'Sister Wives' Star Kody Brown Blames His Strained Relationships With His Kids on His Loss of 'Power in the Household'

Sister Wives star Kody Brown has a very specific answer as to why his relationships with several of his older children have grown distant over the years.

"Your relationship with your 10-year-old or your five-year-old or your babies is very different than the relationship you have with a 15-year-old, a 20-year-old, and a 25 and a 30-year-old. It's very different," he explained to a news outlet. "I didn't have any power in my household to say, ‘These are the rules.’"

The 54-year-old claimed feeling "powerless" in his various households caused bonds within the family to "unravel," and they struggled to talk through their different "perspectives" during points of conflict.

"There were a lot of things … very difficult issues that we had to deal with," he noted. "There were no good answers at the time."

A repeating plot point over the last few seasons of the hit TLC show has been his strained relationships with two of his sons with Janelle, Garrison, 25, and Gabriel, 21, who were left feeling frustrated and neglected by the Brown family patriarch after refusing to adhere to his strict COVID-19 rules.

Janelle chose to enforce the CDC's pandemic guidelines, rather than Kody's personal list of rules, causing him to allegedly spend most of his time at fourth wife Robyn's home. Meanwhile, the father-of-18 appeared to blame Janelle for not doing enough to help mend the broken bonds between him and their kids.

"In the end, it's almost like it was a blur," Kody admitted. "I don't know what happened. All that's left now is moving forward. Moving forward and hopefully healing these relationships."

"It is really a story now, moving forward. This is a story about forgiveness," he added. "Forgiveness and finding hope and joy after relationships have been severed from the way that's the norm."

As OK! previously reported, Kody is also estranged from his only child that he shares with Meri Brown. According to a source, Kody was "disgusted" after Leon, 28, came out as trans.

"Kody is telling close friends, 'This is a new person. I don't know who this person is, but this is not the little girl that I raised,'" the insider said at the time. "They don't have a relationship anymore, and because of it, it has affected his relationship with Meri, 100 percent."

Kody spoke with People about his relationships with his older kids.