These days social media is the main tool of communication for most people. Sharing pictures of your kids so that friends and family can look at them is a normal practice.
This young mother uses social media similarly but the comments her pictures get and how her child is treated are completely different. But she has a few things to say…
Natasha is a young mother navigating through motherhood. Like many young mothers, she likes sharing pictures of her one-year-old son Raedyn online. However, unlike most mothers, she is subjected to intense bullying online on the basis of her son’s looks.
She posts videos of her with her son Raedyn on the popular social media platform TikTok. And she gets dozens if not hundreds of comments on each post asking her to stop posting pictures or videos of her son.
But Natasha has a message for her haters, “I will not stop… just because he looks different doesn’t mean that he is any less – he is perfect,” she says.She cannot count the amount of messages or comments she gets which read “What’s wrong with your child? Why does your child look like that?”
Little Raedyn was born with Pfeiffer syndrome which causes abnormalities in the skull, face, and limbs. But for Natasha, her little boy is perfect and hence she posts videos of him every chance she gets.
But people are cruel and she recounts common comments she gets which are usually something like, “What quality of life will he have?” someone rudely asked on TikTok, while another person added: “Why would you make him live like that? Such a miserable life that you’re permitting him to live”.
And if trolls on the internet were not enough, Natasha is also subjected to comments from people in real life. She says when she is out in public, people come up to her with rude questions such as, “People just come up to me and rudely say: ‘what’s wrong with your child? Or why does your child look like that?’ …that’s not how you talk to a human being.”
She even has a hard time being in public because of the relentless questions she is bound to get, “It’s exhausting to explain my son’s health problems over and over” she shared.
She cannot understand the level of interest in her son merely because of his looks. She says,“He lives a life like every other child… does he look different? Absolutely – but that doesn’t make him any less.”She does not appreciate the concern people send her way especially when she is going about her day and is suddenly accosted by someone who is ‘curious’ and has questions.
“What people need to understand is that I am just a mum and my son is just a baby… our life doesn’t revolve around his diagnosis,” she said.The exhausted young mother added, “My son looks a little bit different but that doesn’t mean he is just a lesson to give the world. It’s exhausting mentally and emotionally to go over the same diagnosis and explain my son’s health problems over and over to people.
“We are just a normal family. I pray for the world to accept disabled people one day and not judge off of their appearance and the things they cannot do.”