Parenting isn’t easy, and mental health challenges can make it even more difficult, especially if the health concerns involve a child.
One mom of five on TikTok understands this more than most. She had to make the difficult decision to prioritize four of her children over her struggling daughter out of safety concerns.
The mom kicked her mentally ill 11-year-old daughter out of her home out of concern for her other children’s safety.
“I have an 11-year-old daughter who is no longer safe to be around my other children nor to be in my home,” the mom, Megan, vulnerably shared.
“I love her deeply and so badly wish she could be at my house, but it’s not safe for my other children,” she continued, “so I had to make the hard decision and send her to live with her grandmother where she is an only child.”
Naturally, viewers were curious after Megan shared this information. She made several subsequent videos to explain the situation further, and in one, addressed her daughter Briley’s diagnosis.
“She has disruptive dysregulation mood disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, reactive attachment disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and impulse control disorder,” Megan detailed.
She also addressed her use of the phrase “kicked out.”
“Maybe my choice of words and how I was explaining things wasn’t put the best,” she admitted. “I do love my child. I am very actively still in her life.”
“[Briley] can’t live in my household because DHS, Department of Human Services, said that she is a danger to my other children and if I don’t place her with someone else safe, that it would be a failure to protect my other children on my end,” she added. “And in this situation, I have four other kids to protect.”
The mom shared details of her daughter’s life story.
The mom’s TikTok account is chock-full of stories about her family, mainly her daughter Briley.
Megan explained that when Briley was just a baby, she cried constantly, to the point that it got them evicted from their apartment. Briley struggled with sleeping until she was five, when she was able to get on medication to help.
“By age six, my child had already been put in-patient for hurting her peers, her siblings, her teachers, all of those things,” Megan said. “And it didn’t help.”
When Megan was pregnant with her now-3-year-old son, Briley was “very, very abusive” to her mother.
“She would throw books at my stomach, she would hit me, kick me in my stomach,” she recounted. “She was very violent towards me.”
At this point, Briley stayed with her grandmother occasionally. However, after an incident when Briley hurt her siblings and cousins — to the point that the police had to be called — it became a more permanent arrangement.
“She isn’t better there. She doesn’t act better there,” Megan admitted. “The only difference is there [aren’t] kids for her to bully and beat up there. But she definitely bullies grandma, but grandpa puts a stop to it real, real fast.”
It isn’t a failure if a parent has to remove their child from their home due to their mental health.
It would be easy to judge Megan and wonder why she wasn’t capable of handling her own child — many, many commenters have. However, it isn’t fair to the struggling mom who is trying to be the best parent possible for all of her children.
“I literally call her every single day. I see her very frequently,” she said of her daughter. “Maybe I wasn’t the mom that my child needed. But I’m still here and I’m still trying.”
Christine Walker, a mom who had to send her son, Schuyler, to a residential treatment program for mental health, told Central Virginia’s National Alliance on Mental Illness, “If Schuyler had cancer, I would never think of myself as a failure if I didn’t do chemo in my living room. I would never think of myself as giving up. This is a brain disorder.”
Mental illness should be acknowledged as the health problem that it is, and those who deal with it, directly or as loved ones, should not be shamed for it. We’re all doing our best, including Megan.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
