Forget Jonasi in The Polygamist — The Kids Are Not Alright

I had work on Monday morning. A real job. Three children. Meetings. An alarm clock that was going to go off whether I was ready or not.

And yet there I was at 1:00 AM, eleven episodes deep into The Polygamist on Netflix, fully hooked. Not because I needed to know which wife would stay. Not because I was invested in Jonasi’s love life. Somewhere around episode six, I stopped caring about that entirely.

What I couldn’t stop thinking about were the children.

Because here’s the thing everyone scrolling past Jonasi and the wives seems to have missed: the kids are not alright. Not even a little.

Because while everyone else is busy debating the wives, the affairs, and the polygamy, I kept circling one question that nobody on my timeline seemed to be asking —

The answer, unfortunately, seemed to be nobody.

And let me be clear before I get into any of this: that is not me dragging a bad show. The complete opposite. I tore through all 22 episodes across Monday and Tuesday and it kept me guessing and on my toes the entire damn time. Such a well-written series — it had me going through some real emotional turmoil inside, lol. But one thing about me: I love a good South African drama. So take everything that follows as a love letter from someone who was fully, embarrassingly invested.

My Family Is One Generation Removed From This

Here’s why this one landed somewhere so personal for me: I’m only one generation removed from polygamy myself. My father grew up watching what that dynamic did to his own mother, and he decided — very deliberately — that he would only ever marry one woman and have his children with her. Enter my siblings and me.

And I don’t think my family is unusual in that. If you come from a Sierra Leonean background, and a Mende one specifically like mine, there’s a good chance you’re only one degree of separation from a family structure that looks a lot like the Gomoras’. A grandmother who was a second wife. An aunt who was a first. A web of half-siblings and quiet resentments everyone learned not to say out loud.

So watching The Polygamist was not abstract for me. The thing my father saw clearly enough to walk away from is the exact thing this show drags into the light: this lifestyle choice, whatever else it is, can carry severe consequences for your children. He knew it decades ago. And eleven episodes deep at 1 AM, I understood exactly what he’d been protecting us from.

The Polygamist Isn’t Really About Polygamy

At first I thought this was a story about infidelity. Then I thought it was about polygamy. Then I thought it was about abuse.

By the end, I realized it was about something much simpler.

Selfishness.

At its core, The Polygamist is the story of a man who consistently prioritized his own wants over everyone else’s needs.
His desires.
His ego.
His image.
His pleasure.
His power.

Every major decision began and ended with the same question: what does Jonasi want? What never seemed to enter the equation was, what will this cost everyone else?

Especially his children. And if you haven’t watched yet, the scale of what those children were absorbing is worth spelling out.

A Selfish Man Doesn’t Become a Better Father Than He Is a Husband

What surprised me most while watching The Polygamist was how shocked everyone seemed by Jonasi’s failures as a father.

Respectfully — why?

By the first few episodes it was painfully obvious that Jonasi only cared about Jonasi. Every relationship in his life existed to serve him. The women served him. The attention served him. The admiration, the status, the power — all of it served him. And eventually it felt like the children served him too. Not as people. As extensions of his ego.

Here’s something I’ve learned as a parent and as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about family systems:

And nowhere along the way did he seem genuinely concerned with how any of it would land on his children — not next week, not next year, not ten years from now. They were collateral damage in a story where he was always the main character.

The Difference Between Having Children and Fathering Them

Jonasi was clearly interested in having children. He just didn’t seem nearly as interested in fathering them. There’s a difference, and The Polygamist puts it on full display.

Fathering requires understanding that every choice you make lands on people who didn’t ask to be here. While Jonasi was out building secret families and leaving emotional wreckage behind him, he never seemed to stop and ask what it was teaching his children about trust, about love, about what a family is supposed to feel like. Because children don’t experience our intentions. They experience our actions.

The Conversation Nobody Wants to Have About The Polygamist

Now, none of this lets Jonasi off the hook. He is responsible for Jonasi. Every lie, every affair, every act of abuse, every broken promise. That belongs to him. Full stop.

But while everyone debates which woman should have known better, I keep landing on a different question:

Because with the exception of Joyce — who was genuinely deceived from the start — the adults in this story had information. The signs were there. The patterns were there. Essie knew good and well he was married when he came rolling back around with that red car; she wasn’t deceived, she was dazzled by the upgrade. Matipa got dazzled in a different room — by the aura, the money, the power. She followed this man taaaay she born two pikin for am. Two children she eventually left behind with Joyce, of all people.

