Not in touch. Jon Gosselin revealed he hasn’t spoken to his eldest daughters, Mady and Cara, in nearly a decade.
“The last time I spoke to Mady and Cara was 2014,” Gosselin, 46, told The U.S. Sun on Thursday, May 18, about the 22-year-old twins. “I periodically text Mady and Cara to see if I get a response and at this point, I’ve never heard from them.”
Jon, who shares eight children with ex-wife Kate Gosselin, went on to say that he wasn’t invited to see Mady and Cara graduate from their respective colleges this year. “Sadly, I am not attending,” he added, referring to Mady’s ceremony at Syracuse University and Cara’s graduation from Fordham University.
The former couple tied the knot in 1999 after two years of dating. In October 2000, Jon and Kate, 48, welcomed Mady and Cara. The family rose to stardom four years later after Kate gave birth to their sextuplets: Alexis, Collin, Joel, Hannah, Leah and Aaden.
The pair were originally featured on Discovery Health specials before landing their own series titled Jon & Kate Plus 8 in 2007. Us Weekly broke the news in May 2009 that Jon had allegedly been unfaithful and Kate filed for divorce one month later. The former nurse was awarded full legal custody, however, Hannah and Collin moved in with their father in 2018.
“I chose to live with my dad, I feel like I just made the choice for myself. I have always been closer with my dad and we’ve always had a strong good relationship,” Hannah, now 19, told Entertainment Tonight in 2022. “It’s a lot, growing up in a very busy household with lots of kids. And there’s not really a one-on-one relationship, for attention, that you have with your parent. I felt like my dad gave me that attention and a feeling like I had a good solid relationship with a parent.”
Jon previously opened up about how he originally became estranged from several of his children.
“[The twins] stopped coming [at 12 or 13]. I was just like, ‘Hey, do what you want, be with your friends’ and then it just became, ‘They’re not coming [over].’ Then I had six [kids],” he detailed to Entertainment Tonight in 2016. “I was just focusing on the ones that did come [to my place].”
More recently, the former TLC personality claimed his ex-wife played a role in the distance that exists between him and his family.
“[Communicating with] the children that live with Kate is very difficult, because I don’t have an open relationship with them. I feel it’s a really poor decision on Kate’s part, because she alienated me from those kids,” he alleged to ET in May 2022. “I think it was a poor parenting decision. It would’ve been much better if she would have been more open with them and explained things better.”
At the time, Jon said he hoped to build a better bond with his kids as they got older.
“They’re going to figure out who [their] parents are, and what transpired in the past, and how relationships build, and how relationships fail,” he continued. “Sometimes you hide those things from your children. Sometimes it’s difficult to say those things to your child, because you’re afraid they aren’t mature enough to understand those things.”
He added: “It’s horrible. Of course, I miss them. That’s why I post things on my Instagram, like, throwbacks, TBTs. It’s bittersweet, but [Hannah] and Collin live with me, so I kind of just focus on them.”
Kate, for her part, has continued to document her close connection with her kids. “I love these kids fiercely … and I don’t apologize for my tears. Times have been so tough and so needlessly unfair for them,” she wrote via Instagram in 2019. “Despite it all, they’ve turned out to be such wonderful amazing human beings. I cannot wait to see what lies ahead for each of them once they get away from those who have tried to destroy them versus protect them!”
