I don’t want to write about this or this woman or this incident that happened in their lives, but I can’t seem to move on to writing about anything else until I do. If this is your first time hearing about Ruby Franke, I will do my best to update you on what I know.
Ruby Franke was a mom influencer with millions of subscribers on YouTube and a ton on Instagram as well. She has six kids and she shares her life and her kid’s lives on social media as part of her job. Or she did before she was given a 30 year prison sentence where she currently sits. She used her expertise on mothering to help teach others about parenting and raising kids with a large age gap.
Sound familiar? Sounds like me (well minus the millions of subscribers and the prison sentence). Sounds like a lot of people I follow online.
I never followed or knew about Ruby Franke until her life blew up recently with criminal charges of child abuse and then I started looking into her a bit. I mean, she is in the same line of work as I am. How did this happen to her? How could you present yourself as an expert in parenting and showcase your life in daily vlogs while also abusing your children behind the camera? It was appalling and interesting to say the least.
Among the first videos I saw of her after her arrest was a clip of a YouTube vlog of hers where she said she got a text from her child’s teacher that her youngest daughter had forgotten her lunch. Ruby said that she wasn’t going to take it to her and that she was going to try to teach her a lesson by letting her go hungry at school so that she might not forget her lunchbox again.
I’ll admit, I was not at all shocked by this. It sounded like something I might do for one of my kids, too. It sounded like something my mom would have done for me and my brothers. A natural consequence. It’s one meal and maybe the shock of mom not saving the day and bringing the lunch would be enough for my kid to remember to check if their lunch was in the bag each morning. I mean, a lot of moms work during the day, so bringing a lunch up to school isn’t even feasible.
Now, in this video clip, she did say that she hopes no one at school gives her anything to eat. This felt a bit extreme. I would hope the school could and would cover a hot lunch or a few snacks for my kid to get through the rest of the day with some energy.
Truthfully, I’d probably spend the rest of the day worried about that kid and would likely run that lunch up to school. But just the fact that I felt like I understood Ruby’s thought process was a little disconcerting for me. Was this why she was arrested for child abuse? Is that all it took?
A few more minutes of digging and I see a video clip with her two oldest kids who are teenagers. It comes up that her oldest son got his bed taken away and was sleeping on a bean bag.
Now, I don’t know the circumstances surrounding why his bed was taken away, but I do know what it’s like to have assumptions made on you for a 7 second video clip. Could this be considered child abuse? If so, I might be in trouble because Gavin currently is sleeping on the Nugget couch every night instead of his bed. Let it be noted that I didn’t take his bed away, he just prefers the floor. But if there was a 7 second clip on social media of his sleeping arrangement, could it be interpreted as child abuse?
I think another clip I saw was her describing how her child got sick during the night and she made him sleep on the bathroom floor instead of changing the sheets on his bed. And honestly, this tired mom of 5 felt for her. Maisy has spilled her bottle in her bed and instead of changing the sheets in the middle of the night, I just laid a towel down and asked her to sleep on top of it until morning. I could see setting up a nest of towels in the bathroom if my child had been throwing up over and over and we were on the third bed sheet changing episode.
All of this to say, I started to get worried that I was on the same path to jail. That by posting about motherhood to the masses online it exposed me and my kids to scrutiny and judgment unfairly.
Perhaps the comments from this viral reel that tell me what a terrible mother I am have slowly taken up residence in the back of my mind after all.
But THEN…
The trial happens and just this past week more evidence has been made public against Ruby and her business partner Jodi. They had started a channel together about parenting principles. And the videos and details of what they did to Ruby’s youngest kids is appalling and shocking and impossible to understand.
The two youngest kids were found emaciated and had duck tape on their ankles and wrists. They were forced to stand outside in the desert heat for days. One was made to jump on a trampoline for hours without stopping. Her daughter’s hair was shaved and Ruby took extensive notes in a journal that outlined all the ways she and Jodi were trying to expel the evil out of her children. Thankfully, it seems that they were located and found before this abuse continued for too long and the 20/20 episode (which I highly recommend watching) says that the kids are thriving in foster care and are back to their normal hobbies. But STILL. Any amount of this torture is enough to leave lasting trauma.
Long story short, it seems to me after watching the 20/20 episode that Ruby was brainwashed by her business partner, Jodi - who at one time had also been her marriage therapist. Her husband was found to struggle with pornography addiction and just a year prior to her arrest, Jodi suggested he live apart from Ruby with no contact with the kids until he was “healed”. This is a whole OTHER topic. Wow.
She truly believed that what she was doing to her kids (and her husband) was helping clean them of evil and sin. Ugh. This makes me sick. But she mentions in some recorded prison calls to her sister and husband that being separated from Jodi has started to remove the blindfold from her eyes on what she was actually doing.
I can so deeply relate to this. This slow brainwashing and conforming to ideals set before you as “right” and “true” and then suddenly you find yourselves separated from the source and your eyes slowly start to adjust back to reality. I’ll go into more details about my experience later.
It makes me worried about what sort of religious holds we can so easily fall into. I’ve done it once. The power and the persuasion that pastors and people in leadership hold - often without a lot of accountability - is quite frightening to me. And possibly has been one reason I’ve distanced myself from an official church for so long. Ruby and Jodi used Bible verses to justify why they were treating these younger kids this way. They claimed to be doing this to cleanse the kids of their evil.
Regardless of religion, we can all agree that this parenting gig is a lot of responsibility. It takes a lot of courage and wisdom and frankly, common sense to navigate. And we are for SURE going to get things wrong. But how can we make sure that we don’t slowly slip into the monster that Ruby Franke became?
I can guarantee she didn’t start her parenting journey 20 years ago with the intention of hurting her children in the way that she did.
It begs to ask… how close are any of us to turning into this same monster of a woman? Where have I been deceived into thinking that the lessons I’m teaching my kids are good for them? I honestly feel like it’s humbling to think about. Maybe you weren’t as close as I was, but in case you were (or are), I want to share my story with you.
I’m going to share a few vulnerable moments in my parenting journey with you here. It’s scary because I’m not proud of them. But it feels important in the grand scheme of things to admit when I have been wrong and to trace those thought patterns and actions back to the source so I don’t make the same mistakes again.
And then I’m going to wrap this substack up with the single easiest thing we can do when raising our kids (and ourselves).