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Sister Wives has followed children growing up into adults (and parents) and also followed the breakdown of a plural marriage into a singular one.
But, at the end of the day, a lot went on for this very troubled family that the cameras never really captured.
Mykelti Brown is describing an extreme no-tattling policy, where simply telling on someone could get you into more trouble than the actual wrongdoer.
She cites multiple examples — including getting punished after a neighbor molested her. Robyn, she says, changed that policy.
Content warning: this article includes mention of child molestation in some form
On the Monday, June 15 episode of the Cults to Consciousness podcast, Mykelti said that she isn’t quite ready to talk about when a neighbor kid — their ages both unspecified — molested her.
Given her word choice, one has to assume that this was not a case of same-age peers experimenting, and that there was an unsavory age gap involved.
“Tattle-telling, that was one of the biggest traumatizing things,” Mykelti recalled. “I know it sounds weird but that was one of the biggest things I remember growing up is we were not allowed to tattle-tell anything.”
She rattled off examples of how this applied even if a sibling was “in a life and death situation.” Bizarre and dangerous, for the Sister Wives stars or any other family.
This wasn’t an issue with just one parent, either. Mykelti explained: “Every single parent had this exact same stance.”
Even in a best-case scenario, where no one dies or is injured as a result, this sort of policy can only have one consequence: silence.
Children need to be able to confide in their parents and trust them. This policy created a culture of the opposite, and that had consequences.
“I think it created a lot of issues with us kids not telling our parents the truth, and not wanting to come to them when things actually needed to be told,” Mykelti reflected.
“Like, ‘hey, this neighbor kid touched me on my private parts,’” she cited as just one obvious example.
Sagely, Mykelti reasoned: “What kid is going to go tell their parents if they’re worried that they’re going to get in more trouble?”
Finally, this toxic family culture changed when Robyn joined the family
“I stopped telling my mom things,” Mykelti said of her childhood.
She said that she kept quiet “to such a degree that I could have been saved a lot of hurt, a lot of emotional damage and pain, if I had that trust with my mom, with my dad, with my other moms.”
But she did not have that culture of trust, where she could safely come forward. So she didn’t.
Mykelti shared that she had only learned about sex from her friends — not from her parents or from educators.
The experience with the neighbor, which she again isn’t ready to talk about in any detail, made her feel “dirty.” Getting into trouble for talking about it certainly didn’t help.
PHOTO FOUR
Ultimately, it was Robyn joining the family — seemingly being the only person who could reach Kody — that changed this rule.
“She went to my dad and she was like, ‘This is not OK. You guys handled this wrong. She needs help. She needs to be saved and rescued!’” Mykelti explained.
“So, it was like a big thing for me like, ‘OK so there’s this person who came into my family that’s here to protect me,’” she explained. “‘They like it when I tattle-tell. I’m allowed to talk to them about things.’”
Mykelti shared: “So that’s when my life started to change and got a lot more better and I did get help that I needed.”
She added: “That’s when a lot of things began to change in our family, too. Tattle-telling became OK and discipline changed a lot.”