The Plath Family Still Has a Hard Time Addressing What Happened to Joshua Plath Years Later

Years before the Plath family on TLC were given their own reality show, Welcome to Plathville, Kim and Barry Plath had 10 kids. However, as they discuss on the show, one of the younger kids, Joshua Plath, died when he was a toddler. But what happened to Joshua Plath, and what has the family said on or off the show?

When the Plaths were first introduced to the world on television, they shared their Christian beliefs and their ideals about homeschooling, technology, and sugar intake.

It didn't take long for some of the older kids to branch off and rebel, so to speak, and viewers continued to watch things change as Kim and Barry split up. Now, they have questions about Joshua and what happened to him.

Early on in Welcome to Plathville, the Plaths explain that Joshua died in 2008 when he was 17 months old. Kim was moving fruit trees on their Georgia property with a truck, and she didn't realize she had hit him. In an investigation, according to Thomasville Times-Enterprise, the death was ruled an accident.

Investigator Daniel Singletary said, per the outlet, "The mother was pulling the vehicle forward — she had been doing yard work — and thought she had accounted for all the kids. She had seven children, ages 15 months to 10 years old, and they were all outside playing. She thought everyone was accounted for, moved the vehicle forward, and discovered she'd run over the youngest."

Although when Welcome to Plathville premiered, the family seemed happy and were functioning well as a unit, the cracks slowly began to show. And, over the course of several seasons, Joshua came up multiple times. For some of the older kids, not being able to properly deal with the loss had lasting ramifications on their own individual relationships with other people.

During Season 8 of Welcome to Plathville, Lydia admits to producers that the topic of Joshua was always "too heavy" to discuss with or around Kim. Later, Lydia and Kim discuss the loss while driving together.

Lydia admits that, because she grew up not being able to talk about Joshua, she wasn't able to talk about other things that worried or bothered her.

"I will say I heard bits where you talked about Joshua publicly," Kim tells her. She then explains to producers, "Lydia went online and she was crying about Joshua, which is fine, totally understandable. But then she starts, you know, sharing about how she wasn't equipped to deal with that. I've had a lot of guilt that I've had to deal with and when I first heard Lydia talking about Joshua online, it was like ripping open that wound for me all over again."

During the same episode, Kim admits that, for her, "it's unbearable to think about." For Lydia, the issue is that Kim is unwilling to discuss the loss more openly with her. But, it seems, Kim is still struggling to work through that grief and guilt herself. At some point, they are going to have to meet in the middle somehow.