After police officers requested she do so, Tehan called her parents and husband to assure them of her safety. “Just to know my little girl is safe is all I needed,” Tehan’s father, Chuck Tabor, said at a press conference today.
Tehan told police that she plans to return to Ohio to her husband and child, but didn’t say when. No charges have been filed against Tehan or Hutcherson thus far.
When we found out that Tiffany Tehan had left voluntarily, it shocked us to the core. When a father leaves his kids for another woman, we don’t bat an eye. But when a mother does it, it seems almost unfathomable. Maybe it’s a double standard, but we just can’t understand how a mother could leave her child under any circumstances.
We turned to psychologist Dr. Michelle Golland for some insight. “First of all, I would be questioning if there were issues of postpartum depression going on that would lead Tiffany to not be connected or bonded with herdaughter,” she says.
“If she had been unhappy in her marriage before, she might have thought that having a baby was going to make it all better, and then it didn’t,” Dr. Golland continues. “Because she’s a pastor’s daughter and very active in her church, it’s possible that she felt divorce was not an option for her. Then she had an affair, which would have been even harder for her to reconcile, given her background. She may have thought it was better for her daughter to think she was missing or even dead than for her daughter to discover that her mom cheated and divorced her dad.”
Dr. Golland says that Tiffany may have felt this was her only way out. “Tiffany may have wanted to save herself the shame of wanting a divorce — and she wanted to spare her daughter from that shame, too,” she says. “So she just decided to run away and make a clean break. This is how she may have justified it in her mind.”
Why do you think Tiffany left her own daughter behind?