She spent the whole series convinced she could wear Joyce’s shoes — until she finally put them on and learned the pain was never about the shoes. It was about the man. And every adult who kept investing in his charisma instead of reading his character eventually had to meet the actual version of him. The selfish version. The one that was there the whole time.

The Bar Was on the Floor — and He Still Couldn’t Clear It

Now, let me be fair, because context matters. In a lot of African family systems, a somewhat hands-off father isn’t automatically a villain. Nannies and house help are far more common and far more accessible, so the daily logistics — the school runs, the homework, the lunches — often don’t land on the father the way they might somewhere else. I wasn’t sitting there expecting Jonasi to be quizzing the kids on spelling words or doing morning drop-off. That’s genuinely not the expectation in that world, and I’m not going to pretend it is.

So let me lower the bar for him. All the way down. To the floor.

There’s a scene where his daughter Mpume writes him a letter — a whole letter — about how his behavior is affecting her. And she comes to read it to him. To his face. With her own mouth. And this man could not even be bothered to turn the television down to listen to her.

Like… damn.

That single moment tells you everything The Polygamist spends 22 episodes proving. The issue was never that he didn’t have time, or help, or capacity. The issue was that his children’s pain simply wasn’t interesting enough to interrupt his comfort.

The Children Were Telling the Truth the Whole Time

And here’s what happens to a child who works up the courage to use her words — who writes the letter, who walks up to her father — and gets met with the back of his attention: she learns words don’t work in that house. So the truth starts coming out a different way.

The most heartbreaking part of The Polygamist wasn’t the affairs, or the lies, or even the violence. It was watching what all of it did to the kids.

Because children tell the truth about a dysfunctional home long before the adults are willing to admit it. Not with words.
With behavior.
With anger.
With withdrawal.
With acting out.
With anxiety.
With poor choices and pain.

Look no further than Sarah. By the time the show is through with her, she’s stealing phones, crossing serious sexual boundaries — with her own sister’s boyfriend, of all people — and eventually trying to kiss a relative. That is not a “bad kid.” That is a child so destabilized by the chaos around her that her behavior has nowhere healthy to go. She isn’t the problem. She’s the smoke alarm going off in a house that’s been on fire for years.

And sometimes a child skips the behavior entirely and just says it to your face. I loved the moment Freedom looked at Essie and told her, plainly, that she loved Jonasi more than she loved her own kids. Because that — right there — is the whole problem of this show compressed into a single sentence. The children could see exactly where they ranked. They always can.

The children in this story became walking evidence that what was happening behind those doors wasn’t sustainable. Adults can spend years pretending everything is fine. Children usually can’t. Eventually the chaos shows up somewhere — and more often than not, it shows up in them. The kids were not alright, and they spent the whole series trying to tell us so.

The Real Victims of The Polygamist

By the later episodes, the question stops being whether Jonasi is capable of terrible decisions — that’s been established on repeat — and becomes much simpler: who pays for them?

The children. The ones who didn’t choose him, didn’t choose the affairs, didn’t choose the instability, and got handed the bill anyway. The adults kept choosing Jonasi. The children never got a vote.

That’s the real tragedy of this show. Not the wives. Not the scandal. The kids.

Except for Joyce

If this whole show is a case study in grown adults forgetting they have children, Joyce is the exception that proves the rule. She was the only woman in Jonasi’s orbit who kept her kids in view from the first episode all the way to the last.

But here’s what I loved most about her arc: she’s also the only one who figured out how to take a man out of the center of her own life. The moment she found out about Essie, she was done with Jonasi — the fantasy was over and she knew it. And the moment he put his hands on her, she detached completely. No more contorting herself to keep him. No more organizing her entire world around a man who was never going to be worth it. I loved that for her.

And look at what she did with all that energy once she stopped pouring it into him. She wrote a book. She finally graduated. She mothered every single one of her children — AND the two kids Jonasi fathered with Matipa, the ones Matipa walked away from. She decentered the man and re-centered herself and her family, and somehow still had room to raise the babies another woman left behind.

A Note to the Parent Who Felt Something Watching This

If you finished The Polygamist and felt that quiet ache for the children on the screen — pay attention to that ache. It’s pointing at something true.

If you’re raising kids in a home where the love is real and not performed, where their behavior gets met with curiosity instead of punishment, where the adults actually thought about the cost before they made the choice — sit in that. That’s not luck. That’s a decision you keep making.

The most important parenting choice you’ll ever make is who you build a family with — and you make it long before the children ever arrive.