Hayden Panettiere says giving full custody of Kaya to Wladimir Klitschko was the most painful decision she has made as a mother. Kaya has lived with her father since 2018, and Panettiere says the choice came during a period when she knew she was in a bad place.
The 36-year-old actress connected the account to This Is Me: A Reckoning, turning a private custody arrangement into the clearest personal disclosure in the memoir rollout. She framed the decision as protection, not surrender, and said she did not want a fight that could permanently damage her child.
Wladimir Klitschko in Europe
Panettiere said Kaya was in Europe with a support system there when she weighed the move. She said, “When I saw her in the environment over there (in Europe) and the support system that she had, I said to myself, 'If I fight, if I go to war about this, it's going to permanently damage my child. It's going to be incredibly public. She's got two very famous parents, and it's going to be ugly.'”
She followed that with the practical decision: “I said, 'You know what? Let her grow up here,'” and added, “I will travel here as much as I can. I know she's safe. I know she's well taken care of — beyond well taken care of. She has an incredible life. And I also knew that there would be a day when she would come back to me.”
During Panettiere’s darkest stretch
Panettiere said the custody choice was made while she was trying to keep her own life from collapsing in front of Kaya. “I just knew that if I wanted to... I knew how bad a place I was in,” she said, and, “I hid it from my daughter as much as I could.” That is the part that turns this from a custody update into a damage-control story: she says she chose stability for Kaya while hiding the scale of her own distress.
She wrote in the memoir, “... I grieve that I'm not the mother I thought I'd be and definitely not the mother I want to be (trust me, no one should ever have to raise a child on FaceTime), and although I miss Kaya so much, my heart aches, I know how blessed I am to be her mom.” Panettiere also said, “It was very hard to wrap my mind around the pain, the emotional pain of that. But you keep putting one foot in front of the other somehow.”
This Is Me: A Reckoning
Panettiere said the account is tied to her memoir, and she hopes the story helps mothers battling postpartum depression feel less alone. The useful read-through here is simple: she is not revisiting the custody decision as a legal dispute, but as a long-running family arrangement she says was made in crisis and remains emotionally costly.
For readers, the key takeaway is that Kaya has lived with Wladimir Klitschko since 2018, Panettiere says the arrangement protected her daughter, and she still expects a future reunion. The unanswered piece is the specific 2018 chain of events that led to the handoff, which Panettiere has not laid out in full.
