Lydia Plath Makes Rare Comment About Mom’s Role in Baby Brother’s Death

Lydia Plath is reflecting on the 2008 accident that killed her 17-month-old brother, Joshua Plath.

“We had a sibling pass at 17 months when I was 4 years old and it was in the hands of my mom,” Lydia, 21, said during an appearance on “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast,” released on Wednesday, July 23. “It was a very tragic accident, and because it affected her so much, we couldn’t talk about it.”

An episode of Welcome to Plathville previously revealed that Kim Path ran over her son Joshua with a vehicle on their family farm. The death was ruled an accident, with head injuries listed as Joshua’s official cause of death.

“We just didn’t talk about it,” Lydia said on Wednesday. “Because we didn’t talk about the hardest thing in our life, they just didn’t talk about the deep things. I think that’s just what’s affected us in that way of not talking about the hard things. … We didn’t talk about the hardest thing in our childhood.”

Lydia appears alongside her family on TLC’s Welcome to Plathville, which premiered its seventh season on Tuesday, July 22. The show debuted on the network in 2019 and follows Kim, 52, and Barry Plath alongside their kids Ethan, Hosanna, Micah, Moriah, Lydia, Isaac, Amber, Cassia and Mercy. (Kim and Barry announced in June 2022 that they separated after 24 years of marriage. Kim filed for divorce two years later.)

“It was a normal day, and we were doing some yard work,” Kim previously recalled of Joshua’s death during one of her confessionals on the series. “I pulled a vehicle forward — I had just seen him. So, I thought I was OK, but I pulled forward and I ran over him. And the ambulance comes and we’re all just praying, crying and the lady came, she took him to the ambulance, and she came back and she said, ‘I’m sorry.’”

She continued, “I can tell you that those next six or eight months of my life were hell on Earth. And [Barry], I was dealing with losing a son, he was dealing with losing a son and a wife. Cause I wasn’t there. I was there, but I wasn’t there.”