For years, Teen Mom fans have pointed out that Cheyenne Floyd was an odd casting choice when she was added to Teen Mom OG in 2018, given that she was 24 years old when she gave birth to her first child, Ryder. Cheyenne recently addressed the comments she’s received since then about not fitting in with the cast, who all gave birth to their kids as teens.
In a video recently posted to Snapchat, Cheyenne discussed how she and Ryder’s dad, Cory Wharton, got their spots on ‘Teen Mom’—despite neither of them ever having been teen parents.
“I never said I was a teen mom,” Cheyenne— who is currently pregnant with her third child— said on Snapchat.
She went on to remind fans that she had appeared on two other MTV reality shows before getting the ‘Teen Mom’ gig. (Cheyenne starred on Are You The One? and The Challenge before scoring a place on ‘Teen Mom.’)
She also reminded fans that there was a period of time where she kept it a secret who Ryder’s father was. It was that mystery that helped get her the job on ‘Teen Mom OG.’
When Cheyenne finally came forward with the news that Cory was Ryder’s dad, the reveal video she made piqued the interest of MTV execs.
“That video got passed around Viacom in the office,” Cheyenne said.
As The Ashley told you back in 2017 when she broke the news that Chey had been cast, the execs were looking for a girl to add to the cast of ‘Teen Mom OG’ after Farrah Abraham was booted. The Ashley’s sources told her in 2017 that the execs were “desperately looking to add some diversity to the show’s cast” and were intrigued by Cheyenne and Cory’s surprise pregnancy and mystery paternity situation.
In her new video, Cheyenne claimed that, surprisingly, she and Cory were not given all the details of the gig before they agreed to appear.
“At the time, I don’t think we really knew what we were signing up for,” she said. “Even Cory has said in the past, ‘I really thought it was a Cheyenne show.’ [He thought] ‘It was pertaining to her and doesn’t have anything to do with me.'”
“I don’t think we realized how much [the show] would intertwine us and how much it would show our families and how it would involve everybody,” Cheyenne said of her and Cory. “Everybody in our families would become, like, these characters almost. So, there was a lot that I feel like I was really naive that I didn’t think about. I just jumped into it. In hindsight, I would have thought about it.”
When it was announced that Cheyenne would be joining ‘Teen Mom’, many fans expressed their opinion that MTV was wrong in casting her because she was in her mid-twenties when she became a mom.
“I think that a lot of people are stuck on the word [‘teen’] and at the end of the day I’m still a young mom. I still have the same struggles and I’m still learning just like everyone else,” she told Us Weekly shortly after the news was announced. “I don’t think 23 is the ideal age to have a baby. [Ryder] was unplanned, so in other ways, other than me not being a teen, I have different things that you can relate. So instead of me screaming all day long that I’m not a teen mom, I’d rather just talk about things that I am.”
