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The remaining siblings followed different paths. Kenny and Alexis stayed closer to home and attended Des Moines Area Community College, while Brandon entered the United States Army. Their decisions illustrated something the siblings themselves increasingly emphasized as they entered adulthood: they might have been born together and known publicly as “the septuplets,” but each was developing an individual identity, career interest and future.
Kelsey spoke publicly about that change as the siblings approached adulthood. She explained that growing up meant they had almost always been together, whether at school, home or family activities. College offered a different experience because each sibling could focus on personal interests rather than constantly being viewed as one member of a group of seven. For them, becoming adults meant learning how to maintain their close sibling relationship while also creating separate lives.
Their older sister Mikayla also entered a new stage of life. She married in 2015 and later had a son, making the septuplets aunts and uncles. Another major family milestone followed in May 2019 when Natalie became the first of the seven septuplets to marry. Brandon married later that same year. By 2022, reporting indicated that Brandon and Kenny had themselves become fathers, meaning the family that had once attracted worldwide attention because of seven newborn babies had moved into another generation.
The septuplets have pursued different interests professionally and academically. Earlier interviews described Alexis studying early childhood education, while Nathan focused on computers and technology. Joel also pursued computer-related studies, and Kelsey studied public relations. Natalie explored work connected with athletic training. Some of those career plans were expressed while they were still students and should not necessarily be treated as permanent descriptions of what they do today, because their professional lives may have continued evolving since those interviews.
One element that remained consistent in interviews was the strength of the relationship among the siblings. Natalie once described having six same-age siblings as also having six close friends. Their childhood was unusual in almost every measurable way, yet their comments as young adults suggested that the experience created an exceptionally strong connection between them. Even as education, careers, marriage and parenthood gradually took them in separate directions, they continued speaking warmly about their shared upbringing.
The family’s story has also changed significantly with time. In 1997, nearly every article focused on whether seven very premature babies would survive and how their parents could possibly care for them. By their teenage years, the attention shifted toward school, driving, graduation and individual interests. As adults, the siblings became less a medical or media story and more seven people pursuing separate lives.
Their parents eventually became empty nesters after raising all eight children, including Mikayla. The large Carlisle house that had once been donated to accommodate the extraordinary family was later passed to Ruth Harbor, where it could be used to help other families. That development gave another chapter to a home closely associated with the McCaugheys’ story for many years.
The seven siblings reached another milestone on November 19, 2025, when they celebrated their 28th birthday. Local Iowa reporting again looked back at the remarkable birth that had made the family famous almost three decades earlier. Guinness World Records has recognized Kenny, Alexis, Natalie, Kelsey, Nathan, Brandon and Joel as the first known set of septuplets in which every child survived and, as of its published record, the oldest living septuplets.
Their history is remarkable not simply because seven children were born at once, but because all seven survived an extremely premature multiple birth and reached adulthood. Modern descriptions should therefore call them the world’s first known surviving set of septuplets, rather than simply the first septuplets ever born; multiple septuplet births had occurred previously, but no earlier known set had all seven children survive.
Nearly three decades after their birth, the McCaughey siblings remain connected by an experience few families could ever understand. They grew up under extraordinary public attention, dealt with the challenges of being constantly discussed as a group, and eventually began building individual identities through education, work, relationships and family life. Their story that began in a Des Moines hospital in 1997 has therefore become much more than a remarkable birth story. It is also the story of seven siblings who survived, grew up together and eventually found their own paths while remaining part of an extraordinary family history.