It can be easy to underestimate how destructive favoritism can be in a family.
If a parent has a set of rules for one child and a different set for another, the child who gets the short end of that deal will likely resent their parents or both. There are cases that are so blatant that no parent could claim they weren’t playing favorites, that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with when it’s harder to recognize.
This effect gets worse when one child is supposed to carry both their parents and their less responsible siblings on their back.
In a video uploaded to TikTok on March 26, a woman named Thea Pham said that her parents had just disowned her.
She told it that she was fed up with footing the bill for her sister’s extravagant lifestyle as an international student in the United States.
Three years ago, she said, her parents sent her sister over from Vietnam with no means to support her. It was her responsibility to cover her tuition, housing, and living expenses.
Her sister’s approach to this living situation left a lot to be desired.
In Pham’s words, “She has been completely ungrateful and completely irresponsible with the money.”
She blew the money that could have been used to pay her sister’s debt, so she had to cover it with her friends.
All the more as of late, an occurrence that at last constrained Pham to put her foot down saw her sister utilize her Visa for a $500 shopping binge.
The grounds for cutting her sister off seem reasonable.
They saw that she was because of them and now she owes them a lifetime of financial security.
In Pham’s words, “So I am their retirement fund, the college fund for my younger siblings, and I feel trapped.”
Since she said that this responsibility is common in her culture, she now feels betrayed by both her culture and her family.
She would still be willing to give this kind of help if she didn’t have so many signs that she was being taken advantage of.
In her words, “I would love to, I love my parents but there are no boundaries. I am just a wallet now. I am just solely a wallet now.”