Every mom’s goal is to be a good mom. Being a good mom isn’t always easy, and feeling like a good mom during difficult times can be even harder.

Some parents make different decisions under similar circumstances, and that’s okay. What’s not okay is to judge other parents or offer unwelcome advice and criticism when a parent makes a decision you don’t like. This is known as mom shaming, and it hurts. One parent went even further than mom shaming though. She called the police.

Melissa Shields Henderson is a divorced single mom with five children. She prides herself on being a good mom, but she also sometimes has to make difficult parenting decisions.

Back in May 2020, Henderson’s children weren’t able to go to school or daycare because the local school and daycare were closed due to the pandemic; however, Henderson still needed to be able to go to work to support her family.

Henderson worked as an administrator at a health spa at the time. While her home is in Blairsville, Georgia, her job was 23 miles away in Blue Ridge

Instead of quitting her job, Henderson made the decision to leave her 14-year-old daughter, Linley, in charge of her four younger siblings. Henderson never considered that this would be a problem because Georgia law states that a child age 13 or older can be left alone and left in charge of younger children as a babysitter for up to 12 hours.

While Henderson was at work and Linley was busy with remote learning, Linley’s youngest sibling, Thaddeus, who was 4 years old at the time, looked out the window and saw one of his friends, a neighbor who lived just down the street, playing outside. Without telling anyone, Thaddeus decided to go outside to play with his friend.

It only took Linley about 10 to 15 minutes to realize her brother was missing. She went outside and brought him home. Nobody got hurt. Unfortunately, that is far from the end of the story. In that 10 to 15 minutes, a parent of Thaddeus’s friend called the police.