If you're the parent of a tame child, move along. This story will only makes sense to the parents of the wild ones.
In a Facebook post that's been shared several thousand times, Mary Katherine Backstrom, mom of two, writes about her daughter and "feral" children everywhere.
She wrote, in part, "Some children are just born feral. Parents can potty train and sleep train and teach manners until their brains are about to explode, but there are some children who, for some reason God only knows, can’t be tamed.They are the kids who eat dead bugs off the floor and shove TNT snap-n-pops into their ear canals. You aren’t going to tame that feral child. Best you can hope for is to simply survive them.
"We have one rule follower and one child just born without boundaries," Backstrom told "Good Morning America," about her five-year-old son, Benjamin, and three-year-old daughter, Holland. "We don't raise them any differently."
With Holland's "feralness," Backstrom said, comes a lot of fun. "She brings joy to every room. Her humor in unfiltered and she's so confidant," she said.
In her post, Backstrom wrote, "Now it’s true that parents of feral children are tired. Our hair is all frazzled and our houses falling apart brick by brick. We have long since given up on trying to impress the world with our awesome, awesome parenting skills. We are okay with the fact that our child is wild. We are okay with the mess and the noise. Believe it or not, we even RELISH IT. (A little bit.)"
Mary Katherine predicts that Holland will grow up to be a resilient adult. "She's going to be the one who doesn’t get stressed out by the twists and turns in life's journey. She just rolls with the punches."
Backstrom told "GMA" she wrote the post in solidarity with parents of other fearless children. "It's all in good fun," she said.
As for Holland, Backstrom wouldn't change her for the world. She said, "I'm not trying to squash it, maybe just redirect it a bit."
