Jon Gosselin rose to fame on the TLC show “Jon and Kate Plus 8”, and the world watched the 8 Gosselin children grow up on their television screens. The show allowed the family to travel the world, ensured that the kids would be able to go to college, and helped pay for a home with plenty of acreage for the kids to run around on. But ultimately, says Jon, it hurt them.
“It just became stressful on the kids and stressful on me,” Gosselin told Oprah recently. “You’re trying to keep your marriage together, and you’re trying to keep your family ties together…Yes, they got to travel the world, and yes, they got these fabulous things, and yes, they have trust funds, and they’re taken care of educationally. Great. But developmentally, they have problems with their peers, and they have problems with talking to other people, and they have problems with wants and needs and manners and morals and what’s right and what’s wrong. I think more so than someone who grows up off TV.”
Gosselin says that after a bitter divorce, he and Kate don’t really have any communication other than the barest essentials regarding their shared guardianship of the kids.
“At this point, there is no cooperation, there is nothing, There’s two different totally parenting styles, two different totally everythings. Which is a shame, because it affects me, but it really affects my children,” he said.
Gosselin, who now works as a waiter in rural Pennsylvania, says his reputation became ruined towards the end of the show’s run, when his name was dropped from the title and the tabloids were running rampant with rumors of adultery and partying.
“The most common misperception [is] that I cheated on my wife, that I left my family, that I’m a party boy,” he told Winfrey. “But my family knows the truth.”
Image: OWN