‘Teen Mom’ Alum Kailyn Lowry Says Everybody Made Money Off Her Drama—So She Did Too

When Kailyn Lowry first appeared on MTV’s Teen Mom, she was just 17 years old and figuring out motherhood in front of millions. Now, she’s a Teen Mom legend—and at 34, she’s raising seven kids, running multiple businesses, and still sharing her life online.

On a recent episode of Tell Me I’m a Good Mom, host Lo Bosworth sat down with Lowry for a conversation that covered everything from postpartum body changes and ADHD, to co-parenting with four baby daddies and monetizing heartbreak. Oh, and sharing a driveway with one of her exes.

Here are some of the biggest moments from the conversation.

Kailyn Lowry Gets Brutally Honest About Life After Teen Mom

When did you stop being ‘a person who happened to be on TV’ and start understanding your story as a business?

“So I think at some point, well, I think right now we live in this nostalgia, like we’re bringing back all the things from the 90s and the early 2000s. So I think I got really lucky there, but I think at some point it was like, the money from the show is going to run out and I have children I need to provide for. What can I do next? How do I leverage what I’ve built in a short time so that I could prolong what I could do with this. You know what I mean?”

“And I think that over time I just developed truly out of desperation, like a business mindset where some of the other girls, and this is not a dig at them…I think that they just never developed like a business mind, but I kind of took like the contracts and like the opportunities and I was like, hold up, like what can I do with this, you know?”

What has sharing your life online cost you?

“I always go back and forth about how much I’m sharing online and I’ve kind of scaled back with how much I show my kids…I would say a majority of my content and now they’re not [in] because a hindsight is always 2020. And so we’re learning lessons about this stuff all the time…

…I still definitely overshare. That’s how I built my platform, but I do get uncomfortable when I think about, like being on TV and what the cost of being on TV has been, right? But then on the flip side of it, I had a conversation either yesterday or the day before about going back into the corporate world, right? And it’s like, I would never be able to have the flexibility in one like in a corporate job that I do with the life that I’ve built off of reality TV and then what came with that.”

How did you find out Elijah cheated on you?

“I was in LA working and it was on TikTok. And so, I had my assistant at the time tell him he needed to move out before I got home on my red-eye and so then he moved out and thankfully the tenants (because when we were together, he put his house up for rent) had moved out two weeks before and it really, truly like the stars aligned for that one.”

Why did you decide to turn that breakup into a Patreon series?

“I don’t really know what the timing was. I’m so used to just being very quick to respond to things and sometimes prematurely and sometimes I don’t have all the facts and sometimes like me, I’m really emotionally charged. And so for the Elijah episode on the tell-all, it was three parts on Patreon. It was like, OK, well, everybody at this point has capitalized, gained money, gained followers talking about the situation…I was like, well, we might as well put our side out there too…

…And so at that point it was like, well, we’ll put it on Patreon. And, so I didn’t put it on my regular podcast feed because I was like, the people who are invested in our lives will, unfortunately for them, will pay for it, and they did. So it did really, it was really successful. I’m like, everybody else is profiting off of my pain, so why wouldn’t I profit off of my own pain?”

What is it actually like living next door to one of your exes?

“We share a driveway. You like, pull into the right and the driveway splits. So it’s not like a neighbor down the street, it’s not a neighbor three houses over—we share a driveway. So you can’t see into the living room. He can see out of his kitchen window, he can see everything that goes on.

So he has texted me and said like, ‘Hey, so and so fell on the trampoline.’ And I’m like, can you not, you know what I mean, but it makes it convenient for drop-offs or like if he ever needed something last minute, it makes it super convenient.”

What made you finally leave relationships where cheating was involved?

“That one was tricky because like I said, I think that he was a good person and he made a bad choice, but I had just gotten out of a relationship. Creed was 2 when I got pregnant with Rio. So I was with Chris on and off for five years, and that was just a constant cheating situation and I stayed and then I got a lot of crap for staying, and going back and staying and going back….

…And so then this time I’m like, I left Jo for cheating on me while I was pregnant. I left Javi for just simply not getting along with him. I left Chris finally after five years of the back and forth that I just didn’t want to go through this again. Like I want a partner and a relationship where we build each other up and we’re not arguing about cheating and that’s not part of our relationship. So as soon as cheating became another—like it was like a pattern at that point—I was like, I can’t do this. I’m done. Like I cannot go back.”

What do you know at 34 that your 17-year-old self never could have imagined?

“Oh, well, one, screenshots live forever. We didn’t know that when we started Teen Mom, you know what I mean? So like the screenshots and all the things, and then just in life, I think it’s like, ‘Wow, well, parenting doesn’t get easier.’ The challenges just change, right? So like the newborn [stage] is really, really hard. I didn’t have a good time from birth to one, right? But then teenagers are hard too in a different way. So the challenges are still there. They’re just very different and no one warns you. Everyone was like, ‘You’re a pregnant teen or you’re a young mom,’ but nobody’s talking about 10 years from now. Like what, how does parenting change 10 years from now? And that’s really challenging.”

To hear the full conversation, listen to Tell Me I’m a Good Mom wherever you get your podcasts.

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