‘Welcome to Plathville’: The Plath Parents Reveal Their Biggest Worry About Micah and Moriah Plath
Kim and Barry Plath of TLC’s Welcome to Plathville have many rules for their nine children. The Christian fundamentalist parents expect their kids to avoid every kind of temptation, from cell phones, movies, TV, and social media to sugar, alcohol, dating, and revealing clothes.
Over time, some of the older Plath kids – especially 17-year-old Moriah Plath and 19-year-old Micah Plath – began to drift away from their family’s strict rules. On the Welcome to Plathville season 2 premiere on Nov. 10, Kim and Barry revealed their biggest fears about the siblings’ “rebellious” ways.
Micah and Moriah were kicked out of the Plath family home
Despite their relatively young ages, Micah and Moriah were kicked out of the Plath family home and forced to find another house in the small town of Cairo, Georgia. According to Kim and Barry, they were especially concerned about the siblings’ “rebellion” against their rules.
Micah called the decision to move out a “mutual agreement,” but Moriah saw things a little differently.
“I moved out of the house…slash got kicked out,” the Welcome to Plathville star admitted, adding that she was now relieved to be out from under her parents’ thumb.
“I had got to the point where I was just starving for freedom and just didn’t follow the rules my parents had set,” the 17-year-old confessed. “They tried to control literally everything — what we ate, what we wore.”
Moriah eventually realized that she wanted to see more of the world and to stop feeling like such an “outsider” every time she left her parents’ isolated 55-acre farm.
Kim and Barry worried that their older children would turn their younger kids against them
As for the Plath parents, they admitted the family was “fractured” due to the older kids’ distaste for the many household rules.
Despite Micah and Moriah’s desire to push the boundaries, however, nothing much had changed back at the Plath home. They still adhered to their usual list of rules, which included no phones for the children, no social media, little to no sugar, modest clothing, no video games, no rock music, and supervised movie watching and internet use.
Barry and Kim’s biggest worry was that Moriah and Micah would lead some of their younger kids to rebel as well – or, possibly even worse, turn them against their parents. The Welcome to Plathville stars were concerned that all their kids would start to resent them over time.
“It was likely to me that they might plant seeds of rebellion and bitterness in the younger children, especially Isaac and Amber,” Kim explained of her decision to ask the teens to move. “If they couldn’t live with our rules, then they needed to move out.”
Moriah’s mom admitted to having “reservations” about the decision because her daughter was still underage. Still, Moriah lived just a block away if she needed anything in an emergency.
Moriah said her parents’ house no longer felt like home
The fragility of the relationship between Micah, Moriah, and their parents was on full display when the siblings visited Kim and Barry at home for the first time in four months on the Welcome to Plathville season premiere. Neither Micah nor Moriah even felt comfortable visiting the Plaths’ home alone, so they went together for “moral support.”
“When you get cornered, they have a way of – no matter what you say, they make you feel like you’re at fault,” Micah lamented of his parents.
As for Moriah, she feared that her relationship with her parents was irrevocably changed. Her lack of freedom at home had been stifling, and she still resented them for what she considered to be her subpar homeschooling education.
“When I moved out of the house, I was angry and frustrated, and I didn’t want any communication with them except for the stuff that was extremely necessary,” Moriah told TLC producers, adding: “This doesn’t feel like home. It feels like a trap, a cage, that I worked so hard to get out of.”
Kim and Barry, too, admitted they felt “nervous” and “on edge” around their older children after all the conflict between them. They felt they had to keep their distance so as to not scare the teens off – and they hoped their kids would eventually begin to open up to them again.
