Divvying up the holidays is always hard with blended families. But when you're "Teen Mom 2" star and podcaster Kailyn Lowry, it's on a whole other level.
With seven children and four fathers in the mix, the logistics quickly become a lot to juggle. So Lowry says she has decided to simply make it easier on everyone by bowing out of Yuletide festivities.
Kailyn Lowry says all 7 of her kids spend Christmas with their dads — but she's actually OK with it.
Lowry, now 32, first joined MTV's "Teen Mom" franchise back in 2011. This came after appearing on the network's reality show "16 And Pregnant" after becoming pregnant with her first child, now 14-year-old Isaac, whom she shares with ex Jo Rivera.
Since then, Lowry's family has grown by leaps and bounds. Lowry shares 10-year-old son Lincoln with ex-husband Javi Marroquin; 7-year-old Lux and 4-year-old Creed with ex Chris Lopez; and she and fiancé Elijah Scott share 22-month-old Rio and 1-year-old twins Verse and Valley.
Whew! You can only imagine the day-to-day parenting challenges. But then imagine how it must be during the holiday season with seven kids, four fathers' families, and Lowry's own to think about.
So, how do you even manage all this? For Lowry, it's all about simply stepping back entirely. As she put it simply to E! News at the 11th Annual Reality TV Awards held on November 19, "I actually don't do holidays."
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Lowry says the logistics of Christmas made it easier to just make it a 'dad' holiday.
“All my kids go to their dads," Lowry told E!, adding that all four fathers have large families with big holiday celebrations. "I’m happy to send them to their dads for the holidays."
Thankfully, Lowry has great relationships with all of her exes as well as their new partners, so the transitions at holiday time sound seamless. Though Lowry has said that being by herself at Christmas is a bit bittersweet.
In a 2020 episode of her podcast "Coffee Convos," Lowry told co-host Lindsie Chrisley that "it is kind of sad" that she doesn't get to celebrate with her kids. But given all of the details, it's just what works best for her, the kids, their dads, and their extended families.
"It’s a lot, and the amount of money that I was spending on Christmas gifts, and then I was only getting them for half the day and then I had to share," she told Chrisley. And the actual logistics of splitting the day with her kids' dads sounds like it was entirely too much to manage.
For one, her family and some of her kids' dads live in different cities. “Then it was stressing me out to have one back by 4:00, one back by 7 o’clock," she told Chrisley. "I just couldn’t make it work to the point that everyone was actually happy about it."
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Lowry says that she's now fine with the arrangement.
It's surely bittersweet, but Lowry now says she's totally fine with the arrangement. In the end, the struggle arose for good reasons — her kids all have loving, involved families eager to spend the holiday with them, which is more than a lot of kids can say!
I speak from experience, too, that the holidays can be hard on kids from blended families. My parents divorced while I was an infant, and the shuffling back and forth my brother and I had to do every Christmas was a lot, especially once I was old enough to notice how different and stress-free other kids' Christmases were from mine.
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Ultimately our parents ended up doing something similar to Lowry, alternating holidays each year to save everyone the stress. That meant my parents spent certain holidays alone, but it was a small price to pay for the calmness it created.
Co-parenting, after all, is all about collaborative compromise, and Lowry seems to be knocking that part out of the park. Christmas is just a day, after all, and you can celebrate it whenever you like. And your kids having TOO MANY loving relatives to coordinate? Well, that's a good problem to have at any time of the year.
