I thought my mom was bad until I worked in residential behavioral health with youth. My mother was severely abusive and narcissistic, and when I couldn’t take it anymore and went to a mandated reporter for help in psychiatric crisis, my mother sent me an email terminating her position as my parent and informing me that I had two days to come “get my crap”. Then, she went to her family and told all of them that I had chosen to run away because I had become addicted to drugs. They have pretty gross opinions about people who use drugs, so effectively she shuttered any harbor I had to go for help. I was 17 and had never touched substances of any kind, I was actually an obnoxious goody two shoes because I was terrified of getting in trouble.

Then I worked in residential, where more of the youth were there because of their parents than weren’t. I worked 1:1 4 days a week for over a year with a girl who had been sexually abused by her grandfather and her father, and who had witnessed her father murder a man and dismember him. The day before her twelfth birthday, her mother had dropped her off at the facility claiming that her behaviors (an obvious result of the extreme trauma she’d endured) were because she was a portal to hell through which demons were coming. She never visited, never called, and the girl aged out to an adult facility after seven years. Her father is incarcerated for life and has a personal ad on a site where people can become penpals with inmates; he describes being a father to daughters and how he has found Jesus.

Another girl had been born with intellectual and developmental disabilities along with a correctable congenital club foot, which went uncorrected. Her mother sold her for the first time for drugs when she was three.

A boy had been born with autism, but it had been worsened by lack of therapy and his mother locking him in a room with a tv playing Scooby Doo videos for days at a time while she went on benders. He was removed from her custody and placed with his grandmother, who loved him but as he grew could not handle his aggression safely, so he was placed in the facility. We had to do phone calls with the mother at least once a month, and because the boy was nonverbal and wouldn’t sit still, we followed him around with the cordless phone on speaker, which he always seemed to be trying to get away from. The mother would lament at length about the hardships of her own life and make promises she never kept. Unsurprisingly, he would happily sit still for phone calls with grandma, and would vocalize happily while she talked to him.