Teen Mom: The Next Chapter star Catelynn Lowell hit back at accusations that her husband, Tyler Baltierra, made up his autism diagnosis.
“It’s not like we sit here and brainstorm [ideas], like, ‘Let’s pretend you’re f***ing autistic. Let’s pretend that I had a miscarriage or that I’m struggling with my mental health,’” Catelynn, 33, told Tyler, 33, as he laughed on their “Cate and Ty Break It Down” podcast on Wednesday, September 10.
Tyler shared in August that he’d recently learned he is on the autism spectrum, after previously being told he had had bipolar disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder as a child. He faced some skepticism from some podcast listeners over his later-in-life disclosure.
“Maybe [people] are so far disconnected from the fact that we’re real human beings, experiencing real life struggles, triumphs, whatever,” Tyler pointed out on the couple’s newest PodcastOne episode.
Catelynn argued that fans should know better than to suspect the couple of drumming up fake drama since they’ve put their real lives on display for Teen Mom over the years.
“Our series has always been a docuseries, like a documentary,” Catelynn clarified. “They just follow our lives so we don’t script s*** in our lives to make a f***ing story line.”
Tyler chimed in, “How have we gotten here as a society where, instead of saying, ‘Oh wow, can you explain more about that?’… you’re gonna question people’s diagnosis? You’re going to literally shame them, shame them for having it and tell them that they’re liars for having it. What is going on?”
On the August 27 episode of “Cate and Ty Break It Down,” Tyler said he now looked back on his childhood differently after being diagnosed with autism in his 30s.
“Growing up, my mom was so focused on me not having meltdowns,” he remembered on the PodcastOne series. “I thought I was just an ADHD hyper kid, whatever. All my behavioral issues in school [were] because I pretty much can’t control myself.”
Tyler explained that he finally got tested as an adult after noticing that his own daughter Vaeda, 6, was exhibiting some of the same behaviors he did as a child.
“I’m a little bit more of a present parent, I think, than my mom could have been back then with more knowledge about this kind of stuff,” he acknowledged. “Just seeing so many things in Vaeda that I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I get why she’s doing that. Oh my god, when I was a kid, I remember doing that, like, wondering why doesn’t anyone understand what I’m saying? Or how important this stupid little thing is to me.’ First thing I noticed is that small things [that] should not be a big deal are a huge deal to her.”
Tyler ultimately admitted to having mixed feelings about receiving his diagnosis as an adult.
“It felt like a big sigh of relief. Then I got really sad and I was like, ‘Wow,’” he said. “I just thought about all the things I went through as a kid. I just felt so sad for that little kid who wondered, ‘What’s wrong with me? Something’s wrong, why am I not normal?’”
Moving forward, Tyler said he wouldn’t seek any treatment for autism because he’d accepted that it was “just the way [his] brain works.”
“Instead of trying to fix it, let’s just try to live with this thing and I think knowing this information makes me better aware,” he said.
Catelynn and Tyler first found fame as a teen couple on MTV’s 16 & Pregnant in 2009, where cameras documented them putting their daughter Carly up for adoption. They got married in 2015 and now share three more children: Veada, Nova, 10, and Rya, 3.
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