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Jon Gosselin learned the hard way that there’s a dark side to living in the spotlight, he admitted last night on Oprah’s Where Are They Now? special.

The reality star opened up about how his reality TV series Jon and Kate Plus 8 damaged his marriage to Kate Gosselin, his reputation, and his kids.

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"It just became so stressful on the kids and stressful on me," the former star, 36, said of the once-popular show, which aired from 2007-2011 on TLC.

"You’re trying to keep your marriage together … your family ties together."

Now making ends meet waiting tables at a Pennsylvania restaurant (and firing warning shots at paparazzi), Jon said his children may have suffered most.

 

"I saw my kids not growing up normally, like I grew up, and having community," he confessed of the perils of spending their formative years on camera.

"Yes, they got to travel the world, and yes, they got these fabulous things, and yes, they have trust funds, and they’re taken care of educationally. Great."

"But developmentally, they have problems with their peers."

"They have problems with talking to other people, and they have problems with wants and needs and manners and morals and what’s right and what’s wrong."

"I think more so than someone who grows up off TV."

Jon’s own sense of self was shredded, too, by the bevy of rumors that he had an affair while still married to Kate Gosselin, which he adamantly denies.

"The most common misperception [is] that I cheated on my wife, that I left my family, that I’m a party boy," he told Oprah. "But my family knows the truth."