Welcome to Plathville 's Kim Plath Opens Up About Being Abused by a Babysitter as a Child
Season 4 of the hit reality series following the large Plath family has seen a number of the children asking their mom, 49, tough questions about her decision to separate from their father, Barry Plath, after 24 years of marriage. But when her 21-year-old son Micah Plath asked her why she and Barry raised him and his siblings the way they did — conservative, religious, homeschooled, sheltered from technology and on a farm far from others — he wasn't expecting to hear that his mother had been abused as a child.
While meeting up for drinks — something that once seemed unimaginable — Micah and Kim discussed the reasons for her desire to end her marriage, and Micah asked outright, "What made you raise us the way that you did?"
It's uncomfortable," Kim began. "There are several things, but one thing that is kind of big in terms of how it affected me is when I was 4 and 5, my mom, who was a single parent and doing the best that she could, hired a babysitter to watch me. And he was a teenage boy. And I can just say that when you have little girls, the last thing you want is for them to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and have something happen."
"That was a regular thing for me growing up. Just 4 and 5, those ages," she continued. "If you read the statistics, people that are most likely to do something like that are people that are close to the family, people that you don't suspect."
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After making that point, she and Micah exchanged a serious look and nod of understanding before Kim went on.
"That is why I always knew where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, whatever," she explained. "That played a very large part in me being protective — maybe overprotective — but to me, the risk of not being overprotective enough is so great that I'd rather err on the side of overprotecting than under and have something like that happen."
Surprised and taking it in, Micah responded, "I guess I only realized my dad's reasoning. I thought it was all out of religion. That's all that was talked about."
"Because I wasn't going to tell you the other when you're little," Kim said.
"When I was 17, 18, I kind of realized that there had to have been something that I had never heard about that made you raise us the way we were, but I'd never heard what it was," Micah admitted
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In an interview following their conversation, Kim noted, "I chose to tell Micah tonight some things about some abuse that I experienced when I was a child. Hopefully, he'll have a little more understanding of who I am and how I came to parent like I did. I feel like I processed this a long time ago, but it's just more helping Micah have some understanding."
"It hurts hearing this, but I'm glad she's telling me," Micah said in his interview. "It gives me more of an understanding of who she is as a person and the way she raised us, the rules she had and the walls she had built. It's like a penny-drop moment. As soon as she told me, all the pieces fit together."
Later, Micah continued, "Growing up, I heard very few stories from my mom or my dad about their childhood. I always felt like my parents were perfect, so I always felt so much disapproval because I wasn't perfect. Because of that, there was never the environment of, 'Well, just talk to me. I'm not going to judge you.' Hearing this from my mom, I realized we're just all humans. We all have problems. It kind of just opens up a bigger connection."
Welcome to Plathville airs Tuesdays at 10