Tik Tok stars Brandon Rowland, and his older brother Hunter Rowland are a pair of young boys making it in the world of internet. As of November 2020, the younger Rowland brother is just 18 years old. But he became a legal adult way before he turned 18. 

Brandon earned emancipation when he was just 16 years of age. But why was it so? Here, we discuss exactly that and give you an insight into Brandon Rowland’s childhood.

How Old Is Brandon Rowland?

Brandon Rowland is, as mentioned above, 18 years old. His birthday falls on September 4 and his birth year is 2002.

Brandon did not post pictures of extravagant celebrations for his birthday in 2020, the year that he finally became an adult in the usual sense, probably because of the pandemic. However, he did state the same thing we just did on a post on September 5, 2020.

He posted a few pictures of him wearing a chain on the post, nothing else on top, and weirdly, shoes, lying on his bed. The caption read, “I’m an adult now... 18,” acknowledging his entry into adulthood.

Brandon’s Mother Was Abusive Towards Him

Both Brandon and his brother Hunter had a challenging childhood. Their on-screen and social media persona are not an exact representation of how their life had been throughout their childhood, even before they were famous on the internet.

On November 29, 2019, the brothers started a two-video series on YouTube about how they had been treated until that point in their lives. The videos chronicled around the brothers’ revealing all that they had suffered from their parents, especially their mom.

Hunter posted a video titled “The Truth” on 29 November 29 on his YouTube channel, which was the first of two videos. In the 19 minute-long video, it’s Hunter that did most of the talking.

The brothers began the video by saying that they were filming it as a way to express a lot of things that they had never really talked about before then.

Then, Hunter revealed that they had three other siblings, an older step-brother, an older step-sister, and a younger brother. They had different dads but the same mother.

Growing up, their mom was messy and distant from them. They had grown up without her at home most of the time, and the two became the men of the house, doing chores and taking care of their little brother.

Their mother also had a drinking problem, and she started drinking in front of the kids from the time Brandon and Hunter were 12 years old. This behavior affected them.

At one point in time, they were even taken away by Child Protective Services, and they lived for a year with their step-dad. Hunter said that the time he had spent there was “the most normal life I’d ever gotten.”

They said that their mother, Christine Rowland, would also use alcohol and drugs to affect her mental state and make her aggressive. But at the time, they didn’t think it was anything bad because they were young.

Once they started getting on the internet and seeing the world and making money, they understood that what they were going through was wrong.

After Brandon Started Making Money On The Internet, His Mother Started Getting Money-Hungry

At around the 8th-minute mark in the video, Greggory Falchetto, the brothers’ manager, says a few things about what he claims he saw in the Rowland household.

Greg talked about how Christine would get drunk at night, even on their tours. He explained a situation in Baltimore City where, during their MagCon tour, she got drunk and misbehaved two days in a row.

During the same tour in Australia, Greg said Christine started to see how much money her sons could be making. She reportedly became very money-crazed from then onwards, and she wanted to drive her kids to make as much money as they could. He even said at one point that if she could have sold the brothers’ souls to make an extra $100k, she would have done it five times over without even thinking twice.

In between these confessions from Brandon, Hunter, and Greg, the video also includes many clips that the brothers secretly filmed of their mother's abuse.

In the follow-up video titled “The Final Chapter”, which was posted on Brandon’s YouTube channel on December 1, 2019, they talk further about what drove them to take legal action for themselves.

Right at the one-minute mark, Brandon talks about how Christine took him and Ashton, his youngest brother, to Florida in early October 2017, leaving Hunter, who was 16 at the time, all alone in Arizona. There is also actual footage of the incident included in the video.

However, it wasn’t just that she left Hunter alone. Brandon revealed that she actually took out all of the money from Hunter’s account, saying that it was her money, and left him stranded in LA a while before they left for Florida.

The Abuse Led Brandon Towards Emancipation

All the reported abuse from their mother led Brandon to think about separating himself from her and be independent. For this, he decided to take the legal route with support from the brothers' videos in secret.

The legal route he was going to take was emancipation. If you don’t know what emancipation is, it is, according to Expert Law, “the process by which a minor becomes legally independent of his or her parents.”

And he succeeded in getting emancipated. On March 28, 2019, Brandon got legal freedom from his mother at the mere age of 16.

What this meant was that he could, from that day onwards, be his own master. Despite being a minor, he could do things like choosing where to live, earn, keep and spend wages, buy and sell real property, enter legally binding contracts on his own, and sue and be sued in court.

After the legal formalities had been completed, Brandon expressed his gratitude for his brother through a post on Instagram the day he got emancipated, writing, “Hunter is the reason I’m where I am, the reason I’m emancipated, I would still be stuck where I was without him”

Hunter, too, let out his happiness with a post of his own the same day. He posted a few pictures of them in the courthouse on the same day as he revealed how proud he was of his younger brother. In the post's caption, the older Rowland wrote: “today’s one of the biggest days of my life.”

Now we just have to wait and see how big and successful Brandon will become alongside his brother without the family stress burdening his psyche.