‘Welcome to Plathville’ Star Micah Plath Admits He and His Siblings Were ‘Extremely Sheltered’ Growing Up

This isn’t exactly shocking. Welcome to Plathville star Micah Plath revealed to a fan on Instagram that he was raised in a strictly protected environment —  which is pretty evident to anyone who watched the TLC series, but it’s interesting to see one of the Plath kids admit it.

Micah, 18, shared a photo of himself from behind the scenes of a photo shoot he did as a model, and someone commented on the post, “Do you feel as though a whole new world has been opened for you? Were you and your siblings really as sheltered from the outside world as all of us perceive?” Micah responded, “Definitely!!! And yeah we were extremely sheltered!”

In the teaser trailer and first episode of Plathville, viewers learned that Kim and Barry Plath raise their nine kids in a rural community in the south of Georgia, on a 55-acre farm with limited technology, few computers, and no “carbonated sodas.” They seem to have similar fundamentally religious beliefs as the Duggars, and the parents take pride in limiting what they see as bad influences on their kids. To Micah, that apparently felt like an “extreme” form of being sheltered.

One of the things Kim and Barry consider to be a bad influence is their son Ethan Plath‘s wife, Olivia Plath. Thy noticeably clashed on the series, with Olivia once saying of herself and one of the Plath daughters on the TLC show, “They don’t trust me and they don’t trust Moriah. They know I have different values and different priorities than them.”

Olivia, 21, later admitted that she and her mother-in-law don’t have the best relationship. “I have felt very negative about Kim,” she revealed. “Because even when Ethan and I were dating, I was criticized for what kind of toothpaste I used, or what I ate, or what I wore, or what I did. I feel like I was constantly critiqued. Literally every time I get in my car to go over there, my stomach is in knots.”

In fact, when Ethan’s wife announced she was leaving Instagram for a period of time due to all the hate she’s faced from the show, she wrote, “If this past year for you didn’t include getting married and moving 800 miles away, leaving your family behind, processing your childhood and re-discovering yourself, having your in-laws speak ill of you on national TV, and dealing with narcissistic behavior, emotional, psychological and spiritual abuse every day, then you can’t understand my story and don’t have a reason to tell me why I’m doing everything wrong.” Yikes.

If there’s a season 2 of Welcome to Plathville, maybe fans will get to see more of the fallout from Kim and Barry’s parenting and their treatment of Olivia, as well as their treatment of their own children as they grew up.