These two videos were recorded by the father before the events of 7/30, offering a disturbing snapshot of the mother’s commonplace parenting tactics. The first video begins moments after TJ has refused to finish the last of a serving of mushrooms, prompting the mother to threaten that “Mommy go bye-bye” if her son does not obey, a terrifying prospect to a four-year-old boy as shown in heart-wrenching fashion here. The mother attempts to manipulate her son through confrontation and anxiety-provoking punishment, repeatedly threatening to abandon TJ if he does not immediately acquiesce. While it is not the purpose of this analysis to engage in backseat parenting or second-guess the difficulties of shaping the behavior of a child, this is yet more evidence that the mother engages in a perpetually catastrophizing manner designed to bewilder and bully others into yielding what she wants. This is especially troublesome when aimed full bore at the child she is otherwise claiming to be ‘protecting’ from outside influence. In these videos we can see that she herself is very much the actual threat to TJ – one who aggressively reduces him to tears simply because he was eager to avoid finishing a helping of mushrooms.

Many children don’t eat their vegetables when they’re told to do so. Some outright refuse and throw temper tantrums far beyond anything we see here from TJ. But no child deserves the lasting scars of abandonment trauma purely over a mostly empty bowl of roughage. This isn’t strong parenting; it’s abuse. It’s additional to the abuse of depriving TJ of his father, who in this same video is heard calmly and deliberately parenting TJ in total contradistinction to the implicit violence of the mother. TJ deserves better, and his mother is both terrorizing him and depriving him of a stable, loving parental figure in his life.

These heartless tactics are compounded by the mother’s choice to employ them on a regular daily basis. What is the mother struggling with in her life that she feels compelled to punish a boy who was only four years old at the time? The father’s compassionate attempts to resolve the domestic conflict are clearly on display here, but does the grave mistreatment of this young boy by his mother persist today?