What I also find curious is that they took Danielle away, but left the two boys with her to raise, even though she's already been found a (criminally!) unfit mother. Really curious as to how the laws work on THAT one.

Although, didn't you tell me Florida is one of the states where Children's Aid is privatized? (According to my sibling, it's not the only state where they've done that...)

Also... she keeps her files in the BATHROOM?

I thought the boys were adults at the time, though I might be misremembering.

In any case they left Danielle with her for seven years despite several calls to the authorities over the course of her life, so who knows?

Horrifying, so sad, so inexplicable. And indeed beyond good and evil. It's a cliche, but I will never understand why we don't require some form of basic license for becoming a parent. If you call this judgmental, Andrea, then I can't imagine what you'd call my reaction (that I will spare you in your space) -- and I consider myself a humanist, feminist and have the developmental degree to know better. But ever since I became a mother, I can no longer don my academic lens to try to understand. I don't care to understand. I'm so, so angry and horrified and just want to go home now and hug my children forever.

I read The Girl in the Window over the weekend, and it was pretty awful. I do, though, have some sympathy for the mother. That's not to say that she what she did to her children wasn't atrocious. I think it's pretty clear that she was incredibly isolated and also suffered from neglect. How else could she have possibly thought that she was raising her daughter normally?

I'm reading a book called Creating Sanctuary, which is about trauma theory and attachment, and there is a great quote from it that is inspiring me to write a longer post on the subject. She says of treating traumatized people who often turn out to be both victims and perpetrators, "What it finally boiled down to is that 'hurt people hurt people,' and if we were going to stop people from getting hurt, then we, as a society, were going to have to stop hurting children."

It really is an incredible book and I find it to be a kind of antidote to these kinds of stories.

I've been thinking about these very kinds of issues this week. At the drop-in centre, I'm constantly confronted with people who were failed as children, and who are then failing their own children in turn. A while back, when I was talking to someone about someone at the drop-in, she said, "Yeah, it's so weird to imagine, because I mean, we love our kids SO MUCH, we can't imagine how anyone could not love their kids." But as this story illustrates, the issue is not love. The people I see LOVE their kids. The issue is we learn how to parent from our parents, and if our parents have addictions or untreated mental illness or just really unproductive, self-destructive coping skills, how can we possibly parent our kids well? I think it's important to treat people with compassion, even when they do Really Bad Things. We don't have to forgive them and we certainly don't have to excuse their behaviour, but we have to at least recognize the child that still resides in all of us. That said, I don't know how we support parents to be better parents, or remove kids until they can be. Obviously, the system is NOT working.

My own website ate my comment. Let me try again.

It's not that I dont' have any sympathy for the mother. It's obvious she had a pretty crappy life (though I note that her own parents at least attended to her enough for her to learn how to speak and walk, and she managed to do the same for her own two sons, so it wasn't just a case of something travelling down the generations). The issue, for me, is that "I love them and I'm doing the best I can" is so often used as a justification for pretty atrocious parenting behaviours (whether technically abusive or not) and, as this story clearly illustrates, it's just such an utterly empty and meaningless phrase. Either you're giving your kids what they need (in which case whether it's "your best" or not doesn't matter) or you're not (in which case it still doesn't matter). The question should never be what the parents are capable of or whether they think they love their kids enough. It should be the impact on the kids.

What's enraging me is that this story and the others like it make this so clear, but we as a society keep giving priority to parental prerogative over children's rights--to the point where we as a society won't even entertain the idea of figuring out what "good enough" parenting means, and restrict our interference to occasionally removing children from the very worst of abusive or neglectful circumstances. If we really mean for no more children to be hurt then we're going to have to be a whole lot more judgmental than that. We would actually need to figure out what children are entitled to receive from their parents--not just in food, clothing, shelter and education, but also affection, discipline, support--and what happens when they don't get it.

No, I agree. Many abusers love their children. It doesn't make the abuse any less traumatic.

I really don't know what the answer is.

What a horrible story. The ending is happy for the girl...but I don't get how they cannot punish the mother at all for what she did? I guess if she really thought that she wasn't doing anything wrong then taking her away was punishment. Tho it doesn't seem to be enough.

Did you see this site http://www.danisstory.org/ ?

There was an opinion piece yesterday, talking about the report issued after a child in BC died in foster care 13 years ago. The report details all the systemic problems that are condemning children to bad placements or neglect from social services staff. The article says, basically, we don't need to study the problem any more. We know what to do. We just need to fund the work and start doing it.

I can't remember if your comments take links, so I'll put the URL in with my name.

I hadn't seen either of those. Thanks for posting them.

I read that story last week - absolutely devastating first that it happened and second that it kept on happening.

I have a friend who had a really really crap childhood and made a few mistakes on her path to where she is today.

She had three children and did an amazing job being a mother although she had no role model, being the father because she had crap choice in men and both her exes and her were abusive people, being a big sister and friend to her three girls.

Unfortunately, now she only has one. One got a completely different story from her father and will not talk to her mother. One died, mysteriously, while staying at her (different) father's house.

I think if we are to bend over backwards on parental rights we HAVE to offer the assistance for people to learn what is acceptable and where the lifelines are.

We had a few tragedies ourselves earlier this year, so it is not just a North American story.

Made me dizzy and I need to throw up. As a former foster parent, with a daughter adopted from the foster care system, I realize there are degrees of neglect and abuse, but so many of the parents are variations on this theme: "But I LOVE her!" And then they feel wronged. It makes my blood boil.

"but we as a society keep giving priority to parental prerogative over children's rights--to the point where we as a society won't even entertain the idea of figuring out what "good enough" parenting means, and restrict our interference to occasionally removing children from the very worst of abusive or neglectful circumstances."

I think you summarized it best in your comment above. This makes me SICK.

P.S. LOVE the new header! So pretty!

Yeah, I agree, Andrea. The problem is that the cause and effect of those gray areas like discipline and affection is impossible to map accurately.

I keep remembering how I felt reading all the baby books that said good parents give their babies the opportunity to self-soothe. And babies need to sleep alone and all that crap. I made myself miserable trying to get that kid to sleep in his crib. Finally after seven months I decided to stop fighting his need to be held and found a way to make it so I wasn't made miserable by it.

It's not really relevant I know. There is definitely a line between abuse and different choices. But as soon as i try to figure out where that line is, I start to come up again class issues and gender issues, and I worry that going down that road will end with total intolerance for difference.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find where that line is or redefine where it falls, but that we need to tread very carefully.

Oh boy. I just read the article about the girl in the window. My comment is even more irrelevant than I initially thought.

I don't think it's irrelevant at all--I think it's very relevant. Where to draw the line between "unacceptable" and "personal choice" is very important.

But in the example you chose--picking up babies and getting them to sleep alone--a fair bit is known about what kids need. Which is different from what is ideal or optimal and legislating that. But, for instance, children need physical affection and a baseline level of responsiveness from their caretakers, or they won't develop properly; at the extremes, children like Danielle will not learn how to speak or walk without interaction. But at the thresshold between acceptable and unacceptable levels of emotional responsiveness you'd see, say, ruptured or damaged attachments, failure to thrive, even chronic illnesses.

I read an article a few months ago about a study in mice (all the normal caveats about non-human study subjects apply) where mouse mothers who groomed their infants below a certain level had infants who were chronically anxious for the rest of their lives. It turns out that when the infants were adequately groomed, one of their genes was switched on that contributed to the regulation of anxiety--and when they weren't adequately groomed, that gene was suppressed, and another gene was switched on that increased hormones related to anxiety. The effects were lifelong.

So if this is true in mice, that maternal/parental physical affection is required for psychological/emotional development--it's got to be true in humans. (We know it is, in fact.) And yes, there might be some ideal or optimal level out there that we wouldn't want to legislate even if we could determine it because of the political ramifications. But that doesn't mean we can't specify some baseline level of (for example) physical affection that human infants need in order to avoid serious psychological problems throughout their lives, and below which they are not receiving adequate parenting and are entitled to some form of intervention. (Which could be a lot of different things--anything from supports to parents right through to removal of the kids, depending.)

I think jeanie hit the nail right on the head, too--that 'intervention' has to include supports and education for parents. Otherwise it's just penalizing someone for having a crappy childhood, or being poor and needing to work two jobs, or whatever.

This keeps happening and happening and happening because nobody in gov't wants to spend even one tenth what they do on the military to support human services including CPS. CPS workers are overworked and overwhelmed and their funds keep getting cut. Which means there's no energy put into prevention or taking care of cases before they get extreme, because all the energy must be put into putting out the blazing fires.