Photo: TikTok
The age difference has people scratching their heads.
By Megan Quinn — Written on Sep 29, 2022
A woman and her "daughter" on TikTok have only a six-year age difference — "How is this possible?" you might ask.
The 22-year-old explains how she gained custody of the 16-year-old girl.
The woman claims that she received full guardianship of her step-sister when she was 21.
Hunter Nelson went viral on TikTok in 2021 after posting a video of herself driving with the textpost, “me driving down the road and realizing I’m 21 with a 15-year-old.”
“No other parents or staff members at her HS [high school] are gonna take me serious,” she added. “I can already feel people asking me what grade I’m in when I go to her events.”
The video received over 8 million views, and naturally, TikTok users were scratching their heads.
“You can’t get pregnant at six! She’s just lying about her age she’s probably 30ish,” one user commented.
“Who did she sleep with when she was six?!?!” another concerned user wrote.
However, Nelson is not the biological mother of the teenager she refers to as her child in the video — she is the girl’s step-sister who she has guardianship over.
Nelson explained her situation in a separate TikTok video.
She shared that her step-sister, Gracie, had the same biological father, who sadly passed away in 2015.
After their father’s death, Gracie lived with her biological mother, but Nelson did whatever she could to remain close to her step-sister.
During one of their conversations, Gracie revealed some alarming news that prompted Nelson to get her out of her mother’s care.
“I went out and ate with Gracie, she told me some very concerning things and I called social services on her mom,” Nelson said. “It was not an easy decision to do that.”
Nelson explained in a separate video that Gracie and her mother had just fled a domestic violence situation and Gracie had to serve as her mother’s full-time caregiver due to her declining health and she felt that she needed to get social services involved.
Afterward, she and her step-sister had a complicated relationship.
“I think she [Gracie] hated me a lot after that, but it’s just a decision that I had to make,” Nelson explained.
A few months after calling social services, Nelson touched base with them to check up on Gracie. She learned that Gracie’s mother passed away from health complications.
“I was back and forth in contact with them [social services] trying to find an appropriate placement for her [Gracie] and we really couldn’t find any,” Nelson said.
“They were going to put her in foster care because they weren’t considering me as an option because I lived out of state.”
Nelson added that her age was also a factor in why social services did not initially consider a candidate to be Gracie’s guardian.
She wanted to do whatever she could to keep her step-sister out of foster care.
She was told by social services that she could file for guardianship of Gracie, but they were not entirely sure what the process would entail or if the plan would go through at all.
Nevertheless, Nelson went to the courthouse and filed for guardianship — she was awarded it the following month.
“It was an easy decision for me to make, just because I knew that I wanted her [Gracie] to be safe,” Nelson shared. “And I knew that I wanted her to be with me in a healthy home.”
However, she was aware that the decision would be difficult emotionally for Gracie since she would be moving far away from her friends and living family.
To Nelson’s pleasant surprise, the situation worked out well for both of them.
“We’re both best friends and we’re so happy,” she said.
In a separate video, Nelson addressed why no other family members could take Gracie in, despite having capable members on their father’s side.
She explains that no other family members wanted to deal with gaining guardianship of Gracie.
“I guess it’s like the bystander effect like thinking the next person will take care of it or somebody else will do it,” Nelson said. “Nobody else took care of it except for me.”
She revealed that both she and Gracie struggle with feelings of resentment towards their father and his side of the family, but they are glad to have each other.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.