER FEEL WHOLE AGAIN? DO YOU SEE ROBYN’S CHILDREN EVER REALLY BEING INCLUDED?
