Queensland mum wants apology after ‘cheap, careless’ KIIS FM radio ploy
A popular breakfast radio program has come under fire for ‘trivialising’ a young mother’s parenting choice regarding her baby’s health.
There are calls for a Queensland radio program to apologise after “trivialising” a young mother’s parenting choice regarding her baby’s health live on air.
Gold Coast mother, Brooke Atkins is no stranger to relentless trolling. She and her baby Kingsley, now almost two years old, went viral in 2022 after the baby’s large port wine stain birthmark was removed with laser therapy.
Trolls chastised Ms Atkins’ decision to have the procedure done, with some going as far as to label her a “monster”.
She has maintained that the procedure was more than “cosmetic”, as critics suggested.
Port wine stains around the eye, like Kingsley’s, are linked to glaucoma which can cause blindness.
Kingsley also has Sturge-Weber syndrome which means his birthmark is connected to blood vessels attached to the surface of his brain.
It means that if the birthmark was left untreated Kingsley could have suffered dangerous seizures.
As part of medical advice to treat the condition, Ms Atkins was advised to tackle Kingsley’s birthmark with a laser – but when she shared an update online she was met with a barrage of abuse.
This week, more than a year after Ms Atkins was thrust into the limelight, Brisbane’s KIIS 97.3 Robin & Kip breakfast program has again dredged up the topic in what was been labelled a “poorly researched”, “cheap”, and “careless” ploy.
Introduced to the audience as an “influencer” whose baby had a “massive half-a-face birthmark”, host Robin Bailey again lambasted the young mother.
Ms Atkins was initially targeted after updating her followers with a video, describing Kingsley’s treatment.
“They had to hold him down to put cream on his face,” she recounted in the social media video.
“In the waiting room, I could hear him screaming, and I had to leave the waiting room crying my eyes out,” she added though her partner remained in the room with Kingsley, who was 22 months old at the time.
But on Tuesday, Robin Bailey asked her audience, “Would you do a cosmetic procedure on your baby? It’s divided the team down the middle.”
“It’s a cosmetic thing, it’s not a medical thing”, she added. “It seems such a painful, unnecessary thing to put a 22-monther through.”
Co-host Kip was empathetic to Ms Atkins’ decision, retorting: “Can I just say how unnecessary (it is) to put a kid through school with a birthmark on their face?”.
A children’s hospital worker called in and labelled Ms Atkins’ decision “inappropriate” and the cause of potential trauma.
However, Ms Atkins later told news.com.au some of the treatment was done under general anaesthetic as the caller suggested.
Listeners, for the most part, agreed with Kip.
“Kids can be really nasty at such a young age,” one caller said.
“They are so resilient. Words hurt more as a primary school to senior school than any of the surgeries he’s going to go through now.”
Ms Atkins told news.com.au the program, which did not contact her beforehand, was “really offensive” and misrepresented Kingsley’s plight.
“I feel like they’ve just seen a TikTok video and taken that one video, not researched anything, and then chopped it for online,” she said.
“(Robin was) basically calling me out, saying I’m some kind of influencer and that I’ve just done this for cosmetic reasons. There’s no medical side to it whatsoever.
“They’ve completely disregarded everything I’ve got on my page, educating everyone about the severity of what can happen if the wine stain is untreated and why it needs to be treated at such a young age.”
She claimed she called the station the following morning but was shrugged off by the operator, who told her: “We’re past it”.
“We’ve already been through all this over a year ago,” Ms Atkins said, citing previous trolling.
“It’s quite offensive – I was livid when I first heard it.
“I don’t have a (social media) page to be famous and to gather followers and all that kind of stuff. I’m doing it to help other families and their journeys and people.”
Ms Atkins told news.com.au that she would happily go on the program to correct the record, though the program appears uninterested in revisiting it.
Disability advocate and author Robert Hoge, who himself lives with facial deformities, said that while it could have been a constructive discussion, it was not treated with care or respect.
“There’s absolutely a place to discuss kids having this treatment when they’re young, but there just seemed to be no care in terms of how they’re using this family’s experience to generate a bit of listener feedback and controversy,” he told news.com.au.
“There’s a family and a little boy at the end of all of this.”
“If they had paused for a moment to think about how they might have treated this issue with a bit more sensitively, with a bit more nuance, then they could have actually had a meaningful discussion.
“It’s not like talking about the new flavour of ice cream from Baskins and Robins.”
Mr Hoge added that experiences like Kingsley’s are “really traumatic” and to “trivialise” them as he claimed the Kiss FM program did, would negatively impact families going through the same.
“It looks to me like they’ve done not even the bare minimum of research to understand the circumstances that Kingsley is facing,” he said.
“Do more to understand the circumstances of this little boy and his family, and maybe reach out to the mum.
“Put some subtlety around discussions about people’s appearance and tough decisions that mums and dads must make around treatment for their kids.”
Mr Hoge suggested an apology was needed for the oversight.
The station and program have been contacted for comment.
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