‘Sister Wives’ Kids Weren’t Paid for Filming, Gwendlyn Brown Says
Life changed for the better when the Brown family started filming Sister Wives, Gwendlyn Brown says.
Gwendlyn, 23, appeared on the TLC show along with her dad, Kody Brown, his four wives, and her 17 brothers and sisters. Now, 15 years after cameras first started documenting their life as a polygamist Mormon family, she’s looking back at her unusual upbringing and the positives and negatives that came with growing up on reality TV.
‘Sister Wives’ lifted the Brown family out of poverty, Gwendlyn Brown says
Gwendlyn was one of several children of reality TV stars who recently spoke to Teen Vogue about spending their childhood and teen years in front of the camera.
Sister Wives premiered in 2010. At first, Gwendlyn, then eight years old, saw the film’s crew presence in her family’s life as cool.
“I was super into it as a kid,” she said.
Aside from using her new status as a reality star to impress kids at school, the family TLC series came with more tangible benefits. Filming Sister Wives lifted the Brown family out of “a poverty situation,” Gwendlyn – who is the daughter of Kody and third wife, Christine Brown – revealed.
“We just got thrown into fame and thrown into money. And I stopped wanting and needing things,” she said. “Life is a lot easier for a kid that’s not going hungry. It was quite a blessing initially.”
Kody and his wives have been open about the financial issues the family faced before they became TV and tabloid fixtures.
“Our biggest struggles have been financial,” Kody wrote in the family’s 2012 book, Becoming Sister Wives.
“Money was really tight,” Gwendlyn’s mom Christine agreed.
“Paying the bills was always a challenge – we never had enough money no matter how hard we worked,” Kody’s second wife Janelle Brown shared.
Gwendlyn got some money from her time on ‘Sister Wives,’ but not her ‘fair share’
While Sister Wives paychecks improved the Brown family’s financial situation overall, none of that money was flowing directly to the children, Gwendlyn said.
“The network only paid the parents,” she explained. “I’m not sure if they did or didn’t expect the parents to pay us kids, but we weren’t paid.”
Later, Christine decided to give her children “a certain amount per day or half-day of camera time,” Gwendlyn added. However, the amount she’s received from her years on the show “certainly hasn’t been a fair share.”
Christine confirmed to the magazine that the Brown children weren’t paid directly at first, but that the family put money aside for them to pay for college and cars.
Gwendlyn and her siblings are not the only reality TV kids who haven’t received paychecks for their time filming. Noelle Robinson, who is the daughter of The Real Housewives of Atlanta star Cynthia Bailey, said she wasn’t paid for appearing on the Bravo series, even though she opened up about her personal life and sexuality to the cameras.
Another ex-reality star has slammed her parents for allowing her childhood to be turned into entertainment. Jill Duggar starred with her dad Jim Bob Duggar, mom Michelle Duggar, and 18 siblings in TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On. In her 2023 memoir, Counting the Cost, she says her dad tricked her into signing a contract for the show the day before her wedding to Derick Dillard. She and her husband demanded and eventually received $175,000 from her father, which she said was a small fraction of what she was really owed. Jill claimed Jim Bob raked in roughly $8 million from his family’s reality show before it was canceled in 2021.
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