Mom Running Errands Can 'Never Get Peace' Because Her Kids Use Their Ring Camera To Ask For Help Even Though Dad Is Home
Dad was feet away and the children still found a way to contact Mom to fix their problems.
@tinyann22 / TikTok Sometimes it feels as if mothers cannot catch a break from their kids — even if they are not physically with them.
One mother is showing the Internet how much her children depend on her, even if their father is right there, by revealing footage from her Ring camera of her children calling her for help with their electronics.
The children call their mom via the Ring camera asking her to fix their tablets that have run out of battery.
ToniAnn, a mother of two living in Florida, assumed that she would have some uninterrupted time to run some errands and go grocery shopping while her children stayed back at home with her husband. She was mistaken.
While at the store, the mother received an alert on her phone that someone was trying to call her through the Ring camera that was connected to her phone.
It was none other than her toddler son, Colton, trying to reach his mom with some important news.
“My tablet’s dead,” he alerts her. When Toni asks him where Daddy is, he responds with, “I don’t know.”
At the sound of her mother’s voice, ToniAnn’s older daughter comes out of the house and tells her that her tablet isn’t working. She ignores her mother’s question again asking where daddy was. The children beg their mother to fix their problem all while their father was feet away in the garage the entire time.
“Moms can never get a minute of peace,” ToniAnn wrote in the caption of the video.
It’s a struggle that many mothers in the comments could relate to.
“No one can charge tablets like mom,” one TikTok user commented.
“If this isn’t the epitome of what motherhood is,” another user wrote.
“My life, in a nutshell. It's always mommy and never daddy. I have to tell the kids multiple times they have another parent,” another user shared.
The video also sheds light on the difficulties of being the 'default parent.' A default parent is a parent (assuming there are two of them) that most often tackles the heavier load of parenting and the one the kids depend on the most. Even when the other parent is capable of handling everything when it comes to the kids, the children will often breeze right by them to get to the default parent.
Being the default parent, which is usually the mother, can be emotionally exhausting and taxing.
When discussing default parenting as a syndrome, clinical psychologist Amber Thorton points out the expectations imposed on mothers that are not expected of their partners.
“When we place both of these concepts together, we can see how the Default Parent Syndrome is more than just an individual problem; rather, it is a systemic and collective experience in which there is a bias toward women and mothers in providing primary care for parenting and home-related tasks,” she wrote in Psychology Today.
“This bias is largely the product of decades of patriarchal cultural history that has continued to evolve in various ways throughout our time.”
Despite what is depicted in ToniAnn’s video, she claims that her husband, Eric is an involved father and her children just happen to prefer mom over dad. She shared a series of follow-up videos of Dad coming to the rescue to fix the kids’ tablets.
“Mommy had to food shop and daddy was doing housework.. normal family things!” the mother revealed.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.