Welcome to Plathville star Lydia Plath she still remembers the details of the tragic death of her 17-month-old brother Joshua.
“I remember specific details of her childhood. I remember that afternoon sleeping on her blanket in the sun, and then all the details of the accident I remember all too well,” Lydia, 21, said on the Wednesday, Jan. 7, episode of “Unplanned.” podcast. “I was in the car when it happened.”
Lídia’s mother, Kim Plath, accidentally runs over son Joshua with a vehicle in 2008. The death was ruled accidental and Joshua’s cause of death was listed as “head injuries.” (Kim and ex-husband Barry Plath He also shares nine other children: Ethan, Hosanna, Micah, Moriah, Lydia, Isaac, Amber, Cassia and Mercy.)
“My mom, like, freaked out, got out (and) pulled him out from under the car,” recalled Lydia, who was 4 at the time. “Then she and all my brothers ran home to get the phone. Isaac and I were in the car, and I got out and saw (Joshua) and it was terrible. I got back in the car and told Isaac, ‘Don’t look. Just go out the other door.”
Lydia Plath has opened up about why she’s ‘jealous’ of her older sister Hosanna for choosing not to be on her family’s reality show, Welcome to Plathville. “She’s amazing. I have a great relationship with her,” Lydia, 21, said on “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast” on Wednesday, Sept. 10. “We were very jealous (…)
Keep scrolling for more of Lydia’s candid memories of her upbringing and how she’s honoring Joshua’s memory:
Joshua’s pain after his tragic death
“Our household wasn’t necessarily one that just talked about everything and was vulnerable when that happened,” Lydia said through tears. “We didn’t know how to talk about it, especially because it was in my mother’s hands, we wouldn’t dare talk about it around her.”
According to Lydia, she felt her family needed to “shut down (their) emotions” in order to move forward.
“Sometimes I see it in my mom: ‘Does she know how to connect and how to feel and how to know her emotions and all that stuff?'” he said. “Other times I can imagine he can’t because he’s had to turn it off because it’s too painful. So I think (Joshua’s death) definitely affected our family more than most realize because it happened so long ago.”
She continued: “I think the hardest part, for me growing up, was how little he was recognized. I don’t think I visited his grave until I was 9 because it was too hard to go back.”
Growing up Plath
Kim and Barry they raised their children on a farm in rural Georgia with strict rules about everything from diets to technology.
“Everything we ate was organic (and) natural. We grew a lot of our own stuff,” Lydia said Wednesday. “It was like we were really healthy and active and raised on 45 acres with horses, cows, chickens (and) ducks. We all had our own garden at one point.”
Why Kim and Barry Plath “protected” their children
“My parents experienced a lot in the world and they wanted to protect us from that,” Lydia said. “My mother was an only child with an alcoholic single mother and her mother wasn’t really in her life until she was 12.”
After Kim’s “tough childhood,” she didn’t want her children to face the same struggles.
“That led to being a lot more sheltered than most people, which I think there’s definitely an aspect to,” Lydia acknowledged. “But, I don’t think you should pretend it doesn’t exist to protect your children from it.”
Misconceptions of the Plath family’s religious beliefs
Speaking on the “Unplanned” podcast, Lydia denied that Kim and Barry’s strict guidelines were motivated by religion.
“I was raised in a Christian home, but I don’t think my parents did a good job, like, I never realized that the way I was raised was because that’s what God wanted,” Lydia said. “It was more than a lifestyle that my mother wanted. She wanted to have a lot of children, she wanted land (and) all those things.”
The Plaths primarily practiced their religion by reading the Bible as a unit and occasionally organizing or attending “home groups” with other local families.
“We weren’t part of a church,” Lydia said. “It was always hard to find people who were, like, families who were really looking for the father’s heart and not just a lifestyle or legalistic or production of all those things.”
According to Lydia, the Plaths also did not practice fundamentalism or IBLP like the Duggars.
How Kim and Barry Plath’s Divorce Affected Their Children
Kim and Barry announced in 2022 who had separated after two decades of marriage.
“I think there was a point, shortly after my parents split up, where I wanted nothing to do with any relationship,” Lydia said. “It’s like the ‘what’s the point’ kind of thing (because) this marriage that you’ve looked up to all your life has (almost) ended in nothing.”
After “working through” her feelings, Lydia finally found love with now-husband Zac Wyse.
“I’m not going to let fear stop me from anything other than the reason I do or don’t do something,” he said. “With (my marriage), my parents had been separated for three years since we met, so I had time to process it.”
Lydia and Wyse married in February 2025a month after Kim and Barry agreed to divorce.
Zac Wyse addresses rumors about his sexuality
Shortly after Wyse proposed to Lydia, his future brother-in-law Ethan asked if he was secretly gay.
“I didn’t feel the need to fuel that fire because I wanted to fuel what was going well,” Wyse said, revealing how she informed Lydia of the comments without giving them too much weight. “There were a lot of things that happened, and I told him a lot of them in time when they were needed.”
Lydia Plath and Zac Wyse are set to have babies soon
Lydia proclaimed on the podcast that she’s had “baby fever forever,” and she has desire to be a mother in the next year or two.
“We decided to (wait) a year and have the conversation,” Wyse said. “I think we want to be parents soon, just young parents.”