Bedroom Door Removal and Drilled Windows: When Strict Parenting Crosses Into Abuse

When TikToker @eriniveson described her childhood punishments in a recent video, she framed them as simply“completely legal things”her parents did. What unfolded in her account, however, painted a starkly different picture—one that commenters quickly reframed not as discipline, but as systemic abuse.

The specifics are hard to hear. A bedroom door removed for nearly a year. A window drilled shut as punishment for sneaking out—a fire hazard, she acknowledged. Seven to eight-hour periods standing hand-in-hand with her sisters on the couch. An entire day in a corner with breaks only for meals and bathroom use. Food withheld as punishment, with uneaten dinners recycled across multiple meals until consumed. Text messages printed and read aloud under parental demand. A strict bedtime that forced her to complete homework secretly by flashlight, tied to her head with a headband. And because she had a job in high school, her own money was required to cover essentials her mother refused to provide—socks, underwear, even extracurricular activities.

What’s striking isn’t just the severity of individual incidents, but the cumulative suffocation they represent. Each punishment stripped away something fundamental: privacy, autonomy, bodily integrity, or basic safety. The window being drilled shut is particularly telling—it removed her ability to escape, literally locking her into a space where she and her sisters had to climb out through adjoining windows onto the roof just to access water at night.

The internet’s response was swift and categorical.“I had strict parents. She had abusive parents,”one commenter wrote, articulating what many recognized: there’s a meaningful difference between high expectations and systematic control. Another commenter shared their own experience, noting they remain estranged from their parents and still question whether their childhood was“as serious as they remembered.”That ambiguity—the difficulty of naming what happened to you—is itself a marker of how insidious this kind of parenting becomes.

@eriniveson moved out at 17 and wasn’t allowed to take her belongings, since her mother considered anything brought into the house to belong to the household. She ended by noting there were more stories. That detail alone suggests this wasn’t a pattern of isolated incidents, but a sustained environment of control and deprivation.

What makes this moment significant is that it validates a growing recognition: parenting that prioritizes absolute control at the expense of a child’s safety, autonomy, and emotional development isn’t strict. It’s harmful. And for the adults who experienced it, naming it for what it is can be the first step toward understanding why so much of their lives still feel constrained by rules that no longer apply.