A video that showed a mother dragging her four-year-old autistic son along a pavement near Liverpool city centre has gone viral.
After suffering a backlash online, the mother – who doesn’t want to be named – claimed she is not a “bad mom”.
The video was posted by a shocked witness, Mail Online reports.
The 31-year-old mother, who slammed people for judging her parenting “before they know the situation”, said her son had thrown a tantrum and refused to move moments before the video.
She told Mail Online: “My son has autism, he has meltdowns and throws himself on the floor. What I am doing in that video is the only way I can move him. He does it all the time and won’t get up or let me pick him up. He just drops to the floor like a sack of spuds.”
After seeing the video, posted on Twitter, hundreds of people raised the question that why someone did not intervene.
The mother said it had angered her that her son had been compared to a rag doll.
She was also offended by the suggestion he had fallen over and she had not picked him up, the report added.
She said: “People are making me out to be a bad mom – I am not a bad mom. They should ask before they judge me. Only two women came up to me and I said ‘he has severe autism’. And I would have told that to anyone who asked me, but people just stare at me and him and judge and think he is ‘not normal’. He is normal he just has autism.”
The single mother – who lives in Liverpool – said her son, who was diagnosed with autism when he was two, reacts badly to being around crowds of people.
She said: “I can’t go out very often because he has these meltdowns. He doesn’t like big crowds and whenever I take him out he could just kick off. People don’t understand how hard it is having an autistic child, especially when they are so strong. He has attacked me before and knocked me off my feet, but he doesn’t know he is hurting me. He can be the same with his friends. It is very stressful. He isn’t a naughty child, he has autism and he is very loving. And people just look at me like something is wrong with him.”
After sharing the video online, Joe – from Liverpool – told the Echo: “I was walking through town and the kid fell over and then the woman saw the kid had fallen but kept on walking. The kid seemed fine with everything to be honest, it was people who saw it that seemed worse off. She walked on like that for a while.”
“It sort of caught everyone off guard really, nobody knew what to say or do.”
Meanwhile, Merseyside Police said they were investigating the video after it was reported to them and CCTV was being checked.
