In ‘Sister Wives’ Season 14, Kody carries Robyn’s 17-year-old daughter upstairs when she has a panic attack. Is this normal or is their relationship codependent?
Back in Sister Wives Season 14, Robyn Brown’s daughter, Aurora Brown, suffers a panic attack during the filming of the TV show, and Kody Brown carries the then-17-year-old Aurora to her bedroom to lie down. This is just one of many examples that fans believe Kody showing favoritism toward Robyn’s children and some belive even be signs of an unhealthy codependent relationship.
Aurora’s panic attacks
In Sister Wives Season 14 Episode 10, “A Breaking Point,” Robyn and Kody tell their five children — Dayton, Aurora, Breanna, Solomon, and Ariella — that they will have to move out of their rental in Flagstaff, Arizona and find a new house. The news becomes too much for Aurora she starts having a panic attack.
Dayton, who was 19 years old at the time, questions his sister’s panic attack regarding moving houses. “Is it really that bad?” Robyn goes to a crying Aurora and comforts her.
Aurora begins spasming and twitching, which Robyn tells the cameras is the “first signs” of a panic attack is starting. “Aurora’s panic attacks sometimes are triggered by stress,” Robyn tells the cameras. “It stresses Aurora out when the two of us are not like totally in love and harmonious,” Kody tells Robyn in their interview.
Kody caries Aurora up to her room
In the interview, Robyn cries, saying, “We just need to get her out of this room. We need to get her to her bedroom.” She says that when Aurora is in the middle of a panic attack, “she can’t talk, and she can’t walk.”
Kody picks 17-year-old Aurora up in his arms and carries her upstairs to her bedroom. While in the room, Robyn and Kody comfort her. Kody’s heard whispering, “It’s always OK. Look at my eyes. I’m right here.”
Kody says that he and Robyn are Aurora’s “safe place,” and it triggers a panic attack if they’re fighting. Robyn blames herself for the stress she caused her daughter. “When it happens, it’s heartbreaking and hard, and I feel like I did this to her somehow,” Robyn says.
Aurora explained that she has these anxiety attacks around “four to five times a week” and are triggered by being “emotionally or physically exhausted” or when she’s in a “high-stress situation.”
Kody is shocked by how intense Aurora’s panic attacks have become. “To me, this is the worst I’ve ever seen,” he tells the cameras. “We’re seeing a doctor about it,” he says.
Robyn thinks Aurora’s anxiety comes from seeing a “disruption in our family culture,” meaning the wives have all separated in four houses and have begun to live their separate lives. “She misses Kody. She misses the family,” Robyn says about Aurora.
Kody’s codependent relationships with Robyn’s children
For many Sister Wives fans, the fact that Robyn and Kody allowed cameras to film Aurora’s anxiety/panic attack seemed strange. Robyn tweeted after the episode aired that Aurora gave her full permission to air the panic attack on national television, saying she wanted to spread awareness to others struggling with the same issue.
The majority of fans felt that instead of catering to Aurora’s nearly daily panic attacks, Robyn and Kody should be getting her medical and psychological help to learn healthy coping mechanisms instead.
As for Kody carrying Aurora to her bedroom, some fans believe this was proof of how codependent their relationship is. “I guess with Kodys need to be worshipped & Auroras need to feel secure/attention puts them in a codependent relationship,” one fan wrote via Reddit.
In the Dec. 4 episode of Sister Wives, Kody proved how strangely codependent he is with Robyn’s children. When everyone at Robyn’s house had coronavirus (COVID-19), 22-year-old Aurora quarantined away from the rest of the family in the basement. Kody remembered after 10-days of separation, him and Aurora were sobbing that they couldn’t see each other.
Kody is estranged from most of his other children
It bothered many fans that Kody has no problem rushing to Aurora’s side when she’s having a panic attack, but when Christine Brown’s daughter, Ysabel Brown, needed her dad to be by her side during a serious spine surgery to correct her scoliosis, he wasn’t there. Kody didn’t make an effort to be there for Ysabel during the surgery or during the months of painful recovery.
Kody said he couldn’t travel to be there for Ysabel because he doesn’t want to be away from 10-year-old Solomon and 5-year-old Ariella for more than two to three days at a time. This caused Kody and Ysabel’s father-daughter relationship to fracture and since, has never been the same. Sister Wives fans struggle to understand why Kody is capable of being there for Robyn’s children, but not his other kids.
With Kody having broken relationships with most of his children he shares with his other wives, fans can’t help but feel like he favors Robyn’s children.
New episodes of Sister Wives Season 17 air Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
