‘Sister Wives’ Star Mykelti Brown Explains How Plural Family Upbringing Left Her ‘Unprepared’ For Parenting

Mykelti Brown is struggling to figure out which parenting style works for her.

In an Instagram video, the Sister Wives star, 29 — who shares daughter Avalon, 5, and 3-year-old twins Archer and Ace, with husband Tony Padron — explained how being raised by polygamists affected her as a parent.

Mykelti’s biological parents are Kody and Christine Brown, but she was also raised by Kody’s other wives, Janelle Brown, Meri Brown and Robyn Brown.

“Friendly reminder from a new mom who had five different women show her what motherhood looked like and still felt completely unprepared that if you feel lost trying to figure out your own parenting style, that makes sense,” Mykelti remarked, perhaps referring to both Kody’s wives and her older sister, Aspyn, 31, who she’s said was like mom to her growing up. “In a plural family, you don’t really get one parenting model. You’re just absorbing five different ones.”

“Different rules, different warmth levels, different expectations depending on whose day it was,” she continued. “Then you have your own kid [and] it’s not just the parenting decisions that feel hard. It’s knowing which versions of mom you even wanna be. Suddenly, you’re holding your baby thinking, ‘I actually don’t know whose example to follow.'”

Mykelti captioned her post, “Growing up in Polygamy Complicates not just your Childhood but also Motherhood!”

Over the years, Mykelti has had a complicated relationship with her family and has chosen to cut contact with Meri.

“She was very, very hard and she was very strict, and she tended to pick on me a lot more so than the other kids,” Mykelti said of Meri’s parenting style in a November appearance on the Pop Psych YouTube show.

“She’d had these big emotional swings where she would just get angry and intense,” Mykelti recalled. “She just was not a very good parent. She wasn’t a very good mom. She was not fun to be around in any sense of the word.”

During the episode, Mykelti also spoke about her strained relationship with Kody, admitting, “right now we don’t have a very deep relationship. We’re not talking, but we’re not not talking.”