Single Mom's Parents Are Raising Her Baby With Her Because She's Finding It Hard To Do It Alone
It takes an entire village to raise a child and support parents.
LightField Studios / Shutterstock Becoming a first-time parent is a challenge regardless of the situation. But being a single mom with postpartum depression makes it all the more difficult.
The exact statistics vary, due to a lack of diagnoses and underreporting, yet it’s estimated that 1 in 10 women experience postpartum depression, with some studies stating 1 in 7 women. Moreover, single mothers report higher rates of depression than partnered ones.
A major part of normalizing postnatal mental health struggles is to speak openly about them, as one mom, Shannon Finan, is boldly doing.
The single mom shared that her parents are raising her baby with her because she’s found it hard to do alone.
Finan shared a post on TikTok showing footage she’d compiled of her mom and dad helping her with daily care for her daughter, Orlagh. She captured her parents cuddling their granddaughter, pushing her stroller and playing with her, noting, “Here’s to my parents, thank you for helping me.”
She explained that her parents don’t usually like having their photos on social media, yet she decided to post a montage of them caring for Orlagh, to show the world how grateful she is for the love and support they provide her and her daughter.
“There’s been a lot of speculation, like, why my mom and dad are raising Orlagh,” Finan shared. “Unfortunately, when I was six months pregnant, Orlagh’s daddy and me decided to split on a decision that wasn’t made by me, and it absolutely broke me.”
“The ideal family situation I had in my head was the mom [and] dad together, bringing Orlagh home from the hospital,” she said, her eyes welling with tears. “As you can see, it still hurts.”
Photo: BGStock72 / Shutterstock
“It’s been really hard,” she revealed. “And unfortunately, when Orlagh was four or five weeks old, I was admitted into a mother and baby unit, because I just didn’t want to do it on my own… I just didn’t think I was good enough to be on my own… I just wanted to give Orlagh two parents, together, and that didn’t happen.”
“I think we compare ourselves to social media so much,” she said. “We compare ourselves to the Instagram post when you upload you’re pregnant, or the gender reveal, and the dad holding the car seat coming home, and I didn’t have that.”
Finan’s experience highlights how harmful it can be to our sense of self-worth to compare our lives to what we see on social media.
According to a survey completed by YourTango, over 71% of respondents believe that social media is the largest contributor to comparison culture.
Social media never tells the full story. It reveals snippets of what people want the public to see and often hides the harder, uglier sides of our daily struggles to survive. Yet Finan has utilized her social media presence to be brutally honest about her mental health struggles.
She vulnerably shares the journey she's taken through the darker sides of having a postpartum mood disorder and how she got treatment to come out the other side.
The single mom’s parents are a source of unending support, telling her how capable and strong she is.
“They’ve helped me every step of the way,” she said, speaking to the value of handing down intergenerational knowledge around child-rearing. “My mom, bless her, she’s had four kids, so she’s done it all before, so she knows. She’s teaching me more and more how to bond with her and do stuff with her.”
She described her deep gratitude for her parents’ presence and explained her reasoning for being so open about her mental health struggles, saying, “You can’t really do it alone. It does really take a village to raise a child.”
Photo: aerophoto / Shutterstock
Finan is entirely right: Raising a child is never something that we were meant to do alone. With her parents' support, Finan is finding her footing along a challenging path and raising her daughter to be embraced by love.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers parenting, pop culture and all things to do with the entertainment industry